From the Mouth of G

On absolving myself

2011-06-14T21:56:00.002-04:00

Did I really go almost all of 2010 without writing almost anything in yon blog? That's...actually pretty amazing to me. Things are changing. That's almost as broad and as general a statement as I can make. Things keep changing. Earth, life, and fate continue to move me in directions I find wondrous, strange, and incomprehensible. Oh, wait, I forgot that I don't believe in fate.

(Liar, I tell myself. Well, half a liar. It's a little like declaring an agnostic a liar when he proclaims that he doesn't believe in God.)

Finding my way around my words feels sluggish today. Not, mind you, that I haven't been writing. God - taking a whole year away from narration would be like, oh I don't know, slicing off my own thumbs. Cutting out a piece of my soul. I exist in narration. I exist to narrate. Not a day goes by when I don't contemplate some story in my head and wonder how I could translate that image into something as wonderful and fascinating to someone else as it is to me. I wish I were more industrious, however. I also wish I were taller, that my nose were straighter, that I were more muscular, more intelligent, more charming, more dashing, more apt to speak my mind and stick to what I say. If wishes were horses, I could pull an entire city. Which brings up a fascinating image - a city made of gold filigree, floating upon clouds, pulled by a sea of horses. Or maybe just four really big ones. Huge. Like...Colossus of Rhodes huge.

I digress. I write. I have an idea right now that could take a bit of execution. It's actually a melding of several ideas, none of which seemed to work particularly well on their own, but take on some magnificent properties when alloyed together. Watch for the Watchtower. Vigilance Always. Vigilance Unending.

On coming home again

2010-01-05T02:34:00.002-05:00

Is that what this is? Home? Or maybe I was, like, I usually am, trying to find a way to maintain parallelism while also appearing clever. Oh G, you're such a rogue. (Insert coy giggle).

Taking a page from Rob, I've decided to start blogging again. Just a little at first, in short easy spurts, and then slowly until I'm back up to my marathon legs. I do note that I a) never managed to finish that fucking travelogue, which was actually starting to feel a little like shoving railroad spikes into my eyes with the kind of days I was having on board that god-forsaken ship and b) didn't manage to maintain the running Wikipedia commentary for more than two weeks. Jesus, that's gotta be a record even for me.

Hmm. You know, I'm thinking that this is another item that Rob has influenced me into resuming. Exercising was the first, and I'm actually coming up on a year that I've been (more or less) steadily exercising. There were a couple of months in there that I skipped my regimen, but on the whole it's the longest that I've managed to maintain an exercise program. And it all started with Rob turning me onto P90X. Now I'm only got back to this blog because Rob said that he wanted to get back to being more serious about his writing, and that got me thinking about it as well. This was...healthy, I think...for a while. Maybe it can be so again. I think I may need it again.

I was reading over Rob's resolutions for the New Year, and discovering a good number of them I could apply to myself as well. Looking back over 2009, I can't say there are many things I feel particularly proud about. No notable accomplishments. My dad asked me, just a few weeks ago, what I had accomplished in the past couple of years, and I found myself really reaching to answer him. I don't...have much, really. Exercising more, which mind you I'm fairly proud about, but there's still not much more, at least in the way that I would have liked, and I can't say that I have anyone to blame but myself. Did I even have goals, back in 2009? Or did I just float like a piece of flotsam along the waves, thinking I'll adjust to wherever the currents happened to take me? Even my writing, which I'm willing to admit now is one of the most important things to me, fell by the wayside only to be inconsistently picked up again. Kind of like a middle-aged hooker.

I don't know. I'll say this, though - Rob tends to push me, for some reason. Push me to be better than I am, and I can't say I have many friends that instill that reaction in me. I think it's because he's one of the few friends I have who actively and obviously strives to be better than he is, and that's...inspirational, I guess, is the only word I can find for it.

Switching lanes for a bit, I'm also noting that I seem to be getting less funny as I get older. My humor always seemed to tend more toward the Eeyore than the Oscar Wilde, and it's not getting any sharper with the impending onset of senility. Ah well. Dementia's kind of funny, right?

Travelogue Two, Day Six: A Petite Pastry Puff Entry

2009-05-06T23:58:00.000-04:00

Ugh. I hate being seasick. Actually, no, scratch that – I hate this feeling of being halfway between seasick and not quite seasick. I don’t really feel that nauseated, but the constant rocking back and forth is giving me one of those annoying headaches that feels like someone is trying to stuff a massive amount of goose down and cat dander into my skull. It’s also making me incredibly sleepy, so it’s hard to focus on anything that I’m trying to get done. It’s SO incredibly annoying. You know how you feel when you’re stuck in the car for a long, long road trip through New Mexico and the A/C is busted and you can’t open up the windows for whatever reason? Yeah, okay, well even if you don’t, it feels like that, minus the overwhelming heat. Count my blessings, I guess.

I’ve got very little to mention today, except that I spent another couple of hours rattling off e-mails in the morning, many of which Philip insisted on overseeing, which never fails to make me want to grind my teeth down to powder. Why is it the perennial prerogative of managers to hang over their workers’ shoulders and make sure every task they do is slowed down to a crawl? I could’ve rattled off three or four e-mails in the time it takes for Philip to dictate, review, and shuttle out one…and at least half the time the e-mails being sent out aren’t even strictly necessary. Do we REALLY need to know who’s signed up on the Baltic trip while we’re still on the Navigator? Are we going to be able to perform some mystic feat of advertising gymnastics to suddenly increase our return rate while we’re still trying to wrangle out the details of Funchal, Malaga, and Barcelona? I think it’s an ultimate point of irony that the part of me that makes me good at what I do also happens to be the part of me that wants to strangle myself with a giant stinky pile of pig intestines every time Philip and I have a meeting onboard this ship.

Stewart ran tea time trivia today, which resulted in some absurdly difficult questions. Team Istanbul didn’t win, and we all puzzled over how obscure some of the answers were. The man sailed overboard and touched down a good mile away from the ship when he googled out that particular set of trivia.

About halfway through the afternoon, Donna gave me a call to let me know that there was no advertising for her book signing, and that she had absolutely no idea how to get her books moved through the ship’s system, which was great, because I’d had nothing to do with the advertising up to this point, and I also had absolutely no idea how to get the books moved through the ship’s system. Unfortunately, when one of the stars has no idea how something is meant to work onboard the ship, and I have no idea how that something works either…guess who gets to go and find out? So I spent a good two hours trying to hack out a time and method by which Donna (and by extension Pat and Lewis) could get their books signed, preferably after their respective shows. That ended up running right smack against Shirley’s show, which I arrived slightly late for.

I do have to digress here to mention that Shirley Jones is probably one of the most elegant ladies I have ever met. She is always impeccably dressed, her manners are always exquisite, and she has never had a negative word for me. In fact, not only has she been ever pleasant when I’ve talked to her, she has never demanded (or even asked, for that matter) anything of me. It probably seems a mite skewed that my opinion of someone is partially dependent upon how heavy a demand they make upon my time while I’m on this cruise, but considering just how LITTLE time I seem to have to do anything for myself, that seems considerably more reasonable that it initially sounds.

Anyway, Shirley gave an excellent and enlightening talk about her experiences as an actor, mother, and wife in film, television, and Broadway. The Show Lounge was as packed as I’ve ever seen it. It fascinates me when I consider how full the theatre is to be a measure for the relative star power of each of our performers. It always forces a certain existentialist contemplation from me, as I wonder what it is that everyone in the audience finds so specifically fascinating about a celebrity. Is it the perception of success? Wealth? A strange sort of mob mentality or popularity contest where the amount of adulation any given person might receive becomes a measure of how interesting that person is perceived to be? I think Shirley’s life was fascinating, but at the same time I think that Dotti’s experiences have been equally interesting. She’s traveled around the world, cruised on multiple ships, and seen things I couldn’t have dreamed of. What quantifiable factor makes Shirley a more interesting figure than Dotti, or hell, than David or Sumrall or Philip? She’s eloquent and charming and exudes this certain maternal sweetness, but what in the length and breadth of her life makes her necessarily a more interesting figure than, say, my grandmother, who lived through the Cultural Revolution? Most of these questions are ultimately rhetorical, and I don’t quite know why I contemplate them or what I think I might be able to learn if I can arrive at some arbitrary answer.

I went back to my room and felt like napping after Shirley’s show, but instead I forced myself to go through chest, shoulders and triceps. This is the third and last week of Phase Two P90X (well, technically the recovery week is the last week, but I don’t really count that.) I think I’ve made some very decent improvements in body shape and general physical fitness, and I think it’s encouraging that I can sort of view the fact that I haven’t always advanced in the numbers with a certain grain of salt. Before I got onto the ship, after all, I didn’t really eat enough to gain much in the way of muscles. Still, I’m already looking ahead and wondering whether I’ll continue with P90X or try to do something else to improve muscle mass after the twelve weeks are over.

Wow…I just read over the last paragraph and basically floored myself with how utterly inane I’ve become. Even more than usual, I’d say. I think that’s a fair sign that I should probably heading to bed. Another at-sea day tomorrow, with more shows and still more inanity to come, I imagine.

Travelogue Two, Day Five: Miles and Miles and Miles of Effectively Nothing

2009-05-05T22:57:00.000-04:00

In that, I’m actually referring to my day, not the stretch of water that we’re on, ‘cause that’s effectively what happened today. Again, I woke up much earlier than I’d have preferred and promptly ran off to deliver messages, collect other messages, and gather materials I needed for the programs that the Navigator is going to print for our evening shows. I spent literally fours hours running from actor to actor, ship executive to ship executive, picking up bios and confirming schedules and making copies and basically trying to get this bloody program in a state where it can be printed. Most of the bios had to be pared down before they would fit properly, some of them were hand-written and had to be re-typed, and two of our actors still aren’t here, so I had to leave two programs unfinished – at least they’re two of our later shows and therefore something I can delay until later. It never seems like the programs should take very long, but they always do and I’m always at a loss as to exactly why.

Anyway, Philip gave his “History of the Theatre Guild” lecture today, which went about as well as expected, given that it’s Philip effectively giving an extemporaneous speech. The entire thing was punctuated with bawdy jokes and random tangents and unrelated asides, but people seemed to enjoy it and it proceeded without any particularly catastrophic Freudian slips. Philip did go on for longer than expected, which prevented Gene (our second guest speaker) from saying anything, but I don’t actually think he was particularly upset about that. I get the impression that he doesn’t actually relish the thought of giving a lecture about his career experiences.

So that was sandwiched between bouts of working and running and more running and did I mention sometimes that I feel like a lemming on speed? Why does the next item or person I have to find always end up being three decks down on the other end of the ship? I think that’s actually why I always seem to end up with no time to do anything, because I spend half of it in transit. I don’t even remember what I had for lunch or who I had it with – David and Sumrall, most likely. Then it was off to send more e-mails and more messages after lunch and before you know it it’s tea time trivia up in the Galileo Lounge.

I think I’ve mentioned tea time trivia before without really explaining what it is. Well, it’s pretty much what it sounds like. Everyone has tea and someone – usually Chris, the assistant cruise director – heads up a trivia game. We’re allowed six people to a team, there are fifteen questions to answer, and if you win you get a useless plastic token that, if amassed in sufficient quantities, can purchase things like bags and rings and cabbages and a king-sized seat in the Seven Seas Battle Royale. (No, you can’t actually buy cabbages, and no, there is no Seven Seas Battle Royale. Although I’m thinking it might be fun if there was one in the Show Lounge. I’m seeing all these octogenarians flinging seats and glasses and tables at each other and doing flying karate kicks in this massive two-floor melee. Kinda like a catfight over Fanta.) My team, Istanbul, hasn’t won yet, but we’ve done extremely well and the desserts that they offer over the tea are simply wonderful. I’ve totally given up on trying to eat correctly while I’m on the ship and just picking what I want. My one concession to general physical fitness, at least as far as food is concerned, is to eat smaller portions of all these desserts than I normally would.
Dinnertime has finally smoothed out to the point where I feel like I can more or less ignore everything else that’s going on around the room and just settle down to some good conversation and good food. I wish it didn’t take two and a half bloody hours to finish, but the alternative is become a hermit and eat in my room. Which isn’t necessarily unappealing to me, but I hate forcing the room service people to keep bringing me food.

Not much else to say. More letters and memos and wrangling with Funchal after dinner, since I still don’t really have any information about it and people keep asking me what we’re doing there. I guess Bermuda must’ve been quite a success if people keep poking me about what we’re up to next. That’s encouraging, I suppose…I really wish we’d stop leaving this sort of thing until the last minute. The reception desk is threatening to start charging me for the copies I make, since I pop by at least two or three time a day requesting fifty pages a pop. If you’re reading this, Sherry, we REALLY need to settle excursions before we even set foot on the ship next time!

Travelogue Two, Day Four: Machete Gangs and Diplomatic Governors

2009-05-04T23:17:00.000-04:00

So I got up this morning a lot earlier than I’d have preferred – first random tangent of day is that the Navigator’s curtains are exceptionally good at blocking out just about all traces of sunlight that hit the room. It literally looks like it’s still midnight out there when it’s nine in the morning. It’s a computer dork’s wet dream. Anyway, I dragged myself out of bed, took a quick breakfast in my room (the contents of which I don’t even remember, but some kind of exceptionally sweet fruit yogurt was definitely involved), and gave a quick call to Pamela at the charter company to make sure the buses were on their way – they were, and Pamela sounded less than happy to hear from me. I don’t particularly blame her. I think I’d have wanted to pummel myself into a bloody pulp by this point as well. Unfortunately, Tanya at the governor’s office wasn’t in yet, which made my stress level in that giant thermometer metaphysically hanging behind my head go up just a teeny bit, but I crossed my fingers and just hoped that everything would be fine. After making sure I looked at least reasonably presentable (down down, damn hair!) I ran out to the disembarkation point to observe how we were docked at the port. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that just as the brochures and the maps had indicated, we were, in fact, RIGHT in the middle of downtown Hamilton. There were literally cars about twenty or thirty-odd feet away, buzzing down the road, minding their own business while the sun beamed down in a way that was far too cheerful. It was kind of surreal, actually, being docked literally alongside a city rather than in some port or dock area that maintains a certain degree of industrial separation from where people actually shop and roam and live.

Anyway, after double checking on how to get onto the street, I zipped back to the Navigator Lounge where, just as expected, a small gaggle of people had already gathered, waiting for me to make my grand entrance. I’ve discovered that my grand entrances tend to be rather hurried and disheveled – this is probably why I never did very well as an actor. It’s hard to be charismatic when it looks like a hurricane just swept you in from the ocean. Anyway, naturally, I got swarmed almost immediately as I walked from person to person and checked off the people on my list, but there were relatively few questions considering how close we were to our stated departure time. I guess my incredibly harried and hurried air manages to remain efficient-looking regardless of the circumstances, and is exceptional at calming people’s worries without my even needing to say a word. Fortunately, the buses actually managed to turn up early – I have to stop here to question the judgment of Bermuda officials, because their buses are this nauseating shade of Pepto-Bismol pink. This might be just this side of tolerable for a tour bus, but they also happen to serve as Bermuda’s public transportation and school buses as well. I think I’d rather walk to school than ride in something that looks like it’s meant to relieve elephantine levels of gastric distress.

Getting people onto the buses was actually fine, since, once again, this had to be one of the most convenient docksides that I’ve ever seen. We had two buses for our fifty-odd passengers and thus, two drivers. I shuttled Philip onto one and took the other for myself – I wasn’t particularly sure what, exactly, Philip would have been able to organize or accomplish if the other bus broke down (particularly since I had all the relevant contact information), but his presence would have been entertaining to the other passengers in such a scenario, at any rate.

The tour actually started rather well, if somewhat banally. Our tour guide, a robust black woman whose name even now escapes me, but had a character like Norma Jane or Louisa Mae, pointed out such remarkable features as the local bank, notable trees, the Flagpole (which is significant because it apparently marks the center of every island in Bermuda), and so forth. David kept making off-color comments about this information, and I tried to snap a few pictures of notable buildings. Bermuda buildings are actually very interesting – they’re all painted in shades of pastel, and they all have these stepped, sloping roofs painted a startling shade of white. Our tour guide explained to us why they white-washed their roofs, which is apparently an extremely expensive process, but I failed my “pay attention” roll and that tidbit slipped right by me. Despite the banal nature of the tour, it was actually quite nice taking in the sights and making observations about Hamilton buildings. The other tour bus tried to go into the driveway of the Princess Hotel (which, like the buses, was very, very, very pink), but got stuck behind a long train of cars, so our bus just breezed on by them and effectively left them to the wolves, which I found mildly worrisome. About twenty minutes into the tour, however, we pulled into this little cul-de-sac that sat next to an admittedly beautiful little inlet. We could see another pair of cruise ships in the distance, a large stretch of cyan water between us, and the remnants of a shipwreck at the entrance to the inlet. A series of small, private boats had been moored in the waters of the inlet, and it looked like the tide had receded while were still moored there, and as such all of the boats were clearly marooned. The effect was actually rather creepy, despite the bright Bermudan sun pouring down on everything in a golden haze.

So Norma Jane, or whatever her name is, puts the bus on idle and tells us that we’re close to the Governor’s mansion, but she’s got some time to kill before we go there. I kind of went, “Ummm…what?” just before she launched into a lecture about the crime rates in Hamilton, the prevalence of muggings even in broad daylight, and the presence of teenagers wielding baseball bats and machetes roaming the streets just last night. Apparently, they enjoy targeting tourists. Seriously: what…the hell? The way she was going on, it sounded like Hamilton was some kind of chaotic, anarchic hole in the ground where press-gangs wander the streets with nail-studded boards and swinging chains, just looking to bash little old ladies to the ground and steal her dentures. This was decidedly not the tour that I was expecting.

Part of me was entertained, part of me couldn’t believe what I was hearing, part of me kept flashing back to Rome, where the tour guide explained to us how to avoid getting pick-pocketed, part of me REALLY wished she would just shut up and drive us somewhere picturesque, and part of me was just repeatedly banging my head against the window. Apparently I’m capable of experiencing more emotions at once than I’d realized. After about ten minutes, even the rather lovely view outside was getting tiresome (oh, how short our attention spans are!), and I could tell the natives on the bus were getting a bit restless despite a continual string of questions about corrupt police forces and farmer’s markets. My attempt to politely get her to just drive us somewhere, however, was firmly rebuffed as an absurdity, as apparently the place I wanted to go was entirely too far away. I got this flash of all of us sitting trapped on this bus forever as this madwoman cackled and went on and on about how we would get raped and pillaged and murdered by vicious Bermudan natives if we took one step off the beaten path.

So finally, 10:45 rolls around and she decides that we’ve apparently been suitably warned about the dangers of wandering around Bermuda alone. Then she casually drops the bombshell that she’s never actually been to the Government House, and hopes that we’re going the right way. I was of a mind to leap out of my seat, drop kick her in the head, and seize control of the bus. Fortunately, she seemed to be in contact with her home office as to where we were supposed to go, and the mere fact that we were in motion, with a specific destination in mind even if we didn’t quite know how we were to get there, put me somewhat at ease.

A few winding roads later, we’d arrived at a neat set of wrought iron gates set into a stone wall that read, “Government House.” There was a bit of confusion with where, exactly, a security guard on a moped wanted us to go, but somehow we managed to get up in an incredibly scenic driveway with the truly enormous Government House to our left and an absolutely gorgeous view of Bermuda to our right. I’m not very good at recognizing architecture, but my impression of the mansion was that it was built in a Colonial sort of style, maybe a hundred feet or so on the long side and half that much on the short, with walls a faded sort of neutral beige color. The lawns were perfectly trimmed – eerily so, actually – and lined with patches of absolutely beautiful pink and purple flowers. Just over a low wall of cobbled stones we could see the rest of the island and that gorgeous blue sea. It was very picturesque – the only thing spoiling the scene was the fact that the entire place looked totally abandoned.

We were actually about ten minutes early at this point, so I hopped off the bus to inspect the front door (which was locked) and to try to ring the doorbell (which was nonexistent.) Just as I was about to head back and report on the apparent lack of human life, much less receptive human life, in the area, the other tour bus miraculously materialized out of nowhere, accompanied by our errant security guard. At exactly the same time, the front door opened, revealing that the building was, in fact, well-occupied by numerous well-dressed people, who cheerfully welcomed us to Government House. Looks like the carefully enacted panic scenarios that I’d arranged in my head were for nothing after all. Our passengers started filing off the tour buses and into the Government House, with a few sticking around outside to take a few pictures of the view. I managed a few snapshots before finally deciding to join the rest of the group inside.

The Government House is probably one of the nicest structures I’ve seen in a while. The entire place is immaculate, with paintings hanging in each of the beautifully appointed rooms. The main foyer or living room or reception area, whatever you want to call it, was covered in a luxurious carpet the color of vanilla ice cream, with elegant furnishing carefully placed tastefully around the room. There was a long table on one end covered with lines of coffee cups, and another table on the other end with rows and rows of banana bread. Sir Richard Gozeny, the Governor of Bermuda, was in the center of the room, surrounded by Theatre at Sea passengers, talking to us about the nature of the Bermuda government and giving us an overview of its history. There was such a polished, welcoming air about the whole thing that I was instantly reassured that this entire excursion couldn’t be anything less than a total success.

Sir Richard led us around the Government House grounds, showing us the beautifully manicured lawn, including the enclosed area that we had been unable to enter from the front entrance, answering questions the entire time. (Did you know, by the way, that Bermuda’s top two exports are insurance and tourism? The second was obvious, but apparently the largest insurance companies in the US reinsure the items that they have insured through companies in Bermuda. I had no idea…) The man is a consummate diplomat – he was exceptionally charming, eloquent, and informative the whole time, despite the fact that the arrival of sixty-odd tourists was probably as disruptive to his daily business as a stampeding herd of rabid elephants. He led us down into the back yard, where there were numerous palm trees that had been planted there by notable personalities, including Bob Marley, Margaret Thatcher, and George Bush Sr. and Jr, and took a few pictures with Carol Lawrence and Shirley Jones. Then we all went back inside to mingle and chat and have a sip of coffee. Of course everyone wanted to have a picture with the Governor, together with a few of the actors, if possible, but the whole time he remained pleasant and charming. I hope to be so elegant when I’m his age.

Anyway, we stuck around for about an hour, during which I learned that the tour operator on the other bus was hilarious as opposed to unnecessarily alarming. He was apparently a female impersonator in the evenings, and…yeah, it sort of showed. He also apparently had relatives all over the island (which is not really unexpected when you grow up on an island), and had great fun pointing out all of his relations to his passengers as they drove past. I have to say, that sounds considerably more entertaining than being warned about machete gangs.

Even though I kind of wanted to see what the other bus driver was like, I dutifully returned to the other bus as we continued our afternoon tour. Somewhat surprisingly, it went off smoothly, entertainingly, and generally without a hitch. We drove to the other side of the island to be tantalized by Hamilton’s beaches, which, even as the movies suggest, consist of aquamarine waters lapping at gloriously white sands. I wished we had at least a little time to spend exploring one of them, but alas, the most that we could manage were a few snapshots from an overlooking cliff. Actually, I didn’t even quite manage that, because my camera chose that precise time to conveniently run out of battery power. We then made our way to the botanical gardens, which seemed too narrow for a tour bus to drive through, and which apparently contain a special type of tree that bears fruit which turn into vegetables. I think high school science established that as a biological impossibility? I…don’t know. Have we not already established that our tour operator was just a little eccentric? She actually pulled the bus over next to a hilltop cemetery just to explain everything we could want to know about how Bermuda buries its people. I mean really – morbid much? Apparently, the graves are all twenty to thirty feet deep, and unless people pay for a family plot they just stick the coffins in one on top of another. I’m imagining all sorts of unpleasant things happening to the coffins on the bottom, when that stack gets to be ten coffins deep.

So after all that we finally make our way back to the ship, and I decide to hop off and go shopping, as I’d neglected to bring a supply of protein powder. I know, I know – I’m turning in such a meathead. I know there is an ample supply of food on the ship, but the problem is actually that so much of that food is meant to be…you know…ENJOYED. It’s all gourmet food and therefore loaded with saturated fats and processed sugars and all the other tasty things that can really wreak havoc on your body. I’m not even sure how I’m supposed to order scrambled eggs made with six egg whites. So I’m trying to supplement with some clean proteins, at least, if I’m going to be eating all this otherwise artery-clogging stuff. If I’m putting a halt to my fat-cutting scheme for the duration of this cruise, I may as well attempt to gain some muscle out of the deal. Anyway, I did manage to find a small health food store yesterday (did I mention this already?) that stocked some extremely unpleasant-tasting protein powder for a relatively inexpensive price.

Oh! That was the other thing. Bermuda is RIDICULOUSLY expensive. I was seeing things like $35 for a crappy pair of flip-flops that would cost all of two dollars in the US, and $120 for a box of gel pens. PENS! One hundred and twenty fucking dollars for a pack of ten pens! Jesus Christ, do these things spell and grammar check your essays for you? What the hell, hero?

Anyway, I made it back onto the ship after buying my protein powder, did my standard tea time trivia upstairs, and then retreated down to the computer lab to type up messages and memos and other nifty things. There was some kind of juggling thing going on in the main theatre, which might have been fun if I didn’t have to sequester myself in my room and fold papers the entire time. I ended up taking dinner in my room again, because I just didn’t have time and couldn’t be bothered to eat in the dining room with everything else that I had to do.

Okay, I think I have to mention here that the Navigator is a much smaller ship than the Crystal Serenity, and since we left Bermuda this evening it’s been pitching and rocking all over the place. Kind of like pirate ships did in bad action movies of the 50’s, except replace the pirate ship with a massive luxury cruise liner. It’s giving me a mild case of sea sickness and a serious headache, and consequently I just want to fall asleep all the time. In fact, I think it’s time to turn in. I know that’s kind of abrupt, but my head is killing me.

Travelogue Two, Day Three: It’s Not Boring Even If I Have Nothing Substantial to Say

2009-05-03T23:54:00.000-04:00

This whole “avoid fattening foods and desserts” deal is getting to be much more difficult than I’d imagined. I know I said that I’d avoid dessert except during dinner but…peach mousse with chocolate sprinkles and a sprig of pineapple! How am I supposed to say no to that! I reiterate – if I weren’t trying to maintain a certain modicum of self-control with the whole P90X thing, I’d fucking grab one of every piece of dessert they’re serving me, and I’d wolf it all down and have no regrets whatsoever.

So anyway, today was our last at-sea day before Bermuda, and I admit to a little bit of apprehension. A part of me is dreading that we’re going to end up with another repeat of the Morocco incident (which I will not repeat here – you can find a concise report about Morocco in my first Travelogue from September, 2008. Yes, I’m advertising myself. Go read!), but we’ve had SO much contact and correspondence with the bus companies and the Governor’s House in Bermuda that someone would have to be holding an idiot ball the size of a beach ball in order for something to go seriously wrong. Plus, I’ll be making some phone calls in the morning to make sure that everything is kosher. Still, I can’t quite help feeling like some kind of Sword of Damocles is hanging over my head.

I woke up too early this morning, but there were events to oversee and things to be done. There was a Q&A with the actors this morning, which was decently attended and passed without any seriously retarded questions from anyone. For some reason, when we have Q&A sessions with the actors I keep worrying that one of the actors won’t get enough questions and it’ll seem like people aren’t interested enough in them. A part of me is going, “What do you care? It’s not your job to take care of the actors’ egos,” but a larger part is going, “The actors are still a part of the Theatre at Sea group, and it’s my job as general manager to make sure that everyone is happy, insofar as that’s possible.” Yeah, I know…I’m such a bloody pushover. INFP / Counselor / Caretaker indeed.

You know, looking back, I actually have very little to say about today. It passed virtually without incident, and everything seemed pretty routine. I’m still pretty annoyed that there’s no way for me to get a protein shake while I’m aboard, but I was pleased to find out that there seems to be a health store in Bermuda, so perhaps I can pick up a bucket of protein powder while I’m there and feel like I’m maintaining at least a modicum of effort in maintaining my exercise diet and schedule. Back and legs was hard…unusually hard, and not just because I stayed up too late last night doing karaoke and drinking too much. The ship’s rocking back and forth had a great deal to do with it, I think. I’m not precisely prone to sea-sickness, but I do get somewhat nauseated and develop a fairly irritating headache when the ship starts lurching like a wino at 3am. My numbers aren’t really going up, but I feel like I can see a difference, which is kind of odd and contrary to what I’m used to. I kind of feel like I’m approaching the best shape of my life, but dammit, that pooch in the lower abs just REFUSES TO GO AWAY! Rob is undoubtedly annoyed at me for being annoyed at that, but hey, we’re all allowed our little petty peeves, no?

Lunch was fine, but I ended up going right back to work after lunch. The general malaise meant I could only concentrate for about half an hour before I had to take a nap, and when I woke up it was almost time for the party upstairs, but in that time I actually managed to get a fair amount of memos written and records updated. On a semi-random note, I got a bunch of calls from people asking me where the party was, where we’re meeting tomorrow for Bermuda, and where the show is this evening, and part of me just wants to scream, “Do you people even READ the notices I send out? Why the fuck am I spending hours of my time writing them, hand-folding each one, and addressing them to everyone – adding personal notes if necessary – if you’re just going to bloody ignore entire PARAGRAPHS?!” I’m forced to remind myself that some of my passengers, like Philip, are advancing in years and don’t remember things as well as they used to, but my irritation, like most emotions, is irrational and doesn’t listen well to reason.

The party actually went fairly decently as well. A number of people turned up, and although I think I overheard a few people complaining that it ought to be more lively, I chose to ignore the comments and focus on the wonderful conversations I had with the rest of my passengers. One of them in particular took a particular interest in my life and my interests, and I do find it wonderful when I can form a connection with any of the passengers. Some of these ladies and gentlemen are more spry and lively than people half or even a third of their age. It’s really amazing to watch sometimes.

I ended up just making a cameo in the dining room to make sure that things weren’t on fire or exploding among the Theatre at Sea guests, but took food in my room because I just didn’t have time to spend two and a half hours eating dinner. I mean, come on – I usually grab something and finish it in fifteen minutes. Extending that by 10 times is practically begging my sense of efficiency and impatience to start tearing ragged strips out of me from the inside. I finished P90X, finding legs and back WAY harder than usual, and managed to shower and get to the show just a little after it started. Our cast did a wonderful job, as usual, and I managed to somehow bite through a martini glass halfway through the show.

Don’t ask.

We held sort of a green room reception with the passengers and our actors up in the Galileo Lounge after the show, and I had a serious moment of contentment as I looked around and realized that everyone around me was relaxed, enjoying themselves, and needed absolutely nothing from me. I danced a few times with Betsy and a couple of my passengers, and that was quite delightful – I kind of regretted having to bow out, but interestingly enough I ran into Matthew (the actor who did Wild Party last year) in the library. We chatted very amiably for a while and made plans to hang out in Funchal, once we get there, which should be a lot of fun. Madeira looks amazing, from the brochures that I’ve seen of it.

Anyway, I know this particular update was a mite more dull than usual, but I’m actually feeling remarkably tired after a fairly unremarkable day and I need to get up early tomorrow to make some phone calls. I’ll come back with a full report on Bermuda tomorrow, assuming I’m not eaten by my passengers if we get stuck outside the Governor’s house.

Travelogue Two, Day Two – I Thought I Was Supposed to Be LESS Busy on at Sea Days

2009-05-02T23:41:00.000-04:00

So, so very tired. And so, so very drunk. Okay, actually, not that drunk, although I had a fairly absurd amount of alcohol. John, the bartender in the Star Lounge, has this unfortunate (or very fortunate, depending on how you look at it) tendency to mix very, very strong drinks. I had my first appletini tonight and it was a fairly impressive one. I have no clear conception of what goes into an appletini, but suffice it to say it seems to be a great deal of alcohol with just enough flavoring to keep the whole thing from becoming absurdly vile.

I actually don’t have a great deal to report today. This is our second at sea day – we have one more tomorrow before we dock in Bermuda, at which point the rehearsals are over and we see just how well G can herd a group of 50-odd people to the right place at the right time. Frankly, I’ll be amazed if we all manage to make it onto the buses without somebody being left behind.

I’d imagined that I would have somewhat less work to do with all of the days we’re spending at sea, but somehow, with everything else that seems to be going on, I’m finding myself with the usual dearth of time. Between meetings, shows, P90X, and dinner, I seem to be stuck in the exact same situations as I was stuck in on the Crystal Serenity, when we were docking at a port practically every day and I was constantly shuttling myself (and sometimes other people) off to some exotic new locale every day. I think part of the issue is the fact that I have to keep up with several Theatre at Sea shore excursions now, whereas with the Crystal Serenity we were restricted to Venice, Rome, and Monte Carlo.

I finally did find a way to get my pull-up bar to fit into my stateroom, although now it’s resting on a rather flimsy-looking piece of decorative wood. I’m hoping I’ll be able to go through the entire cruise without doing permanent damage to my stateroom, but every creak and strain in the woodwork while I’m doing pull-ups is making me nervous. As a tangent, I’m still kind of annoyed that I haven’t been able to make it past three wide-grip pull-ups. I know those are hard and back exercises are among the worst in my repertoire, but I feel like I should have more to show after nearly six weeks of P90X.

Anyway, we had our group meeting with all of the Theatre at Sea passengers this morning, which required me to drag my ass out of bed at 9:45 in the morning after having gone to bed at 3:15 the night before. Having gotten only about two hours the night before that, the six hours felt about as useful as one. The group meeting went well – only one or two people took up a disproportionate amount of my time with issues that have effectively nothing to do with me, which is actually a fact that I’m getting more used to as time goes on. Even as Jessica said – there are always one or two people on the cruises who will make your life miserable, and there’s not much you can do except let it wash over you, out the back of the ship, and fantasize about various ways they might fall overboard during the trip.

I had lunch, or at least a part of lunch, with David and Sumrall, and I very successfully broke my promise last night to eat dessert only during dinner. I can’t help it. They had goddamn Black Forest Cake mixed among, like, eighteen different dessert selections. It’s a testimony to my force of will that I only took a small slice of the cake and didn’t choose one of each item, like I would have if I weren’t doing P90X. Yes, I know I’m making excuses and no, I don’t feel guilty at all. We tread over this ground on my last post. I eat like an ascetic back in New York. I’m going to enjoy myself on this cruise, dammit.

Anyway, I napped through a lot of the afternoon, did my yoga (balance postures are absurdly hard on a ship that’s rocking back and forth), and showed up for a relatively nice dinner. Of course there were issues, but they weren’t nearly as pressing or as idiotic as they were yesterday and I was actually able to sit down for dinner at a reasonable time and have some reasonable conversation with some of my passengers. I know – someone roll out the plagues of boils and swarms of locusts. Did some work, of course, after dinner, but after that was done I flitted over and did some GREAT karaoke with David and Sumrall.

I do have to add here – this cruise would be SO much harder if I didn’t have the chance to unwind with David and Sumrall. I won’t deny I kinda wish I had someone special to share the cruise with me (I’m working on that), but in lieu of romantic companionship the two of them kick some major ass. I’m utterly bummed that they’re not able to come onto the next cruise – and the Crystal Symphony doesn’t even serve complimentary alcohol! Dammit!

Anyway, we have another at sea day tomorrow and our first show. I’m actually anticipating some time off and some rest after Bermuda is all settled, so there might be some fairly short (or fairly philosophical) posts from me for a while. We'll see. For now, however, I’m going to bed.

Travelogue Two, Day One: Bumbling Around in Blunderland and Other Misadventures

2009-05-01T23:47:00.000-04:00

God, someone shoot me now.

I think everyone was expecting that, right? Did we really expect day one to sail smoothly by like a greased up sled over a lake of oily lard? God, I’m too tired to even be particularly original. As is usual with my procrastinating self, I stayed up too late last night doing…I can’t even remember what, actually, so it couldn’t have been terribly important, and as a result I got maybe two hours of sleep when I finally was able to make it into bed. Packing had gone fairly quickly so I convinced myself it wouldn’t take me very long to get ready in the morning.

Well, I was very wrong, and it took very long.

No, that’s a lie. I just said that because I wanted to make a cheesy rhyme. Actually, it only took me about twenty minutes to shower, eat some breakfast, and pack what I figured were the last remaining items that I needed into my suitcase. It’s worth mentioning here that this is the same suitcase I effectively snatched from my cousin, complete with a shredded back wheel that makes pulling it around feel like I’m dragging a dead body around behind me. It was probably about six thirty in the morning when I lugged that particular corpse out of my apartment and yeah, I was totally feeling that fact, as well as the fact that I don’t even go to bed until six thirty in the morning some days.

Everything went pretty much as expected until I got to the airport. Regent had effectively forgotten about me when we requested air for the actors and for the rest of our crew, so I ended up having to book my own air through Continental. Newark to Fort Lauderdale at 9:15 in the morning, arriving around 12:30. The train ride to Newark was unremarkable, although I did note once again that the route that snakes from New York Penn Station to Newark, New Jersey looks like the industrialized outskirts of Hell, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s where yuppies end up when they die. Anyway, after checking in and arriving at the boarding gate (stopping briefly to pick up a protein jamba juice), I learned that the airline had had an equipment change and now my flight was severely oversold.

Um…what?

So I went into standby for the time being, waiting out the standard volunteer time period while they asked people if they would be willing to take a different flight in exchange for a $300 travel voucher. I watched as a few people volunteered, some names were called, and people who had been shuffled onto standby were allowed onto the plane. Finally, we were down to two spots, and there just happened to be two elderly couples waiting in line in front of me. They got onto the plane, and I got a “I’m sorry, your flight is full.”

Son of a bitch!

Fortunately, I managed to retain my composure and an excellent, excellent Chinese face as I informed the service representative that I had to be on a boat by 3:30 pm, and if they didn’t get me there I was going to personally brain them with a trash can and then take a dump on their chests. Okay, no, I didn’t say that, but I did infuse my voice with a low, angry, and undoubtedly very masculine intensity that I’m sure was very intimidating. My obviously irked exterior was clearly able to cow the service lady into putting me onto the next available flight at 11:00 am, arriving into Fort Lauderdale at 2:00 pm. Not only that, but I was pushed into first class and given a $300 travel voucher for my troubles. Sweet! I should totally be late and inflexible for more flights.

First class was nice, but honestly, the first thing I thought upon sitting down was, “People pay five hundred bucks for this?” Yeah, the seat’s a little wider and you get a little more leg room, but for five hundred bucks more than economy class I feel like it ought to blow dry my hair, give me a manicure, and whisper sweet nothings into my ear before leading me into the back room. Oh, I did get a piping hot chicken burrito for lunch, together with a bowl of soup and some nifty cookies, but five hundred bucks for a couple of inches and a spicy burrito seems rather stiff (harr…)

Anyway, the flight got into Fort Lauderdale alright. Although the cab ride was nothing really to speak of, I was feeling oddly excited as we pulled into Port Everglades. It was a semi-cloudy day in Fort Lauderdale and patches of sunshine and blue sky were peeking through the waves of clouds, giving the city an admittedly cheerful look as compared to the damp, dreary, drizzly expanse that had been New York. I think I was also actually beginning to really look forward to getting onto this admittedly luxurious ship, despite my crankiness over all of the mishaps and misadventures over the past few days. Regardless of how annoyed you are and how much work you know you’ll be doing, there’s still something about getting onto a luxury cruise liner that makes your heart beat a little faster. The day that I start going, “Ho hum, another luxury cruise. How dull…” is the day that somebody with more sense needs to beat me over the head several times with a lead pipe. And then bury me in the basement and deny to the authorities that I had ever visited the area. And they’d be justified in doing so.

The check-in process was actually considerably smoother than it was on the Crystal Serenity. I dropped my bags off, gave the people my name, got a retarded-looking picture of me taken via web-cam, and less than ten minutes later I was on board the ship. The Regent Navigator is considerably smaller than the Crystal Serenity, so there isn’t that feeling of great…spaciousness, I guess…that you get upon walking into the atrium. It’s still gorgeous, mind you, but it does feel noticeably more confined. I snapped a few pictures, dropped some of my stuff off into my stateroom, and glanced around to make sure that I would be able to use my pull-up bar in my room.

Yes, I’m so obsessed with P90X that the second thing I did upon entering my five-star hotel room was to check and make sure that my pull-up bar could fit into the doorway. I’m totally turning into a meathead, and I can’t be bothered to care because I can actually see my abs sometimes, and that it kind of bothers me that that doesn’t bother me.

The answer to the burning question in all of your minds, incidentally, is…no, the fucking pull-up bar doesn’t fit into my room. I’m still working on how I’m going to do back and biceps tonight.

There WAS, however, a bottle of complimentary champagne that I managed to mostly ignore before running upstairs to check in with Philip and Marilyn. Naturally, the actors had had a major air malfunction – Donna McKechnie ended up having to buy her own ticket to fly with the rest of the actors, and Lee Roy and the rest ended up being nearly an hour and a half late, which almost resulted in a panic attack on my end and a heart attack on Philip’s. You’d never have noticed, with the way we calmly sat on the pool deck eating our bratwurst and cookies, but there was definite tension. Mmmmm…bratwurst.

Oh, that actually reminds me – as I was running around on the pool deck, I ran into one of the actors from The Wild Party, that I stage managed about a year ago. That was one of those incredibly odd Twilight Zone moments, because as I was walking past we both sort of eyed each other in that, “You look so incredibly familiar but you really shouldn’t be here because reality just doesn’t work that way and oh my god it’s actually you!” sort of way. Turns out he’s been singing for the ship since January. What are the odds? He introduced me to another actor on the ship, name of Stewart, who winked at me twice as we spoke.

I have to say here…that always kind of weirds me out. I always wonder if I’m supposed to smile and ignore it, wink back, make some kind of innuendo, poke out his other eye with a sharp object…what? Is that another one of those gay signals that we were supposed to learn back in homosexual school? I think I must’ve ditched class in favor of doing linear algebra or something that day, because whenever someone does that to me it becomes a serious deer-in-headlights moment. I need one of my fag hags or less clueless gay friends to tell me what, exactly, that’s supposed to mean and what, exactly, is the socially acceptable course of action in such a situation.

After a brief lunch there were, naturally, already issues to deal with and messages to send out, and naturally, in the middle of sending out a message to all the passengers instructing them on how to sit with the rest of the group during dinner, we get a bloody fire drill. So I’m toting my bag and folder and other essentials, fiddling with my terribly gaudy and even more terribly awkward life preserver, knowing that the message about dinner is very unlikely to get out to everyone, and that there would probably be Drama (yes, with a capital D) come dinnertime.

Yup. There was Drama at dinnertime. To set up the overall scenario, we made a request with Regent to have everyone in our group sit together in the same general area. The maitre d’ of the restaurant took note of this, but told me when I spoke to him earlier that the people in our group would have to arrive promptly at 7:00 pm in order to be seated together. Naturally, nobody got this message from me in time, so although most people were prescient enough to ask about sitting with the group, a few people didn’t and were consequently upset when they got seated somewhere else. Then someone else tried to hold a table for certain people to arrive, which really can’t be done in a situation like this because the restaurant doesn’t know who’s arrived and who hasn’t, and that became a big mess because they started antagonizing the head waiter. Then the maitre d’ and the food and restaurant manager got involved, and THEY became upset that the passengers were upset. And I was upset that they were upset and we ended up having to just solve everything in a free for all melee.

Or maybe I just told them I’d handle it and went back to schmoozing with the passengers. That was actually, for the most part, very enjoyable. Despite whatever complaints I’ve had in the past about incredibly demanding passengers, a lot of the people who come with us are genuinely nice people who understand that I’m pretty much stretched to my limit trying to accommodate all of them, who are willing to cut me a little slack, and who are fairly pleased just by the fact that I’m going around to greet them at dinner time. There are more than a few on this cruise, in fact, who are truly extraordinarily friendly, including one man who actually managed to dig up my blog. (Yes, I realize he might well be reading this, and no, I’m making no effort to change what I write on here as a result of it. This is my blog, dammit, and I’m not going to start censoring myself because I’m afraid of what other people might think of me.)

Anyway, it’s worth mentioning here that I’m one of those people who’s more likely to work hard for someone who’s friendly to me than for someone who just complains endlessly. If someone’s nice, then I don’t want to disappoint them by messing up. If someone’s consistently being a temperamental bitch, however, I’m somewhat more likely to let someone else, who probably cares a whole lot less than I do, deal with the issue, and if the passenger decides not to sail with us again, then…well…frankly, I’m not going to be heartbroken over it.

Anyway, dinner was basically a big fracas and I didn’t manage to sit down and eat until it was about three quarters of the way over. On the bright side, today also happens to be my freebie day, so I was able to eat whatever I wanted and choose some delectable desserts to boot. I think that may end up being something of a problem on this cruise, though. Half the fun of cruising comes from the truly incredible food you’re getting, and it’s going to annoy the shit out of me if I can’t sample some of the stuff because I’m trying to stick hard and fast to the P90X diet.

I think Rob would forgive me if I pulled myself off the diet for the duration of this cruise. ‘Cause honestly…five star restaurant! How often do you get to basically eat at a five star restaurant every single evening for two weeks? They offered bloody crème brulee as one of the dessert options tonight! I am not skipping crème brulee ‘cause of Tony fucking Horton, and I am DEFINITELY not skipping a chateaubriand, assuming it’s offered tomorrow night, just because it’s not a “clean, high quality protein.” I’ll do the fucking exercises as usual, but you know what, I’m making the decision right now – I’m on a goddamn luxury cruise, and anyone who thinks I ought to stick to my strict, clean diet while I’m here can shove their head up an elephant’s ass. I’ll try to eat decently during the day, but all bets are off come dinnertime.

Anyway, we have a meeting with all the passengers tomorrow, and Bermuda is until two days after that. Plenty of time, I’m hoping, to get everything sorted out and ready. God, I really don’t want another series of shore excursion debacles.

Shit, it’s almost 1 am and I still need to do back and biceps. Okay, going back to my stateroom now.

On a random note, I ought to take more pictures. The ship is lovely and I ought to capture more of it before it’s time to go.

On refusing to sleep because I'm an idiot

2009-05-01T02:21:00.004-04:00

So I'm about to leave for Fort Lauderdale in about three hours, and instead of going to sleep I'm tossing out a tiny blog on the matter. Actually, I'm waiting to see if there's anything else I'm forgetting before I head out. I'm sure there are loads of things that I'll remember as soon as I've reached the airport, and I'll be tearing at my hair before the plane's left the ground. I've already e-mailed Sherry asking her to take care of a matter I neglected while I was at the office, and I haven't even bloody left yet. Yay for G's organization skills, right?

There will be another format change in the upcoming days of the cruise. As I did last September, I'm going to keep up a travelogue of my experiences on the Regent Navigator. It should actually be much easier to do so this time, because the ship is spending a great deal of time at sea, and I actually have considerably less to do when we're not at port. I think I'm also going to take advantage of any free time I have to go ahead and finish transcribing the last three days of the September cruise, for completion's sake, even though I rather doubt anyone is going to go back and actually read that.

Oh crap. AND I really need to go through and finish uploading pictures from the September cruise into my Facebook, then go through and upload the pictures from my trip to China into my Facebook. I'm developing a serious backlog here. I guess it's fortunate that a ton of the pictures I took don't have me in them, so I don't feel obligated to put them anywhere except in my memories.

On randomness

2009-04-27T03:41:00.000-04:00

The one thing that I break merely by observing...

No, actually, I just wanted to use a quote that once again illustrates how utterly irreverent and arrogant I am, but only to people dorky enough to know what I'm referencing. That includes only one person who reads this blog and he's usually too busy to actually do so, so I'm really just expounding on my own megalomania to myself and the world at large, both of whom are already well aware of the fact.

As predicted (and observed) earlier, I've been oscillating in mood a very great deal the past few days, but with much smaller amplitudes and a much heightened sense of...not resignation, because that has a connotation of defeat about the word. Acceptance, perhaps, or serenity about events that I largely have no control over, and thus am not allowing to bother me as much as I used to. Talking about it, chewing it over and over again in my head and in my blog like a piece of metaphysical cud, however, appears to be helping a great deal, to my benefit and to the detriment of everyone who is reading this. Just how often can we tread over familiar ground before we get tired of the same old scenery? It's like running a marathon in the back yard of a Brooklyn brownstone!

I don't think I'm going to be blogging in a stream-of-consciousness fashion again anytime soon, however. Especially not after reading a book like House of Leaves. The book takes me to cold, dark places, and the stream-of-consciousness takes whatever elegance my writing might have had and cock-slaps it into the gutter. I'm somewhat inclined to go back and delete that last post, but my sense of completion and general honesty won't allow me to do so. And my obsessive-compulsiveness as well, which, for whatever reason, mentally takes on the aspect of a very, very bossy six year-old girl who keeps shoving me in absurd directions from behind and throws major temper tantrums whenever I try to avoid something she absolutely must have me do right now as of yesterday, dammit! So the currently tally goes: my ideal reader is a literate, mustached old British gentleman with glasses and a noncommittal "harrumph," my wit is a whip-wielding dominatrix, and my obsessive-compulsiveness is an annoying little six year-old girl.

And people wonder why I'm a psychological and emotional junkyard. With persona fragments like that, how could I be anything but?

I sort of stopped with the blogging about Wikipedia entries for a short bit (Yeah, I know. That lasted all of a week and a half.) I just don't have the time for it right now, with Musicals Tonight occupying almost all of my free time and P90X occupying the rest. God, I'm turning into a total meat-head. It must be one of the great ironies of modern life that you have to take a social life, a brain, and a fit body and choose two out of the three. I know I didn't stick sleep in there, but that's because you sort of need sleep in order to really be physically fit. As much as that offends my general world view and sense of time management.

I'm also aware of the irony in complaining about not having enough time while sitting here at 3:30 in the morning blogging about almost nothing. I need to go shower, jot down a few story notes, and get to bed. God, I can't believe the cruise is coming up in four days. I can't decide if that will be relaxing or stressful - I guess a lot of it depends on whether or not the cruise sends us the rest of the goddamn tickets for the passengers. Jesus Christ, we've never cut it this close, and I've never come this close to bitch slapping people I've never met. I might just settle for slamming the phone into the table a few times. In the same spot where I was slamming my head last week, preferably.

On dark and spiraling staircases

2009-04-22T03:24:00.002-04:00

Feeling odd tonight, peculiar, strange, and a whole host of other synonyms I can't seem to bring forth from the tip of my tongue, and I'm wondering whether or not I could write a successful blog post in a stream of consciousness format without really worrying too much about it. Somehow, I find myself doubtful, since I find myself going back and correcting the odd thing periodically anyway. This anal tendency of mine is going to have to be addressed at some point. I was talking to Jonny tonight about myself, which is hardly unusual, and I made a realization which was less a realization as a decision to speak about something I've known for a while but which I convinced myself was an unknown factor, because there are so many things that lie buried and which should remain buried but for the excavation and digging that alcohol seems to bring. I should seriously just stop drinking. There are no weapons in this world, just shields of varying adequacy. I suppose I could feel clever, since I didn't see that anywhere - yup, I made that one up all on my own, and I'm going to claim it as a favorite quote of mine, since it's a little bit of insight and brilliance that I can call completely my own. Although we do have to ask whether or not anything is our own, in this world where the same archetypes and ideas repeat endlessly under the sun. Is that even accurate, under the sun? Some days I feel like I'm standing at the edge of a precipice, at the edge of that big spiral staircase that goes down past the rim of the earth, and I wonder whether it would necessarily be such a bad thing to fall. Maybe sleeping would be a better term for it. I'm tired, often tired, tired of expending the effort, tired of trying, tired of trying to balance an equation that ultimately has no balance, it seems, and I'm tired of trying to keep up a happy face in the face of that inequality. That's the definition of absurdity, when you look black eternity full in the face and realize that you don't have anything witty left to say. I'm wandering around in the dark, in a dark vast room with arches and hallways as tall as the world and what little light I have can't illuminate the walls. The light is swallowed, consumed by an endless shadow, darkness, teneboration so piercing that a halogen bulb, football lights, the electric power of cities, atomic bombs, the solar heat of fusion couldn't be more than a tiny blip in the vastness of an eternity that stretches on forever and ever and ever and then you discover you're the only thing in the darkness, which isn't strictly true. You stand at the edge of the precipice because you realize that you aren't alone. You can turn back at any time, walk away at any time, except that if you turn around you do realize that someone else something else is in the darkness with you, and that's the real horror - the fact that there is an other when before there was only the perfect solitude, and in fact that's not the true horror at all. The true horror is that if you turn around and walk away from the precipice that would mean facing the other, and realizing that the other is just you. Only you. No more masks, no more smiling faces for other people's benefit, just the core of you that you can't face or identify or discuss because it burns a hole in your gaze. That's why we really don't and can't be alone. That's actually why humans are such social creatures, because when we stand in the dark all by ourselves we have nobody but ourselves to keep us company, and only then do we realize what flawed creatures we actually are. I see a jagged crack splitting my figure from head to toe, and it's not light that spills forth but an oily blackness that seems to stain even the emptiness a hollow shade and I don't know what light can penetrate it. Can you light up the galaxy with such a sad little glow? Is it pain, jealousy, rage, envy, the whole assortment of seven that assembles as they pour out of the cracks, and is identifying them enough to banish them away into some place where the light can wash over them and heal them into something that might be constructive, something that might redeem everything. Redeem. Implacable, sequestered, untouchable, unbreakable, irredeemable, damned. Thinking about that a great deal, and wondering whether or not my pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and whether I'm actually choosing between a pit and some red-hot walls. Is there a choice there? I think we can see the choice and it doesn't seem to be much at all, except that as Poe indicated even in the darkness of an unfathomable abyss there is hope, always hope, in others? Can yourself be someone else? Can you rescue yourself, stand outside yourself, look into yourself and forgive yourself the errors and thereby heal the tears that wash down from a place too far into the past for nearsighted eyes to see? Who can invest in you the authority to forgive yourself your own crimes and redeem you into the light? Do I even know what I'm talking about, because I think I'm ultimately rambling phrases that sound insightful but ultimately is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That's the thing. Nothing. Sound and fury are ultimately shields as well. There are no weapons. There is no fight, really. There's only a withdraw with as much defense as you can muster before the blank walls of forever push you into a spot that might as well be emptiness, nothingness, vacancy. Against a backdrop of infinity what can you do but dwindle into a point of ultimate meaninglessness? Or is there synergy? Is it synergistic, the action of having one plus one? Simple mathematics combined with considerably more complex motions of the heart (and soul, if such a thing could ever be defined in a way that has any meaning whatsoever) to fill an infinite void with a light that can best be described as empyrean. God exists nowhere but within a human soul, if such a thing exists, and if it doesn't then perhaps God doesn't exist either, and we really have nothing to shield us against that vast and lonely nothingness. Nothing against nothing. It seems apt, in its own way.

I said that I would shine by my own light, but like Lucifer I've been unhappy because I desire things that cannot be. Desire is for what you can't have. The need for what's readily available is just greed. It seems you're destined to be either unhappy or greedy. Covetous. Those aren't quite the same word. Greed doesn't seem to be such a bad thing when compared to an eternity wanting something always out of your reach. I have no stomach for Sisyphean tasks, but the alternative seems, according to C. S. Lewis, to be damnation. What does that even MEAN?

I really need to stop drinking, and to stop reading fucked up love stories that take place in haunted spatial distortions inhabited by eldritch abominations.

On making up for lost time

2009-04-14T00:56:00.002-04:00

I know, I managed to miss four entire days of Wikipedia entries. Well, rather than kill myself trying to make up for those entries, I'm just going to hop right back onto the wagon and pretend nothing is amiss. I could sail through my life much more easily if I'd just adhere to that sort of laissez-faire attitude more often.

Anyway, today's entry is Agrippina. Actually, colloquially, Agrippina should've been tomorrow's entry, since it's now one in the morning. However, I'm finding myself unwilling to be caught up on an issue of semantics...and actually, I don't particularly want to blog about today's issue, which was White Deer Hole Creek. I mean...come on. White Deer Hole Creek? Rather than talk about the creek, I probably would've gone into a whole spiel about the sort of man who'd give a creek an asinine name like "White Deer Hole." Yeah, all you perverts out there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know exactly what I'm thinking, and shame. Shame shame shame on you for your filthy, filthy, filthy minds! What would Sister Aloysius say? Think of Grandma! What would she say if she knew what you were thinking? And how dare you think of Grandma with a mind like that?! I bet you have her sunk in all sorts of disgusting, perverse, and unnatural positions now.

Anyway, Agrippina is an opera in three acts, which already puts me into a bit of a "Uh oh" mood, because I know very little about opera. My training, you see, is in acting, and it's actually very, very difficult to behave realistically when you're belting out a high C in Italian. I know this because actors need to be in the moment, whereas singing is actually all about keeping track of your muscles and your breath and making the little adjustments you need for the sound to come out beautifully. Although breath is every bit as important to acting as it is to opera, the latter parts are antithetical to keeping yourself grounded in the moment, to stop paying attention to yourself and to start paying attention to your partner and your surroundings. I have a lot of respect for opera singers, mind you. Theirs is a demanding art that requires a very great deal of technical skill and physical stamina. I just don't tend to have a lot of respect for opera singers as actors. Which is fine, since I fairly sure most of the people who go to the opera aren't there for the acting.

I actually gave some thought to opera, way back in those dawn ages when gods roamed the earth and heroes still existed. In between besting a red dragon and slaying the Lich of Dunwich, I briefly entertained the notion of getting operatic training, since I enjoyed singing a great deal and it seemed to be a nice way to synthesize that with a fondness for the stage. Then a meteor missile hit me in the head, knocked some sense into me, and made me realize that singing eight hours a day wasn't really my idea of a good time. My passion for that was lukewarm at best, and a lukewarm passion is only good for party games and soiling the sheets.

I'm not too sure where or why that last paragraph went in that particular direction. I think hunger is making me delirious. I'm going to sign off and eat some of my shrimp.

On musical selectivity

2009-04-09T21:21:00.000-04:00

I have absolutely nothing to say about Motorhead, excepting possibly that I'm enterprising enough about new things to maybe pop over to Youtube and listen to a few of their songs. I will not do that now, however, because I don't particularly want to. This is my blog and I can do what I want! In fact, I could segue away from Motorhead and talk about, oh I don't know, rabid cabbages if it's my wont! Just because I have a pet project doesn't mean I'm locked into it! I refuse to be tied down, not even by myself! Freedom and anarchy! Down with the fascist, controlling, stifling Big Brother and up with the power of the people! For the Swarm!

My musical taste has been sort of an interesting anomaly for me. It's very widely scattered, and I'm very hard pressed to find or define any sort of pattern or regularity in what I like. I used to think that I liked alternative or heavy metal, but recently I'm discovering that I like only certain songs in the alternative or heavy metal genre. Not even certain bands. Certain songs. This holds true for classical, pop, video game music, techno, and pretty much everything that I listen to. I offer some explanation by saying that I have a very, very poor sense of discernment - I have a very hard time discerning lyrics in songs, so I tend more toward the musical aspects as opposed to the lyrical. Nevertheless, that doesn't really explain why I'm more fond of, say, "Dancing Mad" than I am of "Unforgiven," or why I like "Around the World" by ATC but don't like the majority of Backstreet Boys songs. I do notice that I seem to like faster-paced music more than slower ones, but that's speaking very, very generally, because I have no small number of slow love ballads on my iPod. However, I do notice that I really, really love it when people mix modern instruments with orchestras and classical instruments. Electric guitar or synthesizer together with a full choir and a full orchestra? That's amazing! AMAZING! I've yet to come across music made in that fashion without enjoying myself. Similarly, I love the British band "Bond" for their ability to mix synthesizer, electric guitar, with a string quartet. I love almost every piece of Bond music, which is something of a rarity for me.

Anyway, like every other aspect of my life, my musical taste seems to take a "treat everything individually" sort of approach to songs. Bond happens to be the exception that proves the rule, but maybe they'll start sucking and I'll have to be more choosy when it comes to the songs they release.

On pendulum swings

2009-04-08T23:07:00.002-04:00

So I went on a date tonight for the first time in...wow, I'd have to say months. I don't think I've really dated anyone since before I left for the cruise back in September. Oh wait, no, that's a lie. I did go on a date with Antyon back in November or December - I can't quite remember exactly when - and that was nice, but the two of us had such radically different personalities and outlooks that I just couldn't see it working out.

Anyway, the guy was nice and we shared a lot of interests, and although I think we'd make decent friends I don't really see us in a relationship. He has what I can only describe as a speedy personality, and I find that I generally get along better with people who are slower than I am most of the time. I do have to say I find that a bit hilarious, because I'd always figured myself fairly laid-back and very low-key. Hanging out with Luis and Rob and most of my other friends, however, has led me to conclude that I'm actually a bubbly, insane maniac when I'm within a certain comfort zone. I think dating someone who's actually faster than I am would end up exhausting me, as I'd feel a perverse need to keep up.

Anyone who's kept up with the blog the last few months will probably know that I've been experiencing something akin to crushing loneliness for a while - insomuch as my Chinese cyborg heart can experience emotions like crushing loneliness or existentialist angst. Actually, it occurs to me that even when I blog about my depression people probably don't know that I am, as I tend to approach topics like that from a very sidelong, oblique angle before slitting their throats with a verbal dagger. Assassinating all forms of emotional expression tends to make it difficult for other people to recognize the signs. Nevertheless, visible or not, this has been the case, and it's only fairly recently that I've found myself pulling out of it. It'd been happening for some weeks now, but I think the process really only became noticeable on Saturday night, when I looked at Dusty and Luis and realized that although I was a teeny bit jealous of what they have (or apparently have), it no longer felt even remotely like someone was taking a corkscrew to my chest. It probably helped that I genuinely like Dusty, but I also think a huge part of it has its basis in an e-mail that Myia wrote me about finding peace within myself before trying to find my balance with another person. Myia always seems to know exactly what I need to hear.

Ayway, what's interesting is that this upswing seemed to hit its stride last night as I was walking home from my date. I realized that even if the date had really gone somewhere...I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted it to go any further. After months of wishing I could share my life with someone, I suddenly discovered that I didn't really have any strong desire to do so anymore. I suddenly felt much more invested in finishing up projects that I'd started, books that I've been meaning to read, shows that I still haven't watched. Talk about fickle, right? Weird that it should happen almost immediately after going out on a date with someone that, on paper, should've been great for me. I'm always reminded here of what an astrology book said about Libras, about how we swing manically around a centerline of balance before finally achieving it. I've been making some pretty huge oscillations lately, and I guess I'm now hitting the opposite end of the scale I've been riding for the past few months.

It's funny, but I actually tossed off a few messages to some people I found interesting on OKCupid when I got home. Why should I do this if I've just decided that I wanted to work on finding my own peace for a while? In some ways, it's the perfect time. I'm arguably at my most emotionally rational, so I'm more likely to judge a person based upon his actual merits and our real chemistry rather than falling prey to any romantic notions I might be entertaining about splicing my soul together with somebody else's. As I said earlier, I'm already far less invested in the notion, so if nothing comes out of it, well, no big deal. Life continues on my own terms, insomuch as it can be on my own terms. Arguably, the most perfect time would be when I've finally hit that balanced center, but I think I have quite a bit of maturing to do before I get there, and relating to other people is necessary for that process.

This comes back to something else I'd been thinking about for a while. For some reason, Rob reading Lucifer has renewed my conviction in certain themes that it explores, at least as far as they pertain to me. Being myself. Finding own my path based upon my own will, and not what anyone else expects or wants of me. Being a star in my own right, rather than waiting for someone else to shed their light upon my nighttime skies. I wrote about it in a very grandiose and very drunk fashion on Saturday night, but I think the healthiest thing for me right now might be a return to focusing on what I can do with my own life rather than concerning myself with what someone else might be able to add to it. I've tried, and tried hard, for a year and a half with mixed success. Being in a relationship has never been far from my mind during that time, but maybe it's time I break the ruby and reclaim my power for a while. Find out if I can really own my positive attributes and accept - truly accept - that I'm the fantastic catch all my friends insist I am.

On obscure universities

2009-04-08T18:05:00.001-04:00

I probably ought to be fair in this: the Florida Atlantic University (topic of today's Wikipedia entry of the day) is hardly a small university. It's at least half the size of Virginia Tech - the largest university in Virginia - has no less than six satellite campuses, and was the first public university to open in Florida. I'd just given it no consideration up to this point, which in my egocentric sort of way makes it an obscure little place in Boca that nobody really gives two shakes of a donkey's butt about. I hope I've just offended everyone who has gone, goes, or is planning to go to Florida Atlantic.

Slightly tangentially, as these blogs tend to go, when I was looking for potential theatre schools, I gave some thought to Florida State, which is said to have a pretty terrific theatre program. I can't remember precisely why I chose not to apply - I think it was because the program offered only an MFA in theatre, which would've been a pretty weird thing to shift into coming from engineering like I was. In retrospect, I think I probably should have given them my information anyway and seen what happened. I mean, what's the worst that could have happened? I could've gotten turned down, I suppose, but I got turned down by NCSA and SUNY Purchase, so that hardly would've been traumatizing. As an aside, it was probably a good thing I got turned down from NCSA and SUNY Purchase, 'cause both of those schools were FUCKING expensive. Even if I was, somehow, able to afford four years of acting school at over 40 grand a year, it would have locked me into the profession out of a feeling of sheer investment. I wouldn't even be able to contemplate going back to grad school for something else, like I'm doing now.

Anyway, at least part of the reason I chose not to apply to Florida State was because I figured I had no chance of getting in, but I think it's argument-worthy whether or not that was actually true. I got into AADA, after all. I had a much more self-defeatist attitude before I came to New York, more of this feeling that if there was a good chance I wouldn't succeed, then I shouldn't even try. Lucifer's quote in "Inferno" comes to mind: "Because I might lose? Funny reason for turning down a duel." It derives from being generally successful at things that really mattered to me as I was growing up, and from a self-inflated notion of my own intelligence. I hated it when I failed at anything, hated when I made any mistakes, and as a result I either didn't care about things that I wasn't good at (like sports), or simply didn't undertake them.

It's always interesting when I look back on the person that I was, as compared to the person that I am now. Age and experience will do that to a person, which I guess is a better gift than than just liver spots and severe incontinence. I barely recognize myself from just two years ago, much less five or ten. Going to acting school, working full-time and living completely on my own, and seriously dating people have all left their mark and exacted their toll. I wonder if I could honestly say I'm a better person. Wiser, perhaps, but does wisdom necessarily indicate improvement?

I don't really feel like going into that right now. How the devil did I go from Florida Atlantic University into a discussion of my personal failings? Ha, well, this IS my blog, so it's pretty much inevitable that everything discussed will inevitably circle back around to how it relates to my life. Narcissism is par for the course when you're maintaining an online blog, I think.

(As another aside, which we all know I do dearly adore, I think I'm getting less witty and less funny with my blogs as my days drag on. I blame it on Dead Rising and the late hours I've been staying up trying to keep the motherfucking useless retards scattered around the mall alive long enough to shove them into the "secure" security room, where they can drive each other insane with their incessant whining and demands for attention. Carlito was right - that place is hell, and not because of the zombie infestation.)

On REALLY scenic routes

2009-04-07T16:56:00.003-04:00

Huh. I totally forgot to put up a blog yesterday, but it kind of looks like Wikipedia forgot as well, because the last entry there is still describing Utah State Route 128 in all its magnificent glory. Anyway, today's topic is the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition, the (somewhat ill-fated) last Antarctic expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

I have to admit that I'm fairly impressed by that title - the Heroic Age. It sounds very epic, almost high fantasy, very much "The Heroic Age of Man," wherein we bested the Beast of Blacksmoore, defeated the great dragon Glauringfang, felled the Fell Hordes of Eventower, and were general badasses overall. Of course, the beasts, dragons, and fell hordes involved in this particular Age were dangerous seas, abominable cold, starvation, disease, and Murphy's Law, but those are arguably more dangerous and harder to overcome than any smoke-belching dragon.

Explorers as a group tend to interest me. I don't think I was born with the gene that gives you a thrill every time you come across some unexplored tract of land or mysterious delve in the forest. I'm pretty mundane when it comes to that sort of thing - I can appreciate them, but, as with most people, the notion of hacking my way through a bug-infested swamp or sub-zero arctic wasteland purely for the sake of piercing that veil of the unknown...doesn't really appeal to me. My tastes for delving into the mysterious tend to be much more academic, I guess - scientific as opposed to geographical. It's all linked, of course - explorers turn out new things for scientists to puzzle over, and scientists then apply that knowledge to expand our horizons of understanding, coming up with ways for explorers to go further and further into that mysterious, misty horizon at the edges of human experience. My spirit of adventure tends to be limited to industrialized countries with running water and internet access, and I note this fact with a certain amount of disappointment in myself. I look at my friends who have been enterprising in their travels, gone to places like Peru or Malaysia, and while part of me thinks that would be a fantastic experience, a part of me also thinks I'd probably get whacked over the head with a big stick, raped, and shoved into a ditch somewhere (not necessarily in that order?) I guess that's true of everyone - the difference is whether you're willing to step outside your comfort zones and take a chance and dive into something new. Then again, I could probably make the same argument for taking a trip to a Pentecostal church in Bible Belt or going to an S&M party in the heart of Chelsea (how's THAT for a broad spectrum), but that would make me deliberately obtuse.

I think...maybe before I start going back to school next year, maybe I'll take the chance to do some traveling. Maybe even some unplanned traveling, like Adam did in Europe. Just buy a ticket to France, buy another ticket back from London maybe two months later, pack a few books and supplies and maps, and see where I end up. I've been making a slow trek from introversion toward extroversion the past couple of years, so talking to new people as I go might not be the horrifying, slimy, slug-like monstrosity that it currently looks like. (AUGH! SLUG BEAST! GIANT SLUG BEAST! WITH WINGS!) Assuming I don't end up in the Hostel of No Return, of course. Apparently, Eastern European people particularly like Asian people for that sort of thing. Man, I should never have watched that damn movie.

I'm making a mental note of this blog, and of the fact that I'm telling myself I might do such a thing. We'll see how I stand with my semi-resolutions come next summer. Maybe I'll talk Luis and Rob into a road trip first.

On scenic routes

2009-04-05T23:37:00.002-04:00

Today's Wikipedia entry is about as banal as you can get. Utah State Route 128. Wow. They couldn't have even given me a state route with a little mystique, a little mystery, a little hint of danger or some social standing that I could comment on, like a highway in California or some scenic route in the upper reaches of Oregon. I'd even have accepted Mississippi or Alabama, just for the opportunity to commentate on the combination of old American mystique and prejudices that run thicker than blood along the vein-like roads of the Deep South. But no, it has to be a highway in bloody Utah, which is an entire state that I know almost nothing about, excepting possibly that it's mostly a lot of arid plans and long stretches of very flat desert. Oh, and it has Mormons in it.

I suppose I could go into a discussion of my opinions on Mormons, but truthfully I don't know very much about them either, excepting only this very odd cartoon on Youtube - apparently from the 80's or so - warning people against the Mormons. This particular cartoon, however, painted the Mormon religion in a very...eccentric light. I can't remember a great deal of it, but it claimed that Mormons believe Elohim (a.k.a. God) travels around to inhabited planets, elevates their people to divinity through the Holy Word, and then fathers other deities with said inhabitants of those planets. His children then go to other inhabited planets to continue the cycle. Apparently, the reason that things are so bad here is because Jesus and Lucifer, both children of God, ended up getting into a war over who was to have dominion of Earth and the right to elevate the people of Earth into divinity. This war is apparently still ongoing, and sort of casts the division between God and the Devil as a disagreement over property rights.

Needless to say, I thought that the cartoon either misunderstood or misrepresented the Mormon faith in a pretty spectacular sort of way, but my friend TJ, who was born in Salt Lake City, assured me that Mormons have some pretty far out beliefs, and that the cartoon was't really as satirical as it may have initially appeared. Which sort of made me go, "Oooooooookaaaaayyyy..." I suppose I could just pick up the Book of Mormon and made my own judgments, but reading holy texts tends to make my head hurt. I could convince myself that I'm just reading a piece of mythology, but I know that there are people out there who can and do take the most literal interpretation possible of what I'm reading, and when I read something like Genesis and think about that, it kind of makes me want to lose all faith in human rationality.

Hmmmm...I'm feeling oddly muffle-headed today, like my brain were wrapped tightly in a warm, damp towel and I can't quite bring the force of it to bear. I don't think I got quite enough sleep, and I think I'm actually a teeny big hung over as well, which never does my writing any good. I'm going to call it a day for now and hope that my brain is more limber tomorrow.

On lanterns

2009-04-04T23:20:00.002-04:00

Okay, so I took a break from my project for today, primarily because I was rushing around like a headless chicken all through today. Rob and Luis and Dusty and Kevin and Erin and Jason and arrgh so many people were all coming tonight for a big dinner gala thing, and I woke up about two hours after I'd intended to wake up, and so I had to do yoga, do my laundry, go food shopping, get a haircut, and cook a Chinese dish all within a four hour period. It's a testimony to my time management skills in a crunch that I actually managed to get everything done except for the yoga, which I shrug and will do tomorrow after (or perhaps before) I get my tattoo consultation.

Oh, by the way, I'm getting a tattoo. Or at least a consultation, which will be happening tomorrow afternoon. Odds are good that Luis will be asleep both before and after I come back from the consultation. He does that. It's worth mentioning here that I'm disappointed Rob and Dusty chose not to stay. I was looking forward to video games - especially Metroid Handing Rob while he was playing Dead Space - and I was REALLY looking forward to Resident Evil 5 co-op mode. (*SIGH*)

It's also worth mentioning, however, that I had a really terrific time tonight. Amazingly terrific. The sort of night that only happens, can only happen once every few months, if not every year, and which I genuinely wish I could rewind and play over again just so I could do it all over again. We all know what that's like.

I kind of wanted to toss into this blog before I go to bed, however, that in light of my new intention to start dating again, despite the fact that this seems to be a relatively bad time, given the fact that within the next week Musicals Tonight starts up again, after which I'm going to be going to Spain for two weeks...wait, that was a total run-on sentence. I've had three glasses of wine and three glasses of vodka - I'm allowing a certain freedom in grammatical structure for myself when I'm tipsy. The key point I want to express at this point is that...I'm done settling. Done chasing after other people. Done expecting and hoping and waiting for a train that just don't come. I will borrow light from no one. Taking a page from one of the most interesting characters I've read about in a while, I will shine by my own light. I shall be a star, not a moon or planet, and I cast my light upon my own path. There is nothing in mere loneliness or emptiness that will daunt me, and I will not be afraid of anything that may rise from the road to greet me.

I've decided that my fulfillment will not be contingent on anyone's will but my own. Just as my decisions are my own. Just as I am not my hopes, nor my dreams, but only the sum of my own decisions.

I will be absolute, be myself, until I bleed. Regardless of how much that may hurt sometimes.

On the cruelty of the hunt

2009-04-03T18:12:00.005-04:00

Today's topic on Wikipedia is hare coursing - admittedly something I know very little about, but which nevertheless I was ready to leap to an opinion on without learning any more about it. See, even diplomatic, intelligent guys like me aren't immune to judgmental nosedives. I was ready to immediately proclaim that hare coursing - like the pack hunting practiced for sport in England until very recently - is immoral and cruel to animals. Upon reading the entry, however, although I'm still rather inclined against the sport, I'm reevaluating certain aspects of my hangups against hunting (in real-time, no less!)

According to Wikipedia, hare coursing now generally uses sight hounds - hounds that rely on sight and speed to catch the hare - as opposed to scent hounds, which (you guessed it!) rely on scent. It also uses a pair of dogs, as opposed to a pack of them. Why is this an interesting distinction? Because it gives the hare a fair chance, so to speak. If the hounds are fast enough and keen enough to catch the hare, then they've caught the hare. If the hare is faster than the hounds, then it runs away, no harm, no foul. This is in contrast to scent hound haring because the pack of hounds inevitably out-lasts the fox, hare, or whatever animal is being chased and tears it to pieces.

The reason I'm slightly less inclined to condemn this form of hare coursing outright is because it doesn't seem overly different from what happens in nature. The hares caught in hare coursing are used for food, not tossed away, and they're given a reasonable head start. If I came across a wild dog in a forest, saw it chase after a hare and then catch it and eat it, I'm certainly not going to condemn that as being particularly cruel. Is this necessarily so different because we have the capacity to pamper our pets and feed them canned dog food? If I owned a large patch of woodland and chose to supplement my dog's diet with rabbits that they caught themselves, is that animal cruelty?

I guess it would be the competitive aspect of the game that makes it so unpalatable. The notion that there are people in the stands, cheering for the dogs to catch the rabbit and tear it to pieces. Somehow, I'd managed to miss that completely - maybe because the whole notion of a crowd cheering for something to kill something else feels so...totally alien to me. For some reason, the fact that there are spectators at this event evaded me. Now that - that fills me with complete distaste. I'm sure some of those people are cheering because they're enamored with this notion of mastery, of their well-bred dogs overtaking the wild. For them, I'm guessing the hunt is symbolic, a metaphor of man, or perhaps civilization, with our well-trained and well-bred animals, revealing its mastery over the natural world. In that fashion, in the way that the dog breeders take pride in their animals, I'm supposing that it's a matter of honor, however much my own notion of honor might rebel against hunting a relatively defenseless rabbit.

But then there are the other people, the ones who are there for the blood and the kill. Those people who watch cockfights or dogfights and find them exciting rather than massively upsetting. I wonder how excited they would be if someone stuck them into a national park and sic'ced a pair of hungry wolves on them, or gave them a board with a rusty nail in it and threw them into an arena.

Yeah, if it's not obvious, I find that pretty abhorrent.

So in conclusion, I wind right back to where I started. Hare coursing? Not so much. Get your kicks somewhere else.

On membrane inflammation

2009-04-02T19:15:00.001-04:00

Today's topic is right up my alley. That's right, we're talking about an inflammation of the meninges. Ohhhh yeah! Sexy! Go go meningitis! I think that I ought to start a super sentai team based entirely upon cerebrospinal disorders. Meningitis, inflame! Scoliosis, bend! Encephalitis, swell! Multiple sclerosis, cannibalize! Alzheimer's, forget! And together we form, PERSISTENT VEGETATIVE STATE!

Anyone reading this blog for the first time undoubtedly thinks that I'm a horrible, horrible person. And he's right. He's so, so right.

Actually, there's not a great deal that meningitis prompts me to say. I suppose I could go deeply into what I think are the problems with the American health care system, one of the worst actually being a seemingly complete disregard by the average American for their own fitness and well-being, which is symptomatic of an increasing trend toward diverting responsibility from ourselves and onto whatever convenient scapegoat may be available. Yeah, I'm pretty disgusted at the fact that an ENORMOUS amount of our health care spending is toward disorders and diseases caused by, to put it simply, BAD HEALTH DECISIONS! Smoke a pack a day for twenty years? Guess what - you're probably going to get lung cancer. Eat nothing but MacDonalds food and never exercise? I can pretty much guarantee you're going to end up with a whole slew of heart-related issues. And I find it kind of hard to sympathize when that sort of thing happens. It's like asking me to feel sympathy for someone who, after being told repeatedly that walking over a bed of hot coals is going to get them burned, does it anyway and then complains about third-degree burns on their feet. Just because the burns in this case take place twenty or thirty years later doesn't really make the person any less responsible for their own injuries.

Our health care system definitely has its problems, but so much of the strain on that system comes from a mentality of entitlement, that we can do whatever we want to ourselves and that it's somehow the medical community's responsibility to pick up the pieces when our bodies start rebelling against us. I'm not saying everyone ought to be a complete health and fitness freak, but come on people. It's really not that hard to eat healthier foods, go with the burgers and the fries just once every week or two, and take a brisk walk in the evenings. Doesn't sound like too much, but just that little change in behavioral patterns can reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer by a tremendous amount.

Ugh. Okay, I'm off my soapbox now. This just happens to be a certain point of soreness with me. And I guess I lied - I did have a fair bit to say about meningitis after all.

On serious wtf moments

2009-04-01T22:41:00.002-04:00

So I just saw the trailer for "Dragonball: Evolution" and the only thing I can think right is...what the FUCK were they smoking? What brainiac had the brilliant idea to turn one of the longest-running piece of Japanese anime, widely criticized for combining INCREDIBLY slow storytelling with RIDICULOUS action, into a live-action film? And how the FUCK did Justin Chatwin end up as Goku and Emmy freaking Rossum get cast as Bulma?!

The truly sad part is...the movie actually looks quarter-way decent, in a generic special-effects laden not-quite martial arts cheap brainless entertainment sort of way. Kind of like Mortal Kombat, but even more inane.

Words fail me right now. I'm not sure if the notion has jumped through subspace and traversed the entire spectrum of insanity to end up in some weird dimension of the potentially watchable, or whether we're witnessing an epic new chapter in the history of film-making bowel movements. Every portion of me is screaming that it's almost definitely going to be the latter, but the trailer actually looks interesting enough (for a Western-copy-of-Eastern-sort-of-mysticism-but-not-really martial arts action movie) that I'm allowing a tiny smidgen of hope that it might actually end up being the former.

Oh, but I AM grossly offended that they cast Caucasian actors as Goku and Bulma. I mean, really? People, come on. This is RIDICULOUS. There are plenty of decent Asian actors out there, and Justin Chatwin and Emmy Rossum hardly even offer marquee value. Are we really still in a place where we're so afraid of having minorities play the leads that we have to substitute in Caucasian actors in a freaking anime re-make?

I could probably talk more intelligently on this topic, but I'm still a little busy picking my jaw up off the floor. Oh, and I need to go do my P90X exercises. So I think I'll be addressing this a little later, after I've had some time to mull it through.

On really bad art

2009-04-01T14:14:00.002-04:00

And not just any bad art - art bad enough that they wrap around the sphere of aesthetic integrity into masterpiece territory, and yet not so bad as to dive right back into the realm of trashy art. The topic for today is the MOBA - the Museum of Bad Art in Boston, Massachusetts - dedicated toward displaying the finest pieces of horrendous muck fished out of refuse piles all over the city. Browsing through the Wikipedia entry, I got a glimpse of a few of them and...let's just say one of the more arresting paintings looks like Andrew Jackson in a blue sun dress and saggy breasts, standing in a field of daisies against a vomit-yellow sky, an otherwise unremarkable blue chair glued to his ass. The title of the painting is "Lucy in a Field of Daisies," but it seriously looks like Andrew Jackson with a unibrow. The painting is so unintentionally hilarious that to intentionally achieve such a feat would take a comic of genius proportions.

I have to admit that I've taken quite a liking to a lot of pieces I saw. Depending on the cost, I would definitely purchase a piece or two of the slightly less gaudy ones and hang them on my living room wall. Or maybe I'd take the slightly more gaudy ones as well. I have a certain fondness for farce, for poking fun at otherwise serious institutions, and in a more serious way, for deconstruction. I don't really want to get into a whole thing about the definition of art, and what "good" art is - that's a dog chasing its own tail when it doesn't even know what to do with it once it's caught it. I do think, however, that there's great value in anything that can bring a little laughter into the world. I am exactly the type of person who would put up the most ridiculous, awful drivel up onto my walls for no other reason than to provoke a response from guests as they arrive. I like thought-provoking, spiritually dense, soaring pieces of art and music and writing well enough, but the notion of introducing a tacky piece of shit after a long train of beautiful works just tickles my fancy to no end. It's like serving jello after a meal of caviar and filet mignon.

My brain isn't functioning quite as well today - I think owing in part to not sleeping well last night - so I'm going to cut myself short, but I think the ultimate point I'd like to make for now is that I'm actually an incredibly tacky person. I have a fairly good sensibility for aesthetics when I want it, but I'm ultimately most drawn to anything with a high cheese-factor. It seems to be the most appropriate response I can find to an absurd universe.

On main sequence inferiority

2009-03-31T17:23:00.002-04:00

The topic of the day is main sequence stars, referring to stars that appear in a certain band on diagrams that plot stellar luminosity against stellar color (the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram being the most commonly used of these). Anyone who took even a cursory interest in astronomy back in their high school / middle school days will know that the vast majority of stars in our sky at any given time are main sequence stars, and that all stars spend the majority of their lives in the main sequence. Our sun is a main sequence star, and it will remain there for roughly another five billion years, which is when it will go red giant and most likely swallow up the four inner planets.

I do have to say here that I've always been (rather irrationally) a bit disappointed that our sun is "merely" a yellow dwarf. While the fact that it will eventually become a red giant assuaged my feelings a little, I've always been a bit saddened that the sun will eventually dwindle into a white dwarf and, in some hoary far-flung future, die that truly final death - the death with no further shore - in becoming a cold, invisible black dwarf. When I was much younger, I was tantalized by stories of those hot, bright, massive stars that would expand into the red and blue supergiants, the stellar heavyweights of the cosmos. I felt like they were the cool kids of the galaxy, the ones who would eventually explode in a unimaginable cataclysm of fire and light before collapsing - coming into their own, really - into even more fantastic stellar objects. Even among these upper crust members of sidereal society, however, there was a degree of stratification. The ones that became neutron stars were all well and good, like the kids who achieved success but still looked wistfully out at the things they might have wanted to achieve. The truly rare ones, however - those annoying kids that were good looking and smart and came from well-to-do families and whom you couldn't even hate because they were just that likable - they collapsed into the fabled black holes. Ah, the black hole. The ultimate celestial object. How often I wished that our own sun would somehow surpass its own physical limitations - leapfrog, as it were, through sheer force of will to become a blue supergiant even though everyone thought it would never amount to anything more than a red giant. "Look at me!" it would say, "I did it! You all thought I couldn't, but with just a little perseverance and hard work, I did it!" And then it would go supernova and collapse into a black hole and live happily ever after.

Yes, I just turned the universe into a bad 1980's family movie.

More realistically, it's a good thing that our sun is a yellow dwarf. Anything more and the Earth would probably wouldn't even be a barren ball of iron and rock, much less a staging ground for intelligent life. Going on with the metaphor, although the sun is quite plain by astronomical standards, it's very mild-mannered and nurturing - average, perhaps a little boring, but ultimately stable in the long-term. The supergiants might be the celebrities and rock stars of the universe, but they also live brief, tumultuous lives filled with violence, ending up as mere flickers of their former selves or as hungry, all-consuming vortices of endless need and ultimate destructiveness. The sort of lives that stars like the sun look at and go, "Oh my. I'm sure glad I'm not a giant hungry tear in space-time."

So as I grow more mature, I become more cognizant of what a blessing it is that our sun is "merely" a main sequence yellow dwarf. Being one of the cool kids isn't always what it's cracked up to be.

And I just totally grabbed that metaphor and jumped ship with it to Tahiti.

On ox carts and the Mississippi River

2009-03-30T18:44:00.003-04:00

In an attempt to move my blog away from incessant whining about boys, I've decided to try something remarkably daring (at least for me.) I'm going to address the daily featured article on Wikipedia, whatever it may be, and see where my rambling thoughts on the article may take me. Some place witty and fancy, I hope, but I think it's going to end up remarkably masturbatory. Then again, this IS a personal blog we're talking about - these things are almost all about pleasuring yourself in one way or another.

So today's topic is...the Red River Trails. Ooooooookay. Already I can tell that time and fate and the cosmos at large are ready to do a big BM all over this pet project. On a random tangent - people often say that it's arrogant to consider that time and fate and the cosmos at large are at all concerned about us. We are, after all, less than blips on the radar when you consider the universe at large - spatially, temporally, and influentially, we teeter right at the edge of being a complete null sum. I, however, like to think that concepts and influences as large as time and fate and the cosmos at large have no choice but to be concerned with the very small AS WELL as the very grand in scale. As with God, only the truly grand can ascribe an importance to the very tiny that matches the importance of the unimaginably astronomical.

I'm not sure I communicated that concept very clearly, but I don't particularly want to go into it right now. Maybe I'll attempt to refine my argument at a later date.

Anyway, the Red River Trails. According to the glance I had off Wikipedia, they were a series of ox-cart routes that extended from what is now Winnipeg down to areas of Minnesota and North Dakota. I know nothing about them, and...that fact does not fill me with chagrin. People close to me will know that I had almost no interest in social studies back in school - I was only vaguely interested in geography and the only kind of history I liked was ancient history. Something about the far-flung pharaohs of Egypt, the antediluvian gods of Mesopotamia, and (yes) the cruel mysticism of China held an air of mystery, of mythology, and the of the exotic that, I do confess, the ox-cart routes of the Mississippi rather fails to achieve. In fact, American history generally seems so...banal...to me that despite my best efforts I could never develop more than a cursory interest in it. Mind you, I've wanted to become interested in it - for someone like me, not knowing very much about American history has been a constant gall. Summoning up the will to actually learn anything about it always feels like the thirteenth labor of Heracles, however. (Ha! You shall not redeem yourself, Heracles, until you can tell me the exact dates and locations of major battles during the Civil War, and who won each one!)

That said, I actually browsed through a book called "A People's History of the United States" during the run of "Wild Party" maybe a year ago and found it fascinating. I never quite got back to it after the run ended, but I HAVE been on sort of a nonfiction kick lately. Maybe this would be the perfect time to pick up that book again and pound some modern history into my rebellious skull.

I teeter between vaguely excited by the notion, and that feeling you might get if you realized you have to spend the next week cleaning up a men's lavatory in a major high-security prison with your own toothbrush. And then actually use that toothbrush afterward. Maybe I'll get through some other books before I get to expanding my history.

Like War and Peace, for example.

(Only one person will actually understand the meaning behind that last one, and only for him with it have the full impact that it's meant to.)

On revisited themes

2009-03-28T06:34:00.006-04:00

I wrote some poems lately, which I will now post.

Desire
Moonlight whispers toward the midnight shadows
And silence roars like endless rolling waves.
Heartbeats thrum in cloistered darkness, waiting,
Tumbling into fireflies' graves.

Desire, desire, the spider-catching web.
Sparrow swallowing the hurricane.
Sunbeams sing toward shadow-shrouded moon face.
Sieves raise high to catch the evening rain.

Fires scream through frozen night-drenched hollows.
Snow flakes blossom thick on desert sands.
Ashes fall on springtime seas of roses.
Soft caresses touch indifferent hands.

Desire, desire, the sun-consuming flame.
Kings bowed low beneath the twisting wrack
Yet still might find an easier smile than mine
As I look into your eyes and only see your back.

**********
Perspective
The garden of my heart I water
With a rain of spite,
And let the fruiting trees of malice sink their roots and grow.
Churning envy, buried rage, and
Pride are all my seeds,
And black despairing days shall be the future that I sow.

Pain and sorrow, lonely nights,
Companion paths I stride.
N'er shall dawn come rose my skies;
Let grief stay at my side.

You fool and man-child, self-made martyr,
Slave to passions mean.
Why do you whip yourself with scourges of your own design?
Envy flees, and rage does die, and
Even pride will break.
And foolish seeming shall be things that once you did enshrine.

Pain and sorrow, lonely nights,
Shall dog your winding way.
But so too always dawn does turn
The night to golden day.

**********

I wrote those poems from very generally the same frame of mind, although I was feeling much more rhetorical and contemplative for the first, which is probably why it's so florid and purple. I like to think the slightly overdone descriptions actually help to heighten the impact of the last line, however. I may go back to revise it someday. I'm undecided as yet.

The second one I like considerably more, because I actually started writing it from a position of a little bit of pain, a little bit of despair, and a not inconsiderable need to destroy something large and memorable. I'd initially intended the theme of the first two stanzas to carry all the way through to the end. Writing it down, however, proved remarkably therapeutic, and after those two stanzas I found myself unwilling to continue it in the same vein, because I don't actually believe in what they say. The first two stanzas are so self-absorbed, so utterly emo that it HAD to elicit a proper response. And that response, I think, forms my penultimate position.

I really do worry too much about my writing. Considering that I've written almost no poetry in my literary life, I'm actually fairly pleased with how these two poems turned out. In my darker hours, writing is always there to help lift me out of whatever ridiculous rut I've entrenched myself into, and more often than not it satisfies even my critical eye.

On hindsight

2009-03-06T04:42:00.002-05:00

I was vaguely tempted to just delete that last blog I wrote, but decided against it. Keeping things like that will keep me honest as I write, I suppose, and anything I don't intend to leave up here just shouldn't be written in a public place at all.

But Christ, what a whiny emo piece of shit blog THAT was. You'd think my world was coming apart at the seams, when in fact the only thing that had happened was that someone didn't return my feelings. Oh wow. Big deal. As if that hasn't happened before.

If it's not obvious, I'm fine now. Fine and rather disgusted with myself. When did I turn into such a teenage girl? I'm inclined to say that if you can get over "heartbreak" in a span of just a few days, your heart probably wasn't broken. I would, in fact, be hard pressed to describe it as cracked, or even chipped. Maybe dented, or possibly scratched, would be more appropriate. Oh no. Someone scratched my heart. I must now fill my blog with purple metaphors and angst.

God, I never learn.

On the long, dark silence

2009-02-26T21:30:00.005-05:00

It's funny. I've always wondered what it would be like if I experienced heartbreak. In my classically asinine way, I thought it come in handy for my acting. You encounter the proverbial heartbreak all the time in fiction: you can read it in any number of books, see it in any number of movies and TV shows. People say that it feels like time is slowing down, and all you can do is just lie back on your bed, feeling the silence press down around you and the little shards working their way around the left side of your chest, watching the time crawl and wondering when or if you're going to start healing again. And all the while you're prodding the wound by thinking about him, because you can't help it. Which of course only makes it hurt more.

Yeah. It's like that.

It's helpful, in a way, that so much of my personality comes from my head, and that I'm so used to internalizing my emotions. A huge part of me is sort of standing to one side, looking at myself, and saying in a clinical, if vaguely fatherly, tone, "Yes, it hurts. You knew it would hurt, in fact. You accepted it as a part of life, because that's what you've learned from all your experiences thus far. But you're going to get through it, because you're far too genre-savvy not to. Heartbreak ends eventually, pain can only last so long, and one day you're going to smile and mean it again." I can distance myself from the hurt. I have experience at it. And I know what the cerebral part of me says is true.

Then there's the other part of me. The one that wants to huddle into a ball, scrape my fingers down my arms until the physical pain overwhelms the emotional one, and scream until it stops. The part that knows only how much it hurts right now, and knows that it's only going to get worse before it gets better, and is terrified because he's woefully unprepared to deal with it. That part is looking ahead and seeing this long march of endless months, in which he's trying to get used to this aching absence, and he kind of wants to bury himself in the back yard and never wake up again.

I'm vaguely disturbed that that part is referring to himself in the third person. I'm apparently either much better at distancing myself than I expected, or this is the beginning of some sort of funky sci-fi story where I get to play the tragic, damaged, yet horrendously powerful main villain. I kinda hope I get nifty psychic powers out of it. ULTRA DOUBLE MINORITY PSYCHIC CRUSH PEER PRESSURE ATTACK! Except I'm sort of lacking my partner for that. Which is the whole point of this post.

Well, I feel a little better. I think I'm going to try to adopt a stance where my self-esteem, sense of accomplishment as a human being, and general state of well-being doesn't depend upon whether or not I'm attached at the hip to another person. I'm aware that's easier said than done, and I think accomplishing that would probably require a certain insane megalomania on my part, but hey - all worthwhile endeavors require a little effort and sacrifice, right?

On things of an unreasonable nature

2009-02-14T22:37:00.005-05:00

Kevin (my roommate) had his birthday party last night and I drank entirely too much wine. In between passing out in (fortunately) my own bed and waking up to accidentally ogle Jason having sex in our living room (oops), I had the most peculiar dream. I dreamt that I was, appropriately enough, in my apartment with a party going on - I was in Kevin's room for whatever reason, and Luis was with me. I kissed him, once, and without a word he got up and walked away, leaving behind a folded sheet of green paper. Upon reading the paper, I realized that it was a letter I'd written to him, asking whether or not he'd ever considered getting back together with me. He'd written a lot of things in reply, but most of it was scribbled out and unreadable. At the very bottom were just two words: "No. Never."

That sort of ruined my day.

The funny thing is...getting back together with Luis isn't something I'd very seriously considered - consciously, at least, which is apparently the point. (Damn you, endless sea of the subconscious!) Mind you, knowing Luis has been one of the best things in my life. It has enriched my existence considerably and expanded my horizons in a fashion that I probably would never have accomplished on my own. It's weird to think that we've only known each other barely a year, because he's one of my closest friends, both in New York and outside of it, and I feel like we've been that way forever. When we were dating, I don't think I was emotionally mature enough to handle a relationship, and therefore being friends was the right thing to shift into. (For that matter, I'm not sure that I'm emotionally mature enough to handle a long-term relationship now, but that's a slightly different set of cows than the one we're haggling over now.) At any rate, it would truly have sucked if we'd pressed on with being boyfriends, only to have the relationship go sour and have to end things on a bad note. That was one of the considerations we had in deciding to be just friends, actually.

Further pressing the point is the fact that I actually have a tough time now associating Luis with romance. We click synchronously enough as friends that the notion of buying him flowers and writing him sappy cards just seems...kind of weird now.

So I don't know why that dream bothered me so much - it certainly cracked my reserve enough for Luis to notice this morning. Maybe it's because it's Valentine's Day, and we broke up around this time last year, so I'm naturally reminded of when we were "together". Maybe it's because to-date, the relationship I had with Luis still remains my longest-running and most successful, in a way making him the yardstick against which I automatically measure all my other dates. Maybe it's because of the existential crisis I've had recently, wherein I felt like I've lost my way professionally, and at this hallmark of Valentine's Day I'm feeling like my love life isn't faring any better. Maybe I'm just starved for affection.

Ugh. Sometimes I wish I weren't joking when I claim that Asian guys are heartless cyborgs.

On finding directions

2009-02-06T12:29:00.004-05:00

Why hello blog. Did you miss me? I have to admit - I didn't particularly miss you. Does the fact make me terrible, or the admission of it? It hardly matters. I can always come back and settle my head onto your electronic bosom and say all the things I want to say, and you will listen. Then, when I tire of that, I'll go away again without a second thought and you'll remain here, waiting for me. Ready for me to return. Patient, willing, perhaps even hopeful. From time to time I might think of you, but I'll never let it show, nor let it influence my actions. Until I need you again. Oh, the indifferent cruelty of men!

Things have actually been quite interesting the past few months. My desktop's been dead for the majority of that time, undoubtedly due to the rigors of moving to Brooklyn. Oh, yeah, that happened. I moved in with Kevin, in Brooklyn. It's been working out decently so far, but he keeps forgetting to do his dishes. Kevin and I have a good relationship, as far as roomies and friends go, but we're just...really, really different.

Anyway, in the interim, I've managed to do a jot of stage management, decide to go back to grad school for physical therapy, visit my cousins in Texas, and take a short trip back to China in order to visit my extended family. That was a hoot and a half, let me tell you. My relationship with my father remains as fascinating and worthy of analysis as ever, but it was made okay partially by the fact that I hadn't seen him in four years, partially by the fact that I'm just tired of standing across the canyon from him. I...I miss my dad, I guess, despite the fact that we see eye to eye on almost nothing. Despite the fact that I'm still kind of angry at him for abandoning his responsibilities so many years ago. Not just to me - that I could forgive fairly easily - but to Mom.

Anyway, they all gave me money, which never fails to make me guilty and feel like I'm the useless midnight sheep of the family, and the only thing that at all keeps me in my grandparents' good graces is the fact that I'm sole heir of the family name. I won't deny it was fucking helpful, though, because not working for nearly a month absolutely KILLED my bank account and fattened up my credit card. Oh, and hemorraging money like a major national bank probably didn't help me either...I really need to learn some bloody self control when it comes to buying shit.

Wow - this blog is turning out rather negatively. Sunshine, rainbows, pixie dust and unicorn wings. Grind, mix, stir, upload onto jumpdrive, inject into computer. There! Much better!

Actually, I'm in a fairly good place and a fairly good mood. I kind of feel like...for the first time in a long time, I have a sense of direction again. A lot of it depends on me getting off my fat, lazy, but admittedly sexy and deliciously bubble-like ass and actually making sure I can assemble a decent grad school application, but at least I sort of feel like I know where my life is headed again. Now if only my love life weren't still as murky as a the depths of the Loch Ness. I've actually, in psychotic desperation only slightly tempered by tongue-in-cheek amusement, taken to asking online magic 8 balls whether or not I'll ever find someone to love, and who will love me back. (Note the necessity of presence, followed by reciprocity). That's right - not even standard magic 8 balls. ONLINE magic 8 balls. That's a degree of patheticness even I, in all my verbal magnificence, find difficult to express in words. On a tangent, I think I'm one of the few people I know who can be so unbelievably arrogant and utterly self-critical at the same time.

Wow. That kind of hopped off-topic for a bit.

Anyway, things are good. Generally. Sorta. Okay, at least they're not BAD, okay? Shut up. I'm going away now.

On insidiously changing courses

2008-11-29T03:39:00.002-05:00

My mother tells me that my father chose my name mostly for the way it looks. This may be a difficult concept for Westerners to fully understand, accustomed as we are to a phonetic alphabet that places less emphasis on aesthetic appearance, but in China, with our pictographic characters, the notion is more common than naming a child after his grandparents.

My name in Chinese consists of three characters - my family name (Zhang), and the two characters of my given name (Ying, and Zhi). Of the two in my given name, Ying is arguably the prettier. It's a character of interesting complexity, stitched together using five simpler words, and at sixteen strokes to complete is one of the "longer" characters in common usage. It's a weighty word, a dense word both to look at and to contemplate, meaning roughly "to win," and in this manner it assumes a certain prestige as well. Its appearance brings to mind lofty towers and pagodas, places at once of wealth and contemplation, worthy of both great consideration and great respect.

The other character in my name, Zhi, is startling by sheer contrast. Weighing in at a mere two strokes, it's one of the LEAST complex words in the Chinese language. Where Ying has density and weight, a sense of stolid purpose, Zhi is airy and meandering, like the path a leaf might make as it drifts to earth upon swirling eddies. The word is, for lack of a better term, a preposition, in certain phrases may also be used in a form approximated by the word "which," and by itself very roughly translates into, "everything." It is thus, in its own way, both extremely powerful and extremely flexible - something belied by its simple appearance.

I don't know if my father had all this in mind when he picked those words - the peculiar balance between weight and weightlessness, between grounded solidarity and meandering flexibility, between having purpose and seeking it, and between two words that, at a glance, sit at opposite poles. I certainly doubt he thought that my personality and my life would become defined, in its way, by these dual modes, this peculiar balance between active participation and passive observation. It's not hard, however to infer what he wanted: the combination of the two words becomes a phrase that roughly translates into "Conqueror of All." Whatever ambitions he may have had for his own life, what he had for mine is obvious.

To my father's eternal dismay, I haven't been nearly as ambitious as he would have liked. I wonder how many children really are. Although it was arguably ambitious to decide on medicine as a career, I suspect that was just a way I sought to win his approval, and through it a certain sense of pride for myself as well. At some point in high school, rather typically, I guess I decided that my sense of self-worth wasn't dependent upon my parents' approval. Since then, even though I was very firm about my decision to go into acting, I think my life has actually followed a meandering sort of path. Even when I thought I had a set destination, I was really just following where unseen currents were pushing me. The search for meaning in a possibly absurd universe is like that, I suppose.

And now, now I'm finding myself directionless for the first time. I'm no longer sure that acting is for me, but I don't know that I want to go back to engineering either. Worse still, I'm not even sure that writing is necessarily my future, despite its ubiquitous presence in my life up to this point. This lack of focus is starting to taint all the other aspects of my life, and it's driving me to distraction. We'll note here that even my writing is losing its natural spark, that shimmering sheen of sly, understated humor that makes it such a pleasure for everyone to read.

I feel like I'm standing at a crossroads, and every part of my life is on hold until I can decide which fork I want to take. A pessimist would argue that it doesn't really matter - they all lead to the same place in the end, right? That's true enough, but some roads are arguably more scenic and interesting than others, and I'd like to be able to look back on my meandering path through Destiny's garden and claim that I lived a life worth the prodigious gifts given to me. I'm actually only half-joking there. If I weren't so damn smart, I'd probably be happy doing menial labor for the rest of my life. I think I'd be fine with whatever the world puts right in front of me, and even if I weren't fine I certainly wouldn't be inclined to examine it too closely. Or from too great a distance, rather, as I reconcile my sense of self-worth with the notion that there may not be a big picture after all. Unfortunately, I AM a goddamn borderline genius, and with that intelligence comes the certainty that I'm meant to do more with my life. And also the nagging fear that I might be smart enough to recognize the problem, but not smart enough to really do anything worthwhile about it.

Ha. I guess I do have that ambition after all. I'd like to make a lasting impact, intellectual and emotional, on people. On numerous people. Millions, in fact. I just don't know that I'm smart or creative or talented enough to do so. I think I am, in fact, afraid to even really try.

Aha! And here we discover the true nature of this existential crisis I've been having for the past month or so, and, with the aid of much self-indulgent whining, decide to do something about it. Although I feel like we've visited this topic before...you'd think it would get tedious by now, these iterations of my inanity.

On a dearth of amenities

2008-11-24T16:21:00.002-05:00

I've made no mention of the fact, but my computer abruptly died about a month ago, which has contributed a great deal not only to my recent absence of posts, but also to my inability to finish uploading the rest of my travelogue and the pictures I took while in Venice.

You'd think that I'd be in a rush to get my computer repaired as soon as possible, as losing the use of the computer, for a technology nerd like me, is somewhat akin to getting my right arm cut off. Well, as it turns out, losing this particular computer is less like losing a limb and more like losing my left testicle. It was exceedingly painful at the time, but over the course of a few weeks it's become more of an annoyance than a real handicap. I haven't been able to watch my Naruto, so downloading a whole host of them when I finally do get my computer back up will be sort of irritating. I also haven't been able to write via computer, but I have no lack of paper or use of my hands. Other than those, it hasn't been as utterly agonizing as one would imagine.

Of course, it helps that I can sort of steal Kevin's computer for use at any given time, and that I have a certain degree of computer access at work. Even so, I'm finding it quite refreshing to learn that I'm not as utterly dependent upon my computer as I led myself to believe some years ago. It's almost like discovering my moorings have been cut, but rather than panicking at being castaway I'm enjoying the freedom of being able to sail away.

I take an aside to note that a life-and-death sailing metaphor is probably not entirely appropriate for a computer mishap.

Anyway, I'll probably endeavor to enact repairs at some point, but I'm finding it increasingly likely that I'll just assemble a new one. This old computer was about five years old, which any geek can tell you is positively ancient by computing standards, and with the release of Intel's new Core i7 I'm finding a certain amount of glee at the proposition of a computing powerhouse with six gigs of memory.

That's right, gentlemen. We can rebuild him. Faster, stronger, smarter. We have this capability.

Just maybe not QUITE the money right now.

On bittersweet moments

2008-11-05T17:44:00.004-05:00

I imagine there are a gazillion of these out there, but I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and express the sheer elation I felt last night when I realized that Barack Obama had won the presidency. I had just gotten out of dinner with some friends and was making my way toward a friend's bar when I heard the cheers ringing up and down the streets, the cars honking their horns, the music suddenly blaring from open windows, and I felt a surge of sheer joy like nothing I've experienced in months. Possibly years. XES was utterly packed when I went inside, and although crowds like that usually make me intensely uncomfortable I felt utterly at home, bathed in the electrifying sense of enthusiasm and optimism. Hope. I've never cheered for something as much or as loudly as I did when Obama made his speech, and when he was done half the bar was misty-eyed or outright crying.

After such an evening, only a cynic would wake up thinking that good things only happen in isolation. Well, I've certainly been telling my friends that living in New York is slowly but surely turning my heart into a shriveled plum of bitterness. When I woke up this morning, despite all my hopes the previous evening, I had this horrifying certainty that Proposition 8 would pass. Thus, when I learned that it had, it felt less like a punch in the face than a screwdriver twisting just a few more turns in my gut. The Lord giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other, as they say.

As disheartened as I am about Proposition 8, however, I find myself unwilling to condemn the people who voted yes for it. I'm frustrated and a bit heartsick, but not despairing, because I believe the people who voted to deny us this equal right did so from a place of fear. Fear that we, somehow, represent a threat to their own security, to the things that they themselves hold dear, to their families and their loved ones. The majority of them don't act out of malice, but out of ignorance, insecurity, and even misguided good intent. That fear can be alleviated by understanding, and I honestly believe that with time and effort understanding can come to even the most bull-headed of men.

As disheartened as I am about Proposition 8, I continue to believe in the progress we're making. California had banned gay marriage with an overwhelming majority vote a scant 8 years ago - less than a third my current lifespan. Today, it managed to do it again only by a scant 2% margin. What will the social climate be in eight more years, I wonder? What further progress will we have made? What effect will Barack Obama's presidency have had in those eight years? The Bush administration has made a ruin of our country, and still we manage to move from a landslide victory for intolerance to Proposition 8 barely squeaking by. If Obama proves to be the harbinger for change, the spearhead of hope that he has made himself out to be, what can we expect from the next eight years?

That, I think, is the true reason Barack Obama has so impressed upon me. I'm as aware as anyone that he is a politician, that he is not in support of gay marriage, that he isn't some paragon of perfection here to lead us to some mythic golden age. He has given us some grand promises, and I am perfectly aware that he probably won't be able to follow up on them all. I believe that he will try, however. I believe that he will make every effort to make good on his promises. In short, I believe that under all the politics he is a truly good man. And in my belief in him, I have found strength, hope, and a willingness to get out of my chair and work for that beautiful tomorrow. That is his gift, the gift of any great leader: the ability to inspire others to become more than they are.

He's inspired me. That is enough.

************

(As a post-script...I am never going to get the last of this goddamn travelogue transcribed!)

Travelogue, Day Nine: Sogginess in the heart of Italy

2008-09-19T23:18:00.000-04:00

I'm really starting to wonder whether it's possible for me to visit mainland Italy without Mother Nature pissing on my head. Am I just dragging a giant storm cloud behind me as I travel? Is my ego large enough that my personal thunderstorms are continent-sized monstrosities? (Don't answer that.) Actually, in all fairness there have been only two previous stops marked by torrential downpours, but they represent fully half the ports we've made so far. That sort of makes it feel like this entire trip has been a big soggy mess.

If you haven't gathered already from previous posts, today was Rome. (I am assuming in this, by the way, that you've been keeping up with my previous blog entries in this travelogue). More concisely, it was Civitavecchia, which is the port closest to Rome at roughly an hour's drive away. As a result of this distance, we at Theatre at Sea planned an excursion for our passengers. We'd contacted a bus and tour company in Rome, offering a comparatively cheap ride from the Civitavecchia docks straight into the heart of Rome, as well as a tour of the major sites by bus for those interested parties. Confirming which passengers wanted Rome, which passengers wanted the full tour, and coordinating this with the ship has been a fairly major task over the last two or three days, and I'm rather pleased to say the whole thing didn't crash down around my ears like a house of cards built with Buicks. At least, not as a result of any miscalculation on our part.

I woke up at around 7:30 this morning, which anyone who knows me will recognize as the truly ungodly hour that it is for me. I had just enough time to shower and grab a quick bite to eat at The Bistro on Deck 6 before hopping down to (everybody now!) Reception on Deck 5. As an aside, the Crystal Serenity has the best oatmeal I have ever experienced. I think they grind up fairy wings and unicorn horns and sunshine dust and blend them into this puree of pure happiness, then sprinkle the mix onto the oatmeal. Eating fairies is delicious! Seriously, I don't what they put in there, because the oatmeal that my father made always tasted like lumpy glue, but I definitely sense pecans, bananas, and possibly cinnamon and brown sugar. There's also an entire array of fruits that you can put into your oatmeal, although I usually stick to the strawberries...and this is in The Bistro, which is like the ghetto of the Crystal Serenity dining experience. I think I need to hire someone to make me this oatmeal for breakfast, because it will ensure that I actually...ya know...eat breakfast. Maybe I'll be able to convince my future boyfriend to do this for me in exchange for...um...sex? Fuck, Sherry was right. I am such a girl.

There were quite a few people already waiting for me down at the reception area, so I went through the list of confirmed Rome passengers I made last night, checking everyone off. Things got pretty hectic pretty quickly as more people started arriving, including the actors, although I also noticed a few missing heads. There'd been a real concern recently about whether or not we'd have enough space on the bus for everyone, but fortunately (or not) more than a few people decided they didn't want to come into Rome. That struck me as pretty bizarre - I mean, this is ROME! How can you not want to go? What kind of weird dimension of frozen cynicism and black misanthropy would you have to come from to skip out on Rome? I guess once you get to a certain age and you've been there already, it's just more of the same? I dunno. I sincerely hope my heart isn't such a shriveled onion by the time I'm eighty that I can poo-poo a trip into Rome, 'cause I found everything pretty spectacular and I didn't get to see NEARLY all the sights that I wanted. Then again, I'm also cheerful and optimistic to an irritating degree, so maybe I'm not the best person to judge. I'm also getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say the whole boarding process went off without a hitch.

The drive into Rome took a lot longer than expected, and about halfway through it started drizzling. Fortunately, I took one look at the steel wool sky this morning and decided to lug my umbrella along. The tour conductor we'd hired for this leg of the journey - a rather jovial woman in her mid-thirties who spoke only passable English - was very insistent upon giving us all a lengthy lecture about Civitavecchia sporadically interspersed with some bizarre jokes. For example, she apparently found it hilarious trying to teach us how to pronounce Civitavecchia (CHEE-vee-tuh-VEH-kee-uh!). She even got everyone reciting along, as though we were a shortbus full of second graders. I kind of wanted to yell, "Just because we're American doesn't mean we're grade schoolers!" but that assessment is, unfortunately, probably not entirely accurate. I eventually just phased her out and spent my time talking with Ron. Philip had almost convinced me last night to take the full Rome tour on the bus, but as Ron and I discussed the specifics of the trip it became apparent that I would want to explore the city on my own. We jotted down a quick guideline to the major sites I would want to see, and by the time we got done the bus was pulling into the outer reaches of Rome. Our tour guide pointed out the walls of the Vatican, then went on to brief us on how to avoid getting pickpocketed by gypsies. That one caught me by surprise, partially because she was so matter-of-fact about the whole thing. It felt kind of like someone just turned to me and said, "Oh, by the way, this is how you avoid getting mugged and raped should you head into the Bronx. Would you like another coffee?"

The bus eventually made its way to the Viale Washington, a street in Rome near the Piazza del Popolo specifically designed for tour buses. We'd upgraded at this point from drizzle to full-blown rain, although nothing as bad as what we got in Venice or Dubrovnik. Our local tour guide was already here; he boarded the bus to take charge of those people who wanted the full tour, while our Civitavecchia guide led the rest of us to the Spanish Steps. Owing to the rain, a number of our passengers decided to stay on the bus, but a surprising number opted to brave the hazards of chill and damp.

I snapped a few pictures of the Piazza del Popolo as we collectively shuffled through, trying not to get water on my digital camera while capturing the vastness of the square and the very unusual Egyptian mold of the monolith that stood in the center. There was a man dressed like an Egyptian sarcophagus standing in front of the monolith; he was outfitted in the King Tut regalia and covered from head to toe in a reflective gold cloth meant to simulate the coffin itself. For a long moment I mistook him for an actual monument and almost took a picture. I sort of regret that I didn't, actually. It was cute - the Italian version of the bronzed statue men in New York - and I wondered who came up with the idea first. Or whether they evolved in parallel, as certain human conventions seem to do.

It was a much longer walk from the Piazza del Popolo to the Spanish Steps than I'd imagined, and on the way our tour guide very insistently repeated when (4:50 pm!) and where (The Fountain at the bottom of the Spanish Steps!) we were to meet back up. The bus would also be waiting back at the Viale Washington at the end of the day, so there was that extra layer of security in case anyone got left behind. As we walked, the tour group started slowly stretching out, elongating like a piece of taffy with our guide at the front and our oldest (or least ambulatory) members pulling up the rear. I, being the youngest and most ambulatory person there, ran a few laps from the front to the back of the taffy pull, dodging pedestrians on the narrow sidewalks=, trying to make sure everyone knew how to get back. I was in horror that we would leave some seventy year-old grandmother smack in the middle of Rome to fend for herself. Although it occurs to me now that any of those seventy year-old grandmothers, with access to considerably more money and experience than I had, could probably fend for themselves far better than I could.

In any case, you can only stretch a piece of taffy so much, so about ten minutes into the walk the younger, more vigorous people had pulled well out of sight. I ended up just crossing my fingers, hoped that we wouldn't have anyone left behind at the end of the day, and, like any good gay man, decided to go shopping. To be fair, it wasn't so much a premeditated choice as the seizing of an opportunity that had presented itself. The street we were on happened to be lined with numerous shops, and as we walked I noticed a antiquities store that was having a going out of business sale. Since I'd yet to buy a present for Dave and Jordan's wedding, I dropped in and, after some browsing, plopped down a sizable sum for a sterling silver salt and pepper shaker set. In retrospect, that's pretty ridiculous, because a silver salt and pepper set would look pretty out of place on any modern tabletop, but dammit, they're wedding presents! From Rome! Sheer international novelty factor alone makes them cool!

Anyway, after buying the shakers, I made my way to the Spanish Steps, which was tall and wide and immensely theatrical. I was reminded of the scene from "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and even found myself looking around for that cafe where Tom spied on Meredith and Margo during their meeting. Additionally, and to my relief, the fountain at the bottom of the steps wasn't some enormous round monstrosity, which would make assembling the group at the end of the day that much easier. I shuttered a few pictures from both the bottom and the top of the steps, and on a whim looked into a church at the top. Rarely enough, picture-taking was allowed inside, so I took advantage and snapped a few shots of the more memorable shrines.

I took the underground from the Spanish Steps to the Ottavio stop, which was the subway stop nearest the Vatican. Nevertheless, it still ended up being a good twenty minutes walk down unfamiliar streets in weather that was growing increasingly chilly and damp. I briefly considered just buying a sweater at one of the shops nearby, but the cost of even a relatively cheap article ran a good 30 euro, which was considerably more than I wanted to spend on anything that wouldn't end up shimmering on my walls or desk. I ended up settling for a personal pizza (ordered in Italian! Yay me!) before trudging my way to St. Peter's Basilica.

The Piazza di San Pietro was impressive in its scale. My eyes were drawn to another of those ubiquitous Egyptian monoliths at the center of the circular square (hah!), to the facade of the St. Peter's Basilica that stood on its western edge, to the incredibly long line of people snaking its way around the perimeter, and to the truly remarkable attention to detail that marked the structures surrounding the piazza. The experience was dampened (hah again!) by the constant curtain of rain draped over the square, and after asking a nice couple to take my picture in front of the Basilica's exterior I contemplated getting in. The length of the line leading into the Basilica itself was substantial enough, and my time in Rome limited enough, that I wasted a goodly amount of this precious time agonizing over whether or not I wanted to wait in that very ungodly line. Neuroticism won out in the end, however, and I plunked myself behind an Asian couple. Thank god for oversized umbrellas (courtesy of Crystal Cruises!)

The line moved much more quickly than I thought it would, and in less than fifteen minutes I found myself inside the single most amazing structure I have ever visited. I am serious when I say the interior of St. Peter's Basilica easily outclasses every other piece of architecture I've ever seen. The place is sheerly astonishing, overwhelming in the degree of detail that graces every wall, and I could spend weeks, if not months, trying to capture all of the marvels inside with my itsy bitsy little camera. I can't compete with any of the resources available out there in describing the interior of the Basilica, but numerating everything that impressed me would be a task of weeks or months, and probably end up an unbearably dull read to boot. Let's just say that seeing the Pieta was an absolute treat, and that the baldacchino and the Cathedra Petri were stunning - positively, supernally, supremely stunning. I've never seen their like in all my life.

Of course, being the churlish cynic that I am, I also have to wonder how much time, effort, and money went into building this admittedly awesome building. Hell, how much time and effort went into carving any one of the sculptures housed inside the nave of the Basilica, that ultimately could have been better used elsewhere. My sense of art and history is appropriately awed by this cathedral, but my sense of humanity ultimately wonders at the opportunity cost of this extravagance. Perhaps that's hypocritical of me. What, after all, would be the opportunity cost of the evenings that I spend at XES, or the money that I pumped into an acting education that ultimately seems of little practical use. How many people could have lived better lives if I had given just a little of that money to charity instead of binging on Cosmos?

I'm not beneficent enough to follow that line of thought to its logical conclusion.

In the end, I spent about an hour and a half basking in the sheer artistic richness of St. Peter's Basilica. I left only with a very great reluctance, in the knowledge that my time in Rome was severely limited and that I still had much to see.

I made a general motion toward the southeast after I left the Piazza di San Pietro, as the Piazza Navona was my next stop on the agenda. It was starting to rain harder at this point, but the Ponte Vittorio was only a short distance away from the Piazza, and led naturally into the Corso Vittorio, which crossed south of the Piazza Navona. The Ponte Vittorio, by the way, is a bridge that crosses the Tiber river, which divides the city into eastern and western halves. The bridge is flanked by a pair of winged bronze sculptures, with additional statues on either side lining the bridge. It's visually very impressive, which is considerably more than I could say for the Tiber River itself, which looked like a scuzzy green swamp. For a city with such incredible art and architecture, they sure chose to straddle a remarkably crappy river. The New River in Radford is more awe-inspiring than the Tiber, which, unfortunately, is a little like saying a triceratops produces a better mound of dung than a rhino.

Okay, I'm done making fun of the Tiber now.

It actually ended up being a much longer walk along the Corso Vittorio than I'd thought, but fortunately for me, and against all odds, I ran into Ron and Norm in the Piazza San Pantaleo, which was apparently just south of the Piazza Navona, but which, by some quirkly twist of non-Euclidean geometry, just refused to direct me there when I attempted to head north. There must be localized time-space anomalies in Rome. Although they'd seen the Piazza Navona already, Ron and Norm were just sort of strolling around and graciously offered to take me where I needed to go. We chatted fairly amiably as we made our unnecessarily circuitous way north, and before I knew it I found myself in a long, relatively narrow plaza decorated with yet another of those monoliths. I'm sort of kicking myself for not asking about those, actually, because they seemed to be cropping up everywhere.

Anyway, the Piazza Navona was very pretty and refreshingly open after the half-hour or so I spent walking along the crowded, almost claustrophobic streets. I took a picture against the Fountain of Neptune, but unfortunately the Fountain of Four, located at the base of that most conspicuous obelisk, was closed for renovations. I was only able to catch a pale glimpse of what it might have looked like in full bloom, as it were. It would have undoubtedly been magnificent. Ah well, I was in a hurry anyway - Ron and Norm pushed me along a side street toward our next destination, the Pantheon.

There was yet another of those ubiquitous obelisks in front of the Pantheon, which is a sort of massively button-shaped building with a ostensibly Grecian front facade. The Pantheon dates back to (ahar) the days of the Holy Roman Empire, and in modern times serves as a terrific respite from sudden downpours. The inside of the building, which is essentially a single, large, round room lined on all sides by statuary of various saints (or maybe they were Roman gods. I should've taken a better look. Bad G! Bad! You're a terrible tourist!) The most striking aspect of the temple, however, was the enormous hole in the temple dome, which, although permitted rain to freely pour into the building's interior, also enabled a streak of light to cascade into the room like God's own spotlight. It's unfortunate that it was raining so, because the effect must be nothing less than divine on a sunny day.

I do have a confession to make here. I had no idea Raphael was buried in the Pantheon. I'm whipping myself right now.

Ron and Norm decided to stay at the Pantheon to look around, but I had to bid a hasty exit as I still had Trevi Fountain, the Roman Forums, and the Colisseum to visit before (everyone now!) 4:50 pm. I only had about an hour and a half in which to do this, but fortunately all three locations were relatively close to each other. More Roman streets, more twists and turns, more tourists, more G wondering whether or not he's going to get lost and trapped in Rome, and then suddenly voila! The Trevi Fountain.

I bought a cone of cherry gelato and took a picture next to the fountain, which was extremely impressive and beautiful and well carved. There is, however, something visually odd about visiting a fountain in the rain. You're holding an umbrella, with water sluicing down all around you, watching water sluice down something else. Something about that just seems patently absurd. Perhaps as a result of this absurdity and my own sense of urgency, I forgot to toss a coin into the fountain. No wish for me! Oh well - I was running pretty low on funds at this point anyway.

It was a long walk to the Roman Forums, although along the way I passed by a very large administrative building whose name now escapes me. Atop two flights of marble stairs, however, burned an eternal flame guarded by a pair of soldiers, and the look was striking enough that I had several pictures taken. I'm particularly gratified here because I overheard a couple talking and was able to exercise my somewhat stilted French. I think my grammar was excessively formal because the guy made fun of me...in a friendly sort of way. As to the Roman Forums themselves, they were far too vast and sprawling for me to be able to spare more than a cursory look at them as I made my way to the Colosseum. It might have been fun to be able to spend some more time wandering around the ruins, but I think after Pompeii I'm all ruined out.

The Colosseum itself was extremely majestic, and I was gratified yet again in asking a Chinese tourist group to take my picture. That makes four different languages that I used today, all for the purposes of having my picture taken. I'm so international! Unfortunately, being international apparently doesn't necessarily mean being prepared, because I arrived at the Colosseum with only about 30 minutes to spare and about five Euros in my pocket. Guess what? It costs eleven Euro to get in.

Fuck!

I wasted a good ten minutes trying to decide whether or not I had the time to go withdraw some funds from a nearby ATM, then come running back to stand in line. This very cute tour guide with spiky blond hair and a pair of the bluest eyes I've ever seen overheard me asking for an ATM. He suggested the guided tour, as they accepted US dollars, and intimated that he could give me a tour of his apartment afterward. (Yeah, okay, I made up that last part.) Unfortunately, the tour was also 40 minutes long and I only had about 15 minutes left at this point. Spending $30 for a 15 minute tour was a bit too much for me to stomach, as Florence is still to come tomorrow and my trip funds are getting very short (damn you, Venetian masks!) Alas, with wrenching disappointment I had to walk away from my beautiful blue-eyed tour guide and any pictures of the Colosseum interior.

I'm still kicking myself for not withdrawing more Euros this morning. And buying that pizza. I refuse to regret the salt and pepper shakers.

The remainder of the day was largely unimpressive. It was a long, wet walk back to the Viale Washington, where our bus was waiting, and more than a few passengers expressed dissatisfaction with our Rome tour due to the rain. Jesus Christ people...I mean, really? You're going to complain to your travel agent about the fucking WEATHER? I'm so sorry that I didn't bring my rain-seeding cannons for the express purpose of making sure that Rome (which, by the way, had been in a fucking DROUGHT for the last three months) remained sunny for your visit. The sheer sense of entitlement some people get while they're on vacation simply astonishes me. Actually, scratch that - the sheer sense of entitlement some people get, period, simply astonishes me. I realize that you paid some obscene sum to come on this cruise, but I would take it as a kindness if you realized that $5,000 is a rather piddly sum for me to exercise powers of divine intervention. And I certainly hope you'll forgive me if I'm not so banal as to exercise them for something so asinine as good weather on a goddamn cruise.

Pardon me if cruise passengers tend to push my buttons.

Anyway, I retreated to the Silk Road again because I really just didn't want to deal with the passengers any more today, and because the notion of spending another three hours eating dinner just wearied me. Tomorrow is Florence, which I'm really, really, oh so very much looking forward to, at least partially because I don't have to involve myself in passenger affairs for a fair while now that Rome is finally over and done with. Yay! Wait for me, oh Firenze, oh center of art and Renaissance magnificence!

Alright, this has been an excessively huge entry. I'm going to go grab some horror movies from the ship library and fall asleep watching some really, really crappy B-rated shit. Come back tomorrow, same G-time, same G-channel, same G-spo...yeah, okay, even I think that joke sucks.

Travelogue, Day Eight: Epic fail in matters of wardrobe and timing

2008-09-18T23:27:00.000-04:00

I knew it! I knew it was a mistake not to get Rome information out to everyone last night. I even had this thought in the back of my head - "You know, G, it would probably be a good idea to confirm with everyone about Rome before you go to bed tonight." Unfortunately, that thought occurred roughly two seconds before my head hit the pillow and consequently dribbled out my ears. Actually, even that's not quite an excuse, because I had the thought again this morning before I left the ship. So really I can't attribute today's madness to anything except flat-out destructive self-sabotage.

Okay, okay, why don't we start at the beginning. (I notice, by the way, that I seem to follow this format quite often on this travelogue. I tend to start off with some sort of blanket statement, usually quite agitated, about the current state of things, then insist that I need to start from the beginning. Maybe I ought to just start at the beginning instead of ranting? Oh, but it's so much fun listening to myself verbally gesticulate in frothing madness!)

Anyway, today was Sorrento, which had several options as far as interesting sites to visit. However, I had already decided on Pompeii sometime last night, and after hearing my announcement Sumrall kindly lent me a few books about the area. I cheerfully glanced through them to make sure I knew how to get there, how to get back, approximately how much it would cost, and all the major sites I would want to visit once I was there. Ultimately, however, I think I knew in the back of my mind that I would want to cover the whole thing, if I could. Come the morning, as usual, I had a brief meeting with Philip, this time to call the bus company in Rome and confirm our tour for tomorrow. After the incident at the King's Palace in Morocco, Philip retains a certain amount of horror about people we need failing to show up at the appointed place and time.

ASIDE! The incident at the King's Palace in Morocco occurred about three years ago, during my first cruise with Theatre at Sea, when Jess was group director and I was office support. Specifically, on that particular cruise we were meant to have a tour of the King's Palace in Rabat - Philip had e-mailed a tour operator at the King's Palace for just this purpose, but didn't make final confirmation by phone. Well, when the ship docked in Casablanca, all 120 of our passengers boarded the four tour buses we'd chartered. They sat the three hours it took to get to Rabat, walked up to the King's palace...and nothing. No tour operator. No one to meet them. In Ron's words:

"There were only these two female tour attendants who were dressed like, I kid you not, a pair of prostitutes, and they had no idea who we were. Philip took one look at them and his jaw just dropped. He was completely flabbergasted. He turned to me and said, 'Well...we've hit rock bottom.'"

Having no idea where the tour conductor was or why they were in this situation, Ron took Philip aside and said, "Philip, our people are getting restless. You need to do something."

Philip's response, in typical Philip fashion: "Well, we could drive back to Casablanca and do some shopping, I suppose."

To which Ron replied, "Philip, these people have just sat three hours for a tour of the palace. We cannot just drive them back to Casablanca and go shopping. Now you get those two hookers over there and you pay to have them show us something, anything - the King's bathroom, if you have to - but these people need to see at least SOMETHING while they're here."

The day after, when I asked Jess via e-mail how things were going, she merely replied, "Don't ask about Morocco." Later, I received an e-mail from the central office explaining matters - apparently, the tour operator we had been in contact with misread our e-mail to him and thought he was to meet us at the pier in Casablanca. While our group was waiting for him at the King's Palace, he was waiting for us at the docks.

To this day, the Morocco Incident continues to live in infamy.

So, anyway, back to the main story - we confirmed with Rome about our tour tomorrow, so I don't anticipate having to rely on tour prostitutes showing us anyone's bathroom. I decided at this point that I was going to head ashore, since it was drawing on eleven and I knew it would take at least an hour each way to get to Pompeii by train. Somewhere in the back of my head I thought, "You know, you probably ought to get the info about Rome out to everybody." However, the sun was already high in the sky and the notion of folding and addressing three dozen letters struck me as a particularly onerous task. It would take a good hour at least, maybe two, and that meant I wouldn't make it into Pompeii until well past two. So yeah, I decided I'd get to the mailing when I got back - surely I'd be back by six at the latest, right? How large could a set of ruins really be? Yeah. Uh huh. Brilliant, G.

Back in my stateroom, I changed into something casual-cool and by my estimate modestly Sicilian - a simple white shirt with sleeves rolled up, pale khakis, and my brown leather flip-flops. Tote bag in hand, outfitted with snacks and a large bottle of water, I strolled off the ship and took the tender into Sorrento.

There's not a great deal I can say about Sorrento itself - it's a pretty sort of town, and I bought a bottle of blueberry Powerade in my halting Italian, which turned out to be unnecessary since the clerk spoke English. My attempt to withdraw a little bit of money was also forestalled by a woman who either didn't know how to operate an ATM or was trying to hack into the bank using her cell phone. I dunno - she was standing there for a good ten minutes with no cash to show for her troubles and a queue creeping some twenty-odd feet behind us. I for my part just gave up waiting (partially because I wasn't sure I wouldn't make an equally large fool of myself trying to operate an Italian ATM).

The train into Pompeii was breezy and quick, although inundated with a swarm of kids in the middle / high school age range. Considering that today is a weekday and I was riding the train around noon, I have no idea what they were all doing there. Don't kids go to school in Sicily? I eventually fished out my iPod and composed D&D encounters in my head while waiting for the Pompeii Scavi stop.

Now, on to Pompeii itself, since nobody really needs a recap of how I bought my tickets. My first impression of Pompeii was definitely one of age, that truly monumental sense of bygone eras pressing out of every cobblestone and brick. It's a feeling hard to describe - this strange mix of muted awe and wonder that slowly takes hold as you realize that you're walking on streets once bustling with people two thousand years ago.

The map of Pompeii the ticket office handed me broke the city down into major sites of interest, numbering them from 1 to 70. Being both neurotic and obsessive-compulsive, I decided that if I was to see everything in this amazing place, the most logical progression was to simply follow the numbers. By pure happenstance, I ran into Michael and his boyfriend, Darren, around number 5. They had already been in the city for quite some time and had wandered around rather haphazardly. They were looking for the brothel before leaving the city, as they wanted to drop by Capri before the ship left in the evening, but evidently I skimmed past that part while reading my guide books because I had no idea what they were talking about. Before we parted ways, however, they warned me that Pompeii was big. Really big. Big enough that I could easily spend the entire day there and not see everything. I accepted this bit of advice with grace, but inside I scoffed a bit - judging from what I'd already seen and based upon the scale of the map, I was sure I could see the entirety of the city. I mean, I'm young and I walk like a New Yorker. How bad could it be?

Ah, the springtime Pride of youth, once again raped in the face by the burly manhood of Experience.

Suffice it to say, two hours later I was only halfway through the 20's, feeling a bit light-headed with the pounding I was getting from the sun, and cursing the ancient Pompeiians for not discovering how to pave their streets with asphalt. Already I had slipped, tripped, or stumbled a good dozen-odd times on the cobblestones, and I was getting sincerely afraid that my sandal straps would give before I got home, forcing me to limp barefooted through the rest of the ruins. On the bright side, however, I was snapping pictures like a madman. My family back home will be terribly gratified to know that I've finally satisfied that Asian stereotype, and that while I was at it I riced out a Toyota Camry and opened a dry-cleaner just outside Pompeii city limits.

I could probably write a book about everything I saw in Pompeii, but rather than bore you with the details I'm going to focus on just three things that seemed particularly significant to me while I was there. The first are the plaster casts of the victims, which are distributed in three locations around the city. Although they're all kept under sealed glass, visitors are allowed to examine them very closely, and in so doing I found myself deeply unsettled. All of the casts show the victims in twisted, contorted positions. There's one of a man with his arms raised, trying to ward himself from the rain of burning ash, and even in the rough plaster the agony on his face is clearly recognizable. Another toward the southern end of the city reveals parents huddled over the body of their child in a futile effort to protect him. A third - one of the really famous ones - shows a dog curled in on itself, in that position dog owners would recognize as one of pain and fright. On more than one cast, the plaster has begun to peel away, revealing yellowed bone underneath and really driving home the realization that these were all people, once. People who died horribly, in terror, without understanding what was happening to them or why, as the skies turned black and belched fire onto their city. It's a sobering thought.

On a lighter note, the second item of particular interest I found was the Lupanar, the aforementioned brothel that Michael and Darren was trying to find. Of all the sites in Pompeii, this was the only one that had a line to get in! The inside of the Lupanar itself was rather spartan - the place consisted of maybe a half-dozen cubicle-sized rooms, each furnished with only a small stone bed maybe five feet long that looked vastly uncomfortable. The highlight of the place, however, were a series of frescoes - one above each cubicle - that depicted people having sex in positions ranging from rear penetration to spread-eagle for oral. It was hilarious! It was like you could go window shopping for suggestions while you were waiting for your...um...turn? Got bored of missionary? Here! Come into this room and try a slow fuck on your side! Of course, I took pictures of all the frescoes, although by this point I was getting a bit conscious of how many pictures I was taking. Considering that I really have no way of getting pictures off my camera on this ship, I'm basically limited to what my solitary 4 gig memory card could hold, and I've already clicked my way halfway through that. I'm going to be really, really annoyed if I run out of pictures halfway through Monte Carlo.

The third item of interest I found in the Villa of Mysteries, which is the home of a particularly wealthy patrician on the outskirts of Pompeii. Curiously, the path leading to this Villa led through a series of ancient graveyards and necropolises, which is pretty creepy when you think about it. The villa itself was very large and quite grand, and was one of the more intact structures in Pompeii. By virtue of this, in fact, one of the rooms in the villa had the most well-preserved frescoes in all of Pompeii, and they were beautiful. Their colors were saturated and rich, the images highly detailed. There were other buildings in various parts of Pompeii where you could see some partially-preserved wall decorations, and at least one house that retained a very well-kept image of Venus. At the Villa of Mysteries, however, you could really get a strong sense of what the city might have looked like, two thousand years ago. Based upon that glimpse, it must have been a stunning place.

In the end, Pompeii took me about six hours to traverse, and I only ended up managing sites 1 through 60 or so. I comfort myself with the notion that at least a few of those sites were just doors out of the city, but in truth I was so tired by the end of it I doubt I could have appreciated anything else. I also hadn't eaten in about eight hours, and given the amount of walking I had done the notion of cannibalism was getting more appealing by the minute. I ended up getting some carbonara from this little pizzeria just outside Pompeii, and I'm still feeling annoyed that I ate there. The place was clearly there to rip off tourists. Although the woman at the front counter assured me that everything was "made fresh!" I caught her pulling out a microwavable meal out of a freezer after I'd paid. The carbonara pretty much tasted like it too. It was also dripping with grease and had this unhealthy-looking bright yellow color generally reserved for cake and dandelions. It's particularly offensive when you think about the fact that Italy is so well known for its array of marvelous foods. I ate about half my carbonara before deciding that I could fish better food out of the Crystal Serenity's toilets.

I apologize if that's excessively gross to anyone here.

The train ride back to the ship was uneventful, but I didn't make it back to my stateroom until about 7:00 pm, and oh boy did my decision about Rome come back to haunt me. There were a good fourteen messages waiting for me (Oh yeah. I forgot to mention - I finally decided to give out my stateroom number, as I needed to know whether my tallies were correct as far as who was going on which shore excursion.) Naturally, all of them wanted to know the details about Rome - when we were leaving, where we were leaving from, when we were coming back, etc. There was also a message from Edna, indicating that Myrna was incredibly pissed off I hadn't gotten back to her with Rome details. Oops.

Well, I quickly sat down and rattled off the Rome newsletter, then jaunted downstairs to do some damage control in the dining room. I didn't quite get mobbed, but it felt a little like it with all the people calling my name from their tables. It was like a broken record - we're leaving tomorrow at nine am, down at reception on deck five. Yes, tomorrow at nine am, deck five. Reception on deck five, nine am. Myrna was indeed pissed ("I didn't have any messages about Rome. None, this entire day!") and I briefly entertained the notion of punching her in the face before fleeing in the opposite direction and diving off the ship. I settled for just reassuring her about Rome tomorrow and booking it out of there as soon as I was done.

I caught up with David in Silk Road, which was nice and reassuring. ("Well, I wasn't worried because it's not like we wouldn't see you at some point this evening, and I figured you'd definitely tell us before bed.") I ate a ton of sushi, which was fun and enlightening because the Silk Road sushi chefs all make the food right there in front of you. Now I know how rolls are made!

Rome is coming up tomorrow - the second of our Theatre at Sea shore excursions - and I do admit I'm getting a teeeeeeny bit anxious when I consider the possibility of there not being a bus waiting for us at the dock. I know we confirmed already, but I'm neurotic and obsessive, dammit! I like turning over these anxieties in my mind like a cow chewing a piece of cud.

At least we'll be docked in Rome. If we were going in by tender, I suspect more than one Theatre at Sea passenger will have gone overboard before the day's end.

Travelogue, Day Seven: Of geo caches, prickly pears, and long, long climbs

2008-09-17T22:19:00.000-04:00

So I spent most of the day today with David and Sumrall wandering around in Taormina. I’d initially wandered into town alone, but bumped into them in one of Taormina’s main squares, and we decided to keep each other company.

What can I say about Taormina? Well, the sun finally decided to grace us with its presence, beaming down onto the island full blast, which resulted in some very grand, truly splendid vistas. There was, of course, yet another church filled with extremely intricate shrines. The novelty here, however, was the lack of a burly lesbian guard demanding that I stop taking pictures, so I snapshotted to my heart’s content. After the chapel, we attempted to get lunch at a local restaurant, but discovered they had no pizza. Honestly…wtf, mate? In Sicily, that’s like a Burger King declaring that they were out of burgers for the day. However, on our way out of the restaurant David introduced me to an interesting concept – geo caches.

Apparently, geo caches are sort of an international scavenger hunt. People take these little objects and hide them in various spots around the world, posting their locations into an international database with coordinates that show up on GPS devices (if you option for it, I presume). The objects are usually stored in some sort of Tupperware and range from pieces of pottery and little bits of artwork to paperclips and pens, to more exotic objects (I didn’t ask, but what would be exotic? Nipple tassels? Cock rings? A full set of Liza Minelli CD’s?). Also in said Tupperware are logs where you can enter your name and, presumably, some sort of ID number indicating that you’ve “retrieved” the cache. You leave the Tupperware for some other enterprising geo cache hunter to find, of course. All of the caches are ranked according to accessibility and obviousness. One might be easy to find, but stuck halfway up the side of a mountain (4 for accessibility, 1 for obviousness), while another might be hidden deep inside a piece of shrubbery just alongside the road (1 for accessibility, but 4 for obviousness). A difficulty of 5 in either situation indicates that special equipment would be needed, such as scuba tanks or mountain-climbing gear. As an additional bit of niftiness, some geo caches contain little tracking devices, which you then pick up and carry with you to another location (presumably another geo cache), and deposit there for someone else to pick up. The owners of those devices can then watch their little bugs travel around the world and live vicariously through the experience (kind of like the Travelocity gnome, I guess.) Some people pick these up as is convenient, while others actively hunt them down as a hobby. David, as I came to understand, had discovered hundreds of these little objects.

The particular geo cache that we were looking for seemed to be hidden a mere four or five hundred from where the pizza-less pizza restaurant was located. As we followed David’s GPS tracker, however, it soon became apparent that the “mere” four or five hundred feet was virtually straight down. We had to follow this winding, looping path down the side of the mountain at something like a 50 degree incline, with David glued to his tracker and the rest of us looking for…something. I had no idea at this point what a geo cache actually looked like – in my inane sort of way, I was imagining this little oaken chest covered with gilt leafing, dusty and cracked with age, similar in its way to the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’d heard the word “Tupperware” of course, but I think my image was much more romantic.

Anyway, as we continued winding down the hill, the city walls sort of fell away, the path opening to reveal a steep, rugged slope covered with dry grasses, tall trees, and cacti. The view was spectacular, overlooking the coastline below, and I could see the Crystal Serenity like a toy boat floating over the glittering water. The water down at the beach was that incredible blend of sea blue, turquoise, aquamarine, and cerulean you only see when the water is crystal clear, and even as high as we were I could see the shadows of large rocks underneath the surface. There were large bunches of cacti near us, their tips budding with orange and scarlet prickly pears, and that was a novelty to me. Sumrall informed me that prickly pears were often used to make jam, to which I promptly attempted to very carefully pick a prickly pear. At about the same time, she told me that heavy gloves are usually needed to pick them.

Well the rest of the cactus had giant needles! I figured I could avoid getting pricked if I was careful!

The results were pretty much what you’d expect. I ended up with a forest of tiny spines eating into my fingers like miniature drills, and no prickly pear for my efforts. Learning very quickly to leave the prickly pears alone, I continued down the path trying to pick the individual needles out of my hand while Sumrall looked on and simultaneously winced while trying not to laugh at me. By the time we’d caught up with David, he was already putting down his name into the geo cache. It was, unfortunately, plain blue Tupperware…but I can still dream. Yes I can.

The walk back to Taormina proper was a real hike. The hill seemed rather steeper than when were coming down, and the sun was beating me over the head with a big, flaming nerf bat. We definitely needed a break by the time we got back, so we tucked ourselves into the first pizzeria (with confirmed pizza!) that we found. I don’t even remember what sort of pizza I ordered – only that it was delicious with the liter of house wine we got.

After lunch, we wandered across town toward the Greek theatre, which I knew nothing about but which sounded interesting. I bought a print of Taormina that I thought would look nifty hanging on the wall, as well as (finally) a brown belt to go with my brown shoes. On a random note, the motif of Sicily is apparently a face with three legs running counter-clockwise around it, and it’s kind of freaky-looking. It’s also absolutely everywhere, wrought in porcelain or bronze in souvenir shops and printed on key chains and flags. I question its viability as a local symbol. It feels like Sicily is declaring en masse, “We produce really deformed babies!” (Thumbs up)

The Greek theatre was pretty stunning, and definitely looked its age. The thing was massively open-air, intimidating with it size. I can’t imagine what it must have been like trying to perform in that theatre. Actors back then must have had lungs like hot air balloons. There were also some very grand views of Taormina and the coastline from the edges of the theatre, as the entire structure stood on a cliff at the eastern edge of the city. I took some pretty splendid pictures, if I do say so myself.

David wanted to go back to the ship after we got done at the theatre, but I’d wanted to investigate the Fortress of the Saracens since coming into the city. Problem was, the fort stood at the peak of a mountain that rose imposingly into the Taormina sky – a climb of several hundred feet at least. We had less than an hour to get up to the fort, get back down, and march across the city to catch the last tender back to the ship. (And it was a long, long swim across the bay to where the Serenity was anchored.) Sumrall was game, but David opted out, citing little interest in old fortresses. So it was just the two of us. We nabbed some gelato for the sake of fortitude before trekking north toward the mountain.

The climb was rough. Really rough. The stairs zigzagged endlessly across the side of the mountain, and although the going wasn’t particularly steep, owing precisely to that zigzag pattern, it was very, very, very long and very, very, very high. There were also statues carved into the side of the mountain at every landing, depicting Jesus carrying the crucifix, and about a third of the way up that’s pretty much what the climb started to feel like. I’m not sure what sort of sadistic nun carved those images of the cross-bearing. Maybe she was trying to encourage climbers by reminding them of the trek Jesus made during his last hours, but I can’t say the notion of my climb being compared to a long and painful road leading to agonizing death was particularly cheering. Worse yet, I’d forgotten to bring water, and the pistachio gelato I’d eaten stuck to the inside of my mouth like a layer of warm sugar. I wasn’t really ready to turn back, but the decision to visit the Saracen castle was looking more ill-planned by the minute.

Well, we did make it to the top of the mountain, just a few dozen feet below the castle, and thankfully there was a water fountain waiting for us. Refreshed by a long swig of slightly stony-tasting water, we started the last few steps up to the Fortress of the Saracens and discovered in short order a locked gate barring the last thirty or so feet up.

Well that’s sort of like getting cock-slapped by a twelve-inch boner, isn’t it? Or would that be face-hugged by a nine-inch vulva? I don’t really know the appropriate form of that expression for a gay man. Let’s just say it sucked monstrous donkey dick and leave it at that.

Actually, I was a little too tired to be really upset, and there were certainly some incredible panoramas of Taormina and the seascape on our way up. I snapped a few pictures of the view, the fortress, and the locked gate, and we started our way back down. Not quite willing to admit defeat, however, I spread my arms and ran down the stairs two at a time, screaming, “WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” as I went.

No, I’m not joking. Yes, people stared. No, I didn’t care.

We made the tender, got back to the ship, and watched the terrific fifth show of our cruise: Susan, Richard, Betsy, and Lee Roy put up a series of showtunes and dancing for everyone. I finally got some pictures of myself with the cast, then drifted off to the Silk Road to have some Asian cuisine with David, Sumrall, Sherry, and Rita. I think I might just make an umbrella declaration that every bit of food I’ve had on this trip so far has been incredible, and stop talking about it. God knows I’m going to make myself jealous in the future if I ever come back and re-read this blog.

Tomorrow is Sorrento, which also starts our three-day block without any shows. That’s actually very fortunate, because not only do I have the Rome transfer to worry about, but it means that I have time to work on the programs without feeling like I’m running perpetually late. Wootness!

Anyhoo, I’m pretty exhausted right now – climbing that mountain takes a lot out of you – so this is G, last survivor of the Taormina excursion, signing off.

Travelogue, Day Six: Two shows and a karaoke night

2008-09-16T21:44:00.000-04:00

There’s not much to say about today. At sea days are kind of boring, from a blogging perspective.

Well, I decided to do some aerobic work in the morning, just to help stretch myself out a little, so I went up to the treadmills and tried my standard circuit training - minute and a half of heaving running at a near spring, minute and a half of light jogging, cycled for about half an hour. That usually puts me into the three/ three and a half mile range by the time I’m done, and it’s a pretty decent workout (especially considering I’m not terribly fit aerobically). Well, about a third of the way in, I was wiping some sweat out of my eyes and completely misjudged the length of the treadmill. I slipped, fell onto the track, and was pretty much carried on my ass off the treadmill and onto the floor. Most of the people in the gym missed it, but Richard happened to be next to me and gave me a thumbs up for my efforts. Nice G. A springtime ballerina I am not.

Today also happened to be a two-show day, with Laurence doing his show in the morning and Brian doing his show in the evening. (That’s Laurence Luckinbill and Brian Bedford, in case you need a recap). I’d been slightly worried up to this point, because although musical numbers are very popular with the old crowd on board, I wasn’t sure how well a straight performance would go over with them.

Oh, I have to tangent here – I’d mentioned before how I thought there wouldn’t’ be anyone on board remotely close to my age, right? Well, I was totally wrong. Somehow I’d managed to completely forget about the crew, the majority of whom are young, and of course the ship company consists mostly of younger men and women. What rather surprised me, however, was that even among the passengers there seems to be a sizable spread of younger folks. Of course most of them are well into their sixties, seventies, and eighties, but there are actually a fair number of people here who are under forty. There’s one couple who can’t be more than thirty, who are on their honeymoon. David and Sumrall are both around my age, and there are more than few passengers who brought their children or grandchildren along. The mix on even luxury cruises is much more varied than I’d imagined.

I’m glad I cleared that up.

Back to the matter at hand, both Larry’s show and Brian’s show were great successes. Larry was tremendously powerful and extremely engaging in “Lyndon,” and Brian was a delight to watch and listen to in “Ever Yours, Oscar.” I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting what they gave me, and I’m glad. My worries were largely unfounded, as both shows were packed, and the applause at the end of both was uproarious. Richard popped over after the show to congratulate me on my Grade A spill in the gym this morning, which was both funny and rather embarrassing. You know, I think I have a slight crush on Richard. He’s got to be at least in his forties, but the man’s in great shape and looks terrific. Too bad he’s a) straight and b) effectively married to Susan. You know, it occurs to me I probably shouldn’t be mentioning this in public. It’s almost certain to bite me in the ass later.

After the evening show, Sumrall invited me to join her, David, Sherry, and Rita over at Prego, one of the ship’s two alternate restaurants. That was a really incredible experience as well. Of course all the food on the ship has been incredible so far, but from Prego I had some really wonderful filet mignon, which was certainly comparable to the chateaubriand I’d had on the formal night. As an extra bit of niftiness, the photographer dropped by and took a picture of us all, which I’m looking forward to seeing on the morrow.

Since today was an at-sea day, there was karaoke again at the Pulse disco. It wasn’t nearly as crowded in there as it was last time, and David decided to join us this time, although he didn’t do any singing. I was encouraged, somewhat, by a pair of extremely exuberant and extremely bad singers from the ship’s officer ranks. I did a decent rendition of “Kryptonite”, tossed in a really weird duet of “All I Ask of You” with Sumrall, did the classic “Losing My Religion” (of course), and closed the evening with “Memory” from Cats, which I hadn’t really intended to sing but which somehow ended up getting turned in at some point during the evening. I did a lot better on Memory than I expected, which was encouraging. Rita actually joined in our karaoke night tonight, which was fun and endearing, because she really got into it. It’s also worth mentioning that although Rita has got to be nearing ninety, the woman outlasts me most evenings. I’m dragging my wimpy ass to bed around 10:30 or 11, and she’s still kicking it at half past two. I hope I’m that lively when I’m an octogenarian.

So yeah. That was today. I’d like to close with something funny or witty or remarkably insightful, but I’m stuffed full of extremely excellent food and all sung out on pop and showtunes. Tomorrow we land in Taormina, which is in Sicily, which brings to mind delicious pizza, sun-drenched villas, and throngs of olive-skinned boys with sensuous dark eyes. We’ll see how that goes.

Travelogue, Day Five: Rain, Poetry, and Introspective Musing in Croatia

2008-09-15T23:41:00.000-04:00

Three cheers for getting drenched yet again. I really need to just start wearing my gym shoes when I head to port, because waiting two days for my only pair of brown or black shoes to dry is starting to get old.

So today was Dubrovnik, which is a nifty little port city in Croatia. I got up early and had an excellent, hearty, and nutritious breakfast of various fruits, banana-nut oatmeal, sausages, and a totally laden omelet – it should be mentioned that I’m milking this whole “free food” thing for all its worth, ‘cause God knows I don’t eat anything like this back at home. It’s probably another reason I’m looking forward to moving in with Kevin, because I think I’d like to be able to make myself breakfast (or any other meal, for that matter) in a form other than stale cereal or overcooked oatmeal.

At any rate, after breakfast, I noted the decidedly murky-looking sky outside and grabbed my umbrella (which is practically a pavilion in and of itself) on my way out. Myrna and Edna caught up with me as I was toward the free shuttle into town, so I chatted with them a bit as we drove. They’re really quite sweet, if rather demanding.

The newer areas of Dubrovnik actually remind me a little bit of various neighborhoods in Beijing and a few areas in Hong Kong. The streets are a little uneven and the traffic not well regulated, but that much is true in many areas of the world. I think it actually has something to do with the way the buildings are built, the style in which they’re constructed – I wonder if the city has had much British influence while it grew up.

The bus dropped us off just outside the Old City, which are surrounded by a set of extremely impressive-looking city walls. I would really rather not be the vanguard in any attack against those walls, particularly not with arrows and assorted other unpleasantries raining down on my head, because assaulting a twenty-foot tall, ten foot thick edifice of solid granite with swords and polearms seems like it’d be about as effective as chipping at a brick with a toothpick. Yes, I’m aware that siege engines were typically used in the medieval days, but Old Dubrovnik sits on a massive series of hills. Just getting a siege engine to sit upright would be a rather Sisyphean task.

Of course, with the walls being one of the principle attractions of the city, there were stairs going up almost as soon as I entered. I separated from Myrna and Edna there, deciding that the view from the top would be worth the tremendous climb and €6 admission fee. Turns out I wasn’t wrong. The view was VERY spectacular, although the climb was VERY tremendous. Quite different from how they would be in the US, the walls of Dubrovnik had virtually no guard rails, hand rails, or any real measure of idiot-protection. I could have easily climbed out over the walls and splattered myself against the rocks fifty feet below. I think I prefer it that way – I’m sure it helps keep the stupidity level of the Croatian gene pool rather low.

In a curious twist of coincidence, I met a trio of students from New York up in one of the turrets, and we exchanged pictures up top. It was edging from drizzle to out-and-out rain at this point, but it still wasn’t heavy enough for me to consider it an issue. After all, I had my Umbrella of Power! After a bit of consideration, I decided to continue along the walls and get some pictures of the coast, because the eastern end of the city stood along some cliffs and had a sweeping view of the ocean. In any case, I could always get some stairs back down when I felt ready, right?

Yeah, uh huh. What did we learn in grade school about assumptions? Right.

I did make it to the eastern wall of the city while the rain was still light and got some very foggy but atmospheric pictures of the coast. I was feeling decidedly poetic as I walked along the medieval stone walls, watching the iron gray ocean rippling its way into a haze of muffled white, merging with the sky in the misty distance. Owing possibly to the poetry of Dorothy Parker, I started composing a series of verses in my head, trying to figure out a way to tie in life, love, and the rhythmic waves of a restless sea in an aesthetically pleasing meter. Just as I was really waxing eloquent, however, the sky basically sharted on my head. The heavens split open and started dumping raindrops the size of quail eggs onto Dubrovnik. At the same time, a massive wind picked up off the sea, nearly sending me spinning around with my umbrella. It caught the rain that would have fallen outside the city and whipped them over the walls, so that not only were we pelted from above, but from below as well. Lightning sizzled in blazing arcs across the sky, and naturally I was standing on the highest spot in Dubrovnik with an umbrella the size of a radio tower and virtually no cover. What could I do? I sighed and kept walking, hoping to find some stairs back down into the city before my shoes got soaked again.

Fail. Epic fail. It turns out the city walls only have two places where you can get on or off. I had to walk halfway around the city walls, with rivers pouring down my back and around my feet. It was fortunate that I was wearing my brown shoes, because my black ones were still in recovery from Venice. It probably would have been more fortunate still if I was wearing my sandals, but with the rain and the wind I probably would have frozen my toes off.

So about forty five minutes after the rain started, I finally found some stairs back down into Dubrovnik proper. I found myself outside the Cathedral, and was able to sneak a few pictures of its luscious interior (with its multitudes of people. It’s astounding how bad weather seems to redouble the piety of the masses.) Continued wandering led me to some central avenues and thoroughfares, where I was able to find my way back to the gate. The rain had stopped by now, the sun carefully peeking out behind tattered clouds, and I was feeling brave enough to keep exploring the city. Avoiding the major roads this time, I decided to check out the narrower alleyways toward the northern end of the city, which were characterized by high walls and steep stairs up the hillside. About halfway up a particularly long, particularly steep set of stairs, I realized something - people live in Old Dubrovnik.

This had been obvious from the beginning, but somehow it hadn’t really registered as I was exploring the more touristy portions of Dubrovnik. People actually live there! There were little doors and balconies and windows leading into living rooms where people were having lunch in their underwear. There were lines stretched across alleyways, extending between two nearby buildings, with pink T-shirts and frilly underwear air-drying in the newly revealed sun. As I wandered up and down these narrow paths, I became acutely aware that I was passing right by people’s doorsteps, and it bothered me a little. I’m actually not sure why, because plenty of strangers walk by the front door to my building all the time. I think it had to do with the intimate, almost rustic nature of those Dubrovnik streets. I felt like I was violating the privacy of everyone who lived there with my tourist trappings, gawking at their way of life as though it were something alien and marvelous and novel. What’s so interesting about a guy watching television and eating fish, even if he’s doing it on the Croatian coastline rather than a New York apartment? Would he feel the same way about me if he were wandering by my Washington Heights apartment?

I did consider here what it would be like to live in Dubrovnik. What it would be like if I, say, decided to stay a summer there in a sort of exchange program. I tried to imagine myself stepping out of one of those worn oaken doors onto the cobblestone streets, looking out over those orange slate rooftops and thinking of them not as an attraction, but as home. It was a strange and anxious thought, but exciting at the same time. I was never much for exploring new places and learning new customs – I like having firm roots rather too much for such a thing, I think – but it would make for a good story. Ultimately, though, I can’t imagine it would be that different. Dubrovnik isn’t a third world country after all. Whatever I might do during the day, however I might work, I can’t imagine that the habits and trappings I carry with me would change so much. I’d still write, draw, read, and hang out with friends at the local bar. Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t be kissing too many guys while I was there, but you never know. Maybe Dubrovnik has a thriving gay community that I know nothing about.

Anyway, the sun was blazing full force by this point and I was starting to develop a headache, not to mention the fact that I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. I decided to just take the shuttle back to the Crystal Serenity, where I had a late afternoon snack and some ice cream with Ron and Norm. The evening show featured Donna and Lee Roy, which was fantastic and fun (particularly where Lee Roy did an impression of Ethel Merman), and I only had to spend a little time after dinner working, and that was mostly exchanging e-mails with Sherry.

Tomorrow is another at-sea day, which means some time spent catching up on work and figuring out the logistics of Rome. I’m not blogging as much about the work being done on the ship because a) it’s boring and b) it’s boring, so it should be a short blog day as well. I now return to my marshmallowy pillows with a pair of horror movies nabbed from the ship library.

Oh! Did I mention the ship library? It’s pretty neat – there’s a series of new book releases, international selections, some old favorites, and a very substantial DVD library. Not only do they have an excellent selection of horror movies, they’ve got (whispers) pooooorn! And not just regular porn either – they’ve got seriously gay porn. Unfortunately, the librarian kind of knows me by sight already, so I’m trying to decide if I can work up the nerve to check out something like, “Slick Fast and Furious” or “Sporty Gays.” Maybe I’ll wait until a day or so before the cruise ends, because I’m not sure I could stand her piercing gaze every time I went to check out another horror movie. Well, I mean…she must get guys who take out porn, right? This is a cruise ship! Half the entertainment cast has to be gay!

I’ve gotten fairly outgoing in the past year or so, but I’m not sure I’m daring enough to request “Wild Anal” just yet.

Travelogue, Day Four: Singing and dancing on the open seas.

2008-09-14T22:35:00.000-04:00

Today was actually a really good day.

Well, most of the day was just work, but that’s rather better than fielding complaints. As I had planned, I woke up early and spent a little time in the gym. As is my norm for getting back to the gym after a long time of idleness, I only worked all the major muscles once, but worked them pretty hard. And, as is the norm for getting back to the gym after a long time of idleness, I’m sure I’m going to feel like a giant walking bruise tomorrow. Hrm. Maybe this whole “gym on board” thing wasn’t such a great idea after all.

I went to pick up Pat from the spa after my workout, but found out that she’d already left. Huh. Turns out she forgot I was coming to pick her up and ended up asking someone down in room service to push her back to her room. I’m actually feeling a bit for Betsy now – I also went to pick up Pat for the post-lunch show and ended up spending twenty minutes helping her put on makeup. She definitely needs a full-time escort – someone whose job is to take care of her, and not just an actor trying to double as a caretaker. Philip seriously needs to stop trying to cut corners with this one.

The show itself was terrific. Our cast got to show their stuff, and I thought they were all quite wonderful. Well, by our cast I’m referring to Lee Roy, Richard, Susan, Betsy, and Donna, since Laurence and Brian don’t do any performances until after Dubrovnik, and Lucie doesn’t do hers until Elba. I’ve been noticing this weird sort of totem pole among the actors, based upon this and past Theatre at Sea cruises, where actors with more “star” power seem to get by with just one show, while the others fill in our other performance days with additional singing and dancing. I can’t imagine it’s really a chore for these guys, because our audience absolutely adores them and gets to see more of them, but I still find it sort of…I don’t know…sort of strange and sort of irritating. Meh, maybe that’s just the Libra in me talking.

Oh! In more spectacular news, the dining situation seems to have sorted itself out. Philip apparently persuaded Leo to allow our Theatre at Sea section to have open seating, and people seem to have been able to fill the table space without leaving anyone out or ending up in a bad spot. I spent the better part of half an hour floating near Norm and Ron, muttering commentary about the seating while referring endlessly (and uselessly) to my seating notes. Since this was also the first of our formal nights, I think I just ended up looking like a fretful penguin in my tux while the waiters did all the actual work.

After it looked like everyone was happily seated, I finally took an empty seat and sat down to an excellent meal of chateaubriand with some remarkably lovely company. I got to know David, Sumrall, and Rita over dinner – David was rather miffed earlier about the Fenice Theatre debacle, since they didn’t find out about the time change until after getting back to the ship, but he was easily ready to let it slide by the time dinner rolled around. We had some great conversation, the contents of which are completely lost to my memory, and afterwards Sumrall and I decided to check out the evening karaoke.

Now that was a blast. The place was fairly empty at first, but even so I was really nervous about singing karaoke on board a ship where musical numbers were being shown on a daily basis. It didn’t help that there were a couple of very, very good singers in the crowd, Sumrall being among them, as well as a tall blond Norwegian guy who, despite a thick accent, managed to do an incredibly mean Elvis. Now that was a tough act to follow. A couple of drinks later, however, I ditched my reservations and sang my perennial karaoke favorite, “Losing My Religion.” I got a rousing round of applause for my effort, a declaration from Sumrall that she was very impressed with my voice, and that grand sensation feeling of having sung karaoke wearing a tuxedo.

Yessir, this penguin rocked out tonight.

Travelogue, Day Three: Day two in Venezia, in which G gaily murders everyone aboard.

2008-09-13T23:15:00.001-04:00

Ohhhh…my god. The cruise has barely started and already I’m being assaulted by complaints. Jesus bloody Christ. In this particular case, the problem seems to be with seating. Four of our passengers don’t feel that their dining seats are satisfactory, and naturally I’m supposed to do something about that because clearly my “decision” to shuffle them off to a “corner” of the dining room where they were “separate” from the rest of the group was in very poor taste. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I’d gotten promoted to Dining Coordinator and Maitre D’ of the restaurant when I wasn’t looking. How silly of me. Ugh, and I’ve already spoken to Leo twice today trying to work out seating for the actors. I think he’s going to get palpitations every time he sees me for the rest of this cruise.

Actually, this whole day has been sort of an exercise in things that could go wrong. Sherry had mentioned that she didn’t think all of the people who’d planned to go to the Fenice theatre received our notice about the party being pushed to 2:00 pm. I had hoped to get a newsletter out about that this morning, but owing to a meeting with Philip I didn’t manage to get to it until well after 10:30 am. That, as it turned out later, was just a teeny bit too late for people to actually receive before leaving for Venice. Fuck me with a pumice scrub.

Okay, okay, let’s go about this in chronological order. After that meeting with Philip, I ran newsletters to everyone’s staterooms personally. Betsy had also asked me to just check in on Patricia, as she was going into Venice for the day, so I did that. Pat was in splendid form as usual, declaring in her matronly way that “I’m not even out of my nightshirt, darling. I was planning on just staying in, but thank you so much for calling me. You’re terribly kind.” She’s such an interesting lady. After all that, I headed out to Venice for the day.

The sky were even more dour than yesterday, with the clouds looking downright charcoal in color, and by the time the tender had reached the Piazza San Marco there was a respectable downpour. I, being adventurous and frolicsome, and in a show of sheer youthful bravado for all the aged individuals on the tender, stepped gaily out into the rain with my Crystal Cruises umbrella. They probably all just thought I was a fucking moron.

I ran into Betsy and Donna on the pier, and Betsy proclaimed (rather portentously) that she wanted to talk to me about Patricia because she was “a lot more to handle than I expected.” Swell. While I was busy digesting this bit of news, the rain suddenly intensified into a bonafide torrential downpour. I had to duck underneath a tree while still holding my umbrella, and even then my shoes were soaked through within minutes. It felt like God had decided to dump the Mediterranean onto Venice. I spent fifteen minutes just huddled underneath that tree, watching the water slowly drip through my umbrella, wondering whether I would be spending my afternoon there…waiting for Godot. I mean, for the rain to stop.

It never did.

Eventually I just bit the bullet and marched out into the rain. It actually got to be pretty funny, because everywhere people were huddled underneath archways and tucked onto porch steps, packing themselves in like rats on a high rock watching the tide come in. The Piazza San Marco was practically flooded. In some parts the water came up ankle-high – I found out later, however, that in some years, the water from the river itself rises to submerge practically all of San Marco island under a foot or more of water. I can’t imagine what it must be like owning a shop here.

I waffled around San Marco for a while, trying to figure out the best way to get to the Art Academy without getting even more drenched, then finally gave up and marched my ass to the alleyway north of the Piazza to find a nice mask shop. I then spent a very, very pleasant, terminally indecisive hour trying to figure out just how much money I could afford to blow on a Venetian mask. The answer? About $170. Yup, that’s right. I spent €95 on this black and gold half-mask decorated with feathers, then pulled another €15 on two smaller porcelain pieces. I can think of any number of things I could buy with $170, but dammit, this is Venice, and I don’t know when I’ll come back here again, and these are some goddamn pretty masks. The purchase was totally worth it! I am such a fucking faggot.

Anyway, the rain eventually let up a little, so I was able to wind my soggy way toward the Art Academy. I’d figured I could go in and wander around a little, maybe sneak a few pictures, but upon arrival I discovered there was an admissions fee to get in. And me without any Euros (before you ask, I’d charged my card for the mask purchases). Oh well, maybe next time.

I was hitting time for the Fenice Theatre tour at this point, so I headed back across the bridge and made my way to the theatre, replying on the sketchy memories from yesterday to navigate the twisting streets. The rain still hadn’t let up, and by this point I was having a sinking sensation that maybe there wouldn’t be a Fenice group tour as a result. Maybe it would consist of me and…me, and then I’d have to field demands from twenty-odd octogenarians for their money back. Augh! I choose you, Sherrychu! Save me with your Guarding Booby Smash!

Well, true to form, we had exactly seven people attend the tour. Ron and Norm, Philip and Marilyn, me, and two of our passengers. That’s two passengers out of about twenty. Success! Ignoring the fact that I would probably have complaints waiting for me back on the ship, I went on the Fenice tour with everyone and had a terrific time. The Fenice Theatre – the inside, at any rate – is easily the most spectacular theatre I’ve ever seen. I had thought the set for Phantom was impressive, but in comparison now that’s like calling a turd haute cuisine. I wish I could have taken a picture of the place, because not only is the theatre absolutely MASSIVE, it’s also intricate like nothing else I’ve ever seen. All of the walls – including the ceiling – are covered in gilded leaf-shaped curlicues and decorated with paintings in a classical realistic style. The gilding was actually made using sheets of real gold leaf, shaped to cover the carvings underneath, then welded and polished smooth. And the Royal Box! Good god, the Royal Box. Imagine this plush, effusively opulent room roughly ten feet to a side that’s all blood red velvet and gold drapery, touched with classical artwork here and there, and you’ll have an idea of the Royal Box. The detail of everything in the place is simply staggering.

We were initially going to have a reception after the tour, but since there were only seven of us eating and drinking for twenty-two, it consisted mostly of me stuffing myself with some high-class snack foods and downing almost an entire bottle’s worth of Bellini’s. What can I say? I’d skipped lunch. Anyway, we made our way back to the ship after that, and I spent the rest of the afternoon making programs, answering e-mails, and trying to figure out the logistics of Rome.

Now came dinner time. Dinner itself was amazing, although I spent a good deal of it jotting down notes about how I wanted to rearrange seats for next time, assuming Leo would let me. Unfortunately, almost as soon as dinner was over, those same four passengers from yesterday came to let me know that they were “very unhappy” with the dining conditions. They were very cold sitting underneath a vent, and they felt like they were outcast from the rest of the Theatre at Sea group. At least one of them was unhappy with her company, as she had wanted ostensibly to sit with interesting people (and by interesting she, of course, meant the stars featured on our cruise.) Christ almighty, save me from rich people and their overblown sense of entitlement.

To top off the day, Betsy called me and asked me to pick up Patricia from her spa treatment in the morning. I’m sensing a rather alarming pattern forming. Ron thinks that although Betsy is Patricia’s semi-official companion, she’s also hoping that someone (namely me) will step up and offer to help take care of Pat. Well, I think I speak for the receiving party when I say, “Fuck. That. Shit.” I have already got WAY too much on my plate without dropping special time with Pat on top of the pile.

Ugh. Tomorrow is our first at-sea day, our first formal night, and our first show. I am going to spend my morning in the gym, I think. Blow off some steam. Hope that today doesn’t set an example for the rest of the cruise, because otherwise this ship is going to end up a prime spot for a noir-style murder mystery.

Travelogue, Day Two: Serenity, Venezia, and Dining Issues

2008-09-12T22:42:00.002-04:00

First off, I’d like to say that it’s one thing looking at cruise ships on a computer screen, and another thing entirely to be standing next to one. Good god, these things are MASSIVE. It’s sort of vulgar, when I really stop and thinking about it, but I’m still a little too busy being impressed by the sheer grandeur of the Crystal Serenity. It could easily fit ten iterations of my apartment building and still have room left over.

Okay, starting off at the beginning, as it were. The flight into Rome was uneventful, although I managed to catch all of two hour sleep. Nor can I say much about the flight from Rome to Venice, except that the customs line in Rome was just unreasonably long. I was a little caught between being the asshole American tourist and just speaking in English, or embarrassing myself with my stuttering Italian. I managed a “Buon giorno. Parla inglese?” here and there, but that was about the extent of it. There was an issue transferring from the Venice airport to the ship, where apparently I wasn’t listed as having a transport in despite having air arranged by Crystal Cruises. So they’re currently zero for two in the air department, because they’d fucked up earlier in putting me on the September 1st flight, as opposed to the September 11th. Oh! Annnnd something apparently happened to one of my checked bags, because it came back to me split open and covered in white tape. My guess is that customs had to open to it check it for contraband (does thirty pounds of Pat Neal’s autobiography count?), and then couldn’t figure out how to close it up again, so they just taped the whole thing up and threw it on its way. I’m astounded the thing lasted the trip, and it’s pretty fortunate that the only things in there that were mine were a pair of shoes.

My first impression of the Venice countryside was that (brace yourselves) it reminded me a great deal of Northern Virginia. Before any of you start howling at me, I’d like to note here that the route I took had very little in the way of housing, consisting mostly of isolated groves and fields of wheat or corn. That’s basically all you’ll find in large swathes of NoVA. Add to that Ace of Base’s “Cruel Summer” coming on over the radio as we drove, and the entire scene could have been transplanted a few miles outside Fredericksburg with nobody the wiser.

The cruise terminal – the Marittima Stazione – docked several large cruise ships, including one from Princess Cruises as well as the Rotterdam (or something like that) from Norwegian cruise line. As I already said, it was a fairly impressive sight coming in by car. I shuttled myself over to the cruise terminal, grabbed my check-in number, and promptly saw the Theatre at Sea cast sitting in a series of plastic chairs over by the window. Everyone was already here, of course, and although I’d met Lee Roy, Betsy, Richard, and Susan a few times, I’d never actually spoken to Brian Bedford, Donna McKechnie, Lucie Arnaz, Laurence Luckinbill, or Patricia Neal. Well, first impressions were decent, I guess – I didn’t spaz out and faint, but I was a bit nervous about how I was going to manage all these actors for the duration of the cruise without looking like a complete dunce.

I ended up settling for getting them cookies from the refreshments table. Hey, it works.

Anyway, check-in went smoothly, although they took my passport upon my boarding the ship and traded it to me for a little stateroom card with another of those perennially terrible ID photos. I can’t say I was altogether pleased by this, because the thought of someone manhandling my brand new passport was, at a word, irksome. (Unhand my passport, brigand!) Ah well.

My first impression of the Crystal Serenity’s interior – in this case the atrium – was nothing less than spectacular. Polished marble floors in the atrium, coupled with a truly lovely statue, and a stained glass ceiling give the entire place a thoroughly elegant look. I finally checked in my book bag, since the D&D books were getting awfully heavy, and went into the Crystal Dining Room for some lunch with Philip and Marilyn. That was another amazing affair – it’s a little late and I can’t quite summon the words to describe it, but the dining room is about as upscale as you can get, the sort of place where you feel obligated to wear a suit and tie, wonder about the etiquette of using the utensils, and expect a three digit check at the end. But for the purposes of this trip…IT’S ALL FREE! Please excuse me while I go do a goofy dance.

I had some chilled fruit and some salmon for lunch, both of which were excellent. Although, there was a small yellow berry on the chilled fruit that I suspect might have been a dressing, rather than something actually meant to be eaten. It had a very bizarre, woody sort of taste to it, not altogether unpleasant, but I’m not certain altogether palatable either. The salmon was delicious, but small…really small. It came on a plate the size of a truck tire, which is a concept that has always kind of baffled me, and looked a bit like a little floral arrangement with its various veggie dressings. It was certainly a few orders of magnitude better than the pieces of shoe leather they tend to serve at Columbus deli, in any case, but I felt like I could have done with a more substantial lunch.

After lunch, I finally made it to my stateroom, which is another beautiful monstrosity, hold the monstrosity. It’s basically a small hotel room with a truly ginormous bed – I mean, seriously, the thing can probably hold four people or one really, really fat man – and a little sitting area past the bed. I found myself thinking that I could probably live fairly comfortably in a room like this, even if it is a shade smaller than my bedroom back at the Heights.

Ron gave me a call after I’d finished settling in, letting me know that he and Norm were heading into Venice, and that since this was my first time abroad, they were happy to lead me around the place a bit. I took the offer and, after the administrative shuffle, we found ourselves making our way toward the pier. The sky had turned a very ugly shade of gray-green at this point, the air becoming thick and heavy, and amidst the wrangling of trying to figure out where our shuttle boat was docked we were hit by a torrential downpour. It lasted all of five minutes, and while the three of us took dubious shelter underneath some canopies the shuttle boat arrived. Then we were on our way.

The shuttle boat was almost empty, most people having more intelligence or more sanity than us, and it took us in around the southern edge of San Marco toward the Grand Canal. I really don’t have any comparative words for my first impression of Venice from afar, save maybe that strange bittersweet-sour mix of excitement, anxiety, and anticipation I always get when heading into a new place. Venice definitely has a weighty feel, that press of ages you’ll be hard to find, but the sensation was marred somewhat by the proliferation of cranes and scaffolding that I could see even from twenty minutes away. A necessary evil, I suppose, given the number of ancient monuments in the city in constant need of reconstruction or renewal.

The shuttle boat docked just a short distance from the Piazza San Marco, and as we walked Norm and Ron divulged their collective (and very expansive) knowledge about the city, explaining in great detail where we were going and where I should consider going tomorrow before the party at the Fenice Theatre. We paused in the Piazza San Marco so that I could take some pictures, avoiding the pigeons massed like rats in the middle of the square, before venturing deeper into the city.

I’m not sure I want to go into a blow-by-blow about the individual sights we saw, although it’s probably worth mentioning that I fell in instant love with the Venetian masks. It seemed like there was a mask shop on every corner, its walls covered in these glittering, shining, intricate little constructions. There were masks with crazed wings of gold filigree, masks surrounded by a halo of burning golden feathers, masks painted with flowing streams of musical notation, masks with pointed chins and devilish noses. It’s hard to do them justice with words, to describe the sheer variety and awesomely detailed construction of these masks. Like the interiors of numerous cathedrals I saw in the city, some of these masks were just too complex to be believed – I remember one in particular featured a sort of floral pattern that expanded in waves above the eye holes, spreading out fully three or four feet in diameter as it melded seamlessly with the life-sized face underneath. It was simply an amazing piece of craftsmanship. I wish I could’ve taken a picture of it, or better yet, had the money to buy it. I actually don’t even know how much it cost, but with even the more modest masks weighing in at sixty Euros or more, that one was definitely well out of my budget range. Well, who knows, maybe I’ll come back to Venice one day when I’m oozing money from every pore and buy out the store.

The masks, however, weren’t the only thing that made an impression as I walked through Venice. The place has a definite air, an indescribable feeling I can only describe as Venetian, with its cobblestone streets, narrow alleyways, and high walls. The city is internationally defined by its canals, and they’re certainly integral to the sensation of being in Venice, but in my estimate the city is a great deal more than just the waterways. On a random note, I apparently got fairly lucky, because the sudden downpour cleared out most of the big crowds in the more popular tourist areas and I was able to sample the Rialto without having to force my way through a jumble of people. The view of the Grand Canal across the Rialto is, according to Norm, sort of an essential Venice. I wonder if I can overuse the word “spectacular” in one blog.

Oh, we also went to see a church, which followed suit in the intricately detailed artwork with some truly lovely shrines. Unfortunately, they didn’t allow any photography inside, so I had to make do with some rather crappy sneak peeks from outside the door.

I’m not sure there’s much else to say about my first day in Venice. I did a bit of work after coming back in and met a few more of the Theatre at Sea group as we were heading into dinner. Again, the food was excellent, although they’re still doing the artistic thing where the plate pretty much dwarfs anything it happens to be holding. Jon’s statement, “It’s like fucking a hula-hoop with a needle” comes to mind. This being our first night on the ship, dining utilized open seating. There were a few grumbles about that – particularly among the actors, actually, since they didn’t really want to be separated from each other. I spoke to Leo, the Maitre D’ of the Crystal Dining room, and I understand we have our own Theatre at Sea section, so I’m hoping this will all sort itself out tomorrow.

I didn’t have a chance to withdraw any money or buy anything while I was in Venice, but we’re docked here one more day before we head off toward Dubrovnik. Tomorrow’s the tour and reception at the Fenice Theatre, so I’m thinking that I’ll pop into one of the mask stores and pick something up before meeting Philip and Marilyn and the rest of the Theatre at Sea group.

Man, this has been a huge entry. I think I’m going to cut it short here and go to sleep. In my huge, semi-orgy sized bed with its four dramatically soft pillows. It’s like sleeping on marshmallows!

Travelogue, Day One: Into the Mouth of Madness

2008-09-11T21:35:00.001-04:00

I’m writing right now on board Delta Flight 158, JFK to Rome, and the in-flight movie is Prince Caspian. If I’m lusting after the actor who plays Peter…does that make me a pedophile? I mean, the actor’s eighteen already, I’m pretty sure, and really…what does a few months REALLY matter? On a semi-random note, I just spent the last half-hour practicing Italian under my breath, using that handy-dandy booklet that Greg lent me, and I’m pretty sure the Italian couple sitting next to me thinks I’m insane. Or a giant slut. (“Non non, faccio solo sesso secure. Ho molte malattie!”)

So we should all be aware by this point that, as part of my duties / services to Theatre at Sea, I’m going to Italy for a couple of weeks. In my capacity as Group Director, I’ll be trying to make sure that the passengers on our lovely ship, the Crystal Serenity, are taken care of as far as our Theatre at Sea events go. In this regard, I’ll be taking over for Jess, whose feet, small and dainty and lovely as they are, filled some rather monstrously large shoes. Did I mention that I’m looking forward to this event with a mixture of excitement and boot-quaking dread?

So let’s see…where to begin? Well, I suppose we could start with last night, where I very hastily packed up a few shirts, a few pairs of pants, and some underwear into the little luggage carrier that Myia left me before she went back to Ireland. Yes, I’m a last minute packer. I stuck my tuxedo and a few shoes into my suit carrier, which looked rather iffy, and I rather ill-advisedly decided to pack up all of my D&D gear into my carry-on bag. Yes, I’m a dork! And yes, I plan to be doing some adventure / campaign planning during the wee hours of the morning on board the ship! It’s a bloody cruise ship and nobody on board will be below 50! What the hell ELSE am I supposed to do? Anyway, my carry-on’s a bit heavy, and I’ll go into what happened to my suit carrier in a moment, but my checked bag weighed in at a very sensible 20-odd pounds.

I stayed up rather late last night after packing, and I honestly don’t remember why. I suspect Guitar Hero had something to do with it, or maybe some random fact-checking for D&D, or maybe I was messing with my last bit of e-mail and finances before I left. Whatever. Point is, I woke up slightly later than I’d intended, dropped into Theatre at Sea ‘round 10:30 am, and, in short order, was told to transfer all of my things into a larger suitcase so that we could drag some of Patricia Neal’s books onto the cruise with us. Ummm…okay…

So in between copying all the files I would need for the trip, I was stuffing Pat’s autobiography, each of which feels like a gold brick, into the rather large suitcases that Philip had provided for just this purpose. They ended up a combined weight of 100 pounds, handle like a Mack truck on skis, and overall are a pain in the ass. I love working for Theatre at Sea. Adding to the fun of this last day, Kevin needed a check from me for the security deposit on the apartment we’re moving into. Since he was filming in upstate New York , I had to take an hour to run down to Martha’s and drop off the check, getting back just in time to leave for my flight.

Oh. Now I remember what I was doing last night. I went to see the apartment that Kevin and I are to move into. God…I’m moving to Brooklyn. With Kevin. (Heh – just kidding. Hey Kev!) I’m actually really excited about the prospect, because a) I’m getting tired of living like a college student, b) it’ll be nice having some company I can actually relate to for once and c) it’s new, I guess. I’s fond of new shinies.

Back to the matter at hand, I can’t say much about the cab ride over, except that I crashed somewhere around 73rd and Park and woke up just as we were pulling into the Delta terminal at JFK. Along the way, however, I had this interesting dream where George Dubya was visiting the New York Library at Bryant Park and I got caught trying to smuggle a gun in through customs. My subconscious is terribly anvicilious. I snuck a peek through my luggage before going in, just in case I somehow stuck a Beretta in there without noticing, and proceeded through check-in without much ado. Given that there were a couple of hours before my flight, I went to have some exceptionally bad Chinese food and do a bit of reading before my flight. About halfway through the meal, I got a text from Sherry that read, “Please tell me the flash drive in the computer isn’t the one you’re taking to Venice.”

Aww, fuck. This trip is starting real well.

Philip had left an hour earlier, so there was no way to pick it up again. After entertaining some fairly wild options, the best of which involved Sherry fed-exing the drive to Rome and the worst having her fly it over in a hot air balloon, I realized that there was nothing on the drive that couldn’t be e-mailed to me or uploaded onto our file server. So that was done and, crisis mostly resolved, I proceeded to almost miss my flight, largely owing to a very well insulated toilet stall.

But for the sake of everyone involved here, I’ll skip the specifics of that story.

On teh suck

2008-08-26T01:46:00.002-04:00

I was initially going to talk about work, but then I realized that talking about work is arguably as interesting as an in-depth discussion about the mechanism of paint drying, so to preserve you all I'm going to skip everything. Well, skip everything except the portion where I get to go to Europe for 12 days. On a cruise. That's right, bitches, I'm going on a 12-day cruise to Venice, Sicily, Florence, Rome (well, Citavecchia, really, and yes, I enjoy tossing out random obscure Italian cities knowing that exactly 12% of the general populace and 0.2% of my readership knows what I'm talking about), St. Tropez, and Monte Carlo. I will be doing so on the Crystal Serenity, which is one of the few cruise ships that managed to obtain a Berlitz five-star rating this year. I know this because Cruise Travel magazine's annual publication says so (nyah nyah!)

The caveat? I will be group director for this cruise, which basically means that I will be the go-to bitch for roughly eighty crotchety, angry octogenarians. Is having to smile 12 hours a day worth a free trip to Venice? Obviously my answer was yes, but having gotten off the phone today with one of my irritating, demanding wards, I'm starting to have juuuuuust a few second thoughts. Ah well, worst comes to worst I can go with a ready supply of booze and a few caps of arsenic.

On a different note, I spent the evening playing beer pong with Darien and Brandon, knowing that Darien will be moving out of New York and going to LA come Thursday. Wait for it...wait for it...oh yeah, there it is. That sort of choppy sensation where you realize that a big chunk of your soul just went flying out into the uncaring void. I'm going to miss her a lot.

Mind you, I've gone months before without seeing Darien - most recently where she went to Italy for about three months. It's the sort of thing you get used to when you have a lot of friends in the theatre business. But...knowing that she won't be back in just a month or two, that I'm not going to be able to look forward to an evening of good Thai food and totally random discussions, and her ever solid advice about the pease porridge soup of my love life...that just sucks. If the expression "sucks" might be related to how much it actually sucks by a ratio approximated by the relationship of a Hoover to, oh, an F5 tornado.

Still, she's going to a better place, as it were. LA holds a lot more opportunity for her, and for what she wants to do, than New York does, and...well...as she's stated, it's really just time to move on.

Hrm. I'm usually a bit more eloquent when I'm mildly drunk, but I'm stacking a pretty spectacular hangover on top of that, so the best thing at this point is possibly to just head over to bed.

On review

2008-08-22T02:45:00.001-04:00

So this would be my second post of the evening (technically morning), and I've just spent a little bit of time consolidating my blog posts from the past several years. Was this necessary? Arguably not, but frankly I'd forgotten that I'd written half of these posts, forgotten where I'd written them when I finally remembered that I'd written them, and then I'd forgotten the password for the damn blogging site where I'd written them once I remembered where they were written.

So there, after a really minor effort, I'm finally and fully consolidated. I choose you, Blogger! You will be my online journal of choice from now on, and I will simply include a link to you, beautiful you, wherever I may feel a need to post my blog in the future. We will sing happy songs and weave sad tales together, and I will hold you and love you and never let you go. Wait, where are you going, Blogger? Don't go! I love you! I love you forever! You were going to meet my parents! I have baby clothes picked out and everything! Oh God, why? WHY?!

Oooooookay. Now that's starting to creep out even me.

On a semi-random note, I was reading over what I'd written about Chris (Ah Chris. Dear sweet, funny, straightforward Chris.) back in May, and I actually find it rather funny now. In much the same way that I find the fact that I wet the bed when I was a toddler funny. Obviously, things didn't work out with Chris, and while I would like to say that I'm considerably wiser now and would do things vastly differently, I would also find such a statement highly, highly dubious.

So taking a leaf from Chris's book, actually, I'm going to stop posting about my romantic endeavors for a while. Maybe once I'm fully, solidly, steadily in a relationship, I'll toss in a mention here and there. Until then, the gossip will have to come from somewhere else.

On stinky, unwanted children

2008-08-22T01:11:00.001-04:00

Hello blog. I return. Has it really been only three months since I've written? I find that curiously unfathomable. It seems like entire lifetimes have passed since I last wrote here. Certainly my love life has died and resurrected a couple of times since we last spoke.

Wow, I'm not even sure where to begin. So I'm not going to! No recap for you! Ahahaha! My cruelty knows no bounds, and you will not know all the things that have occurred over the course of the last several months. The ordeals that have changed me from that poor, innocent boy looking for love and happiness to this cynical, surly soul who would mug a beggar for the change in his cup and then kick a puppy on his way home. A blind, three-legged puppy who wags his tail whenever someone walks by, despite months of cold neglect, for the simple joy of a pat on his head. Yeah, that puppy. I ate him. It was delicious.

Yeah, okay, so I dated a few guys, broke up with a few guys (is it breaking up if you haven't even been dating a month?), and now sort of feel like that prototypical gay who seems to flounce aimlessly from one relationship to another. They (whoever "they" are) were right about online dating, by the way - just because it seems like you're compatible on the numbers...doesn't mean there's going to be the slightest bit of chemistry. Dear Jesus have I got stories...if I hadn't scoured them out of my brain. With bleach. I'm sorry, were we talking about something...?

Things now are...interesting and not at all straightforward. I don't particularly feel like elaborating on that, except possibly to say that whenever things SEEM to be straightforward, fortune seems to enjoy dropping a seriously obese kid off into my neighborhood pool.

On knowing there's worse out there

2008-05-23T01:55:00.000-04:00

So I was hanging out with Rick last night at the Bread Factory, and in between Boston clam chowder and cheesecake we came up with a terrific idea:

Dante's Inferno, the Musical. With such memorable musical numbers as, "Oh My God, I'm on Fire," "The Cerberus Shuffle," and "Song of the Flatterers." We're thinking that if it has a high enough budget, we could have a big bronze Satan at the end rise out of his ground, flapping his wings and chewing on the three sinners (with understudies playing the roles of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius). We'll crank the AC really high to simulate the chilling effect of being at the farthest possible point from the Grace of God, and use nifty immersion techniques like a chorus to do the moans of the damned. It'd be so terrific!

On a slightly more serious note, I actually did briefly contemplate the logistics of a musical about a high school drama class that attempts to put on "Dante's Inferno, the Musical" using a shoestring budget. There's nothing very solid, but I decided that they'd have freshmen carrying signs like, "Canto II: The Lustful" across the stage to indicate where Dante and Virgil have ended up. If I'd actually experienced what it was like being in high school drama, I could probably make this idea considerably more successful than anything I could produce at the moment. Oh, and if I could compose. That would probably help.

On hoping prostitution isn't a necessity

2008-05-21T01:05:00.000-04:00

So a rather disturbing event occurred today at work. It seems that Jess will be leaving us to manage a dog walking company. She'll be making *enormously* more than she is making now and she'll be getting benefits to boot, so I'm quite happy for her. At the same time, however, I'm dreading the possibility that I'm going to be asked to step into her place, as the only other permanent full-time employee at my company. Yeah, we're a pretty tiny company, and being a manager of any sort pretty much runs against the grain of my being.

I dunno. I enjoy working at my company. I get paid lunches, lunches paid FOR me, and a very relaxed work atmosphere. So I actually make *substantially* more than my hourly wage seems to suggest...although I don't get any sort of benefits, which sucks. Maybe it's just that sudden and massive changes that may have long-term effects on my surroundings make me very uneasy. While not necessarily a creature of habit, I do prefer that I have a nice, level surface to work from.

Although...I HAVE been contemplating moving to a new job for a while. It'd be nice to have benefits and a pay rate that will actually let me assemble something resembling a savings account, but I kind of hate the idea of sacrificing flexibility for it. Plus, it seems incredibly difficult to find a decent job in New York without offering illicit services to somebody. I think that someone with my level of experience and technical skill ought to be considerably more marketable than I currently seem to be. Wait? Was that a non sequitur? I'm a bit tired right now.

Anyway, perhaps when I hit 30, if I still haven't really done anything to speak of as a creative professional, I'll start contemplating getting my Masters and going back to engineering. Perhaps.

On cheese alerts

2008-05-20T00:05:00.000-04:00

So I've had three rather successful dates with The Boy, and that's been quite marvelous. We entertain each other, we make each other laugh, we have both stimulating and idiotic conversations ("Did you know that you have the softest arm hair of anyone I've ever met?") and we cuddle during movies. Wonderful, right?

Except my intuition is telling me that...well, basically that I'm not really his number one choice. Mind you, he clearly likes me - I mean, good lord, we've had three dates, and we're planning a fourth for next Monday. Who'd be so masochistic as to go on that many dates with someone whose company they don't enjoy? But there's just...something. I don't really know what it is. Maybe tiny hints my conscious mind has glossed over, but that my subconscious has picked up on, which collectively suggest to me that although The Boy likes me, he has his reservations. I have my insecurities, but I don't think that's them talking. There's just...something piercing through my usual armor of excessively over-compensating self-confidence. (That was a joke. Laugh, dammit!)

Of course, I could be excessively overthinking this. Because clearly I don't overanalyze things, or obsess about tiny, stupid details most rational people wouldn't even notice. *Eyeball roll*

Anyway, to keep my entire post from being a self-indulgent whine-fest about The Boy (Oh, you know what? This is totally idiotic. Chris! His goddamn name is Chris!), I'd like to add a little advisory to anyone who's planning to purchase a house. If, in the contract, it's listed as a short sale...run away. Run away like there's a t-rex up your skivvies. The fact of the short sale makes actually purchasing the house SUCH a bloody chore that unless you're paying SUBSTANTIALLY under the market rate, it's just not worth the trouble. I've been wrangling with lawyers and loan agents and real estate agents on behalf of my mother for the better part of three weeks, and it's getting to the point where I just want a zombie horde to chew all their faces off, I want a meteor to fall on Wells Fargo's national headquarters, I want a herd of elephants to stampede the house in question into so much inedible pancake, and I want violently malevolent fleas to eternally plague the original seller of the house for not paying back his mortgage in full.

If cosmic justice is the order of the day, I think Wells Fargo deserves some divine smiting for the shit they've put my mother through the last month or so.

On reconsideration

2008-05-17T21:56:00.000-04:00

So I've had a bit more time to ruminate about The Boy, and I'm thinking I need to take a more balanced approach toward this. Now, anyone who really knows me would probably yell here, "But you try to take a balanced approach to everything!" Well...yes. I'm a pretty cautious guy except where relationships seem to be concerned, because the moment I like someone a great deal (which often happens as early as the first date) it's like I practically want to drag him into a chapel. I mean, really. Wow. Creepy much?

My aunt remarked to me in the past about my cautious streak, and again, I generally agree except with regard to relationships and oh, careers as well. I've already transitioned from engineering pre-med to acting, which is about as anti-conservative as you can get, and I've said I have this nasty tendency to plunge headlong into forming attachments to guys who, frankly, may not have that same attachment to me. I look at Isti and the way she knew Diaz for a good two or there years before they started dating, and now they've been together...what? 9 years? Or I look at Dave, and the way he and Jordan seemed to date in a very casual sort of way before becoming joined at the hip. The way they got together just seems a lot less...turbulent, maybe, than what I always seem to put myself through. Then again, Isti and Dave both are much less...erratic, I guess, than I am. It's just that the difference in our approaches seems to be the difference between slowly gliding down a slope, or hopping off a cliff. The first is obviously a lot less painful, but considerably slower, more cautious, and arguably less fun. At least until the splat at the bottom.

I'm just bringing this up because...I dunno. Maybe it's acknowledging that my natural tendency isn't particularly healthy for my emotions, and I'm trying to insulate myself a little in case things DON'T work out with The Boy. Mind you, I hope that they do (I *really* hope that they do), but at this stage it's probably wise not to become too attached.

Ha. As if I had any choice in the matter.

On squee'ing like a blooming idiot yet again

2008-05-16T02:14:00.000-04:00

So today was the big day, and it's 2:17 in the bloody morning, my head feels like it's stuffed with cotton balls, and I really ought to just get in bed and sleep, but I really, really wanted to get on here and put this down before the moment is lost.

God, where to start? Well, Sherry and I went out drinking like we'd planned. Jess did, indeed, still feel like an ambulatory ball of pestilence and rot, so she opted to go home instead of coming out with us. I exaggerate here - it sounds like I'm suggesting she was a shambling mound shedding disease at every turn. She really just felt like crap and looked a bit wan, is all. Anyway, Sherry and I went out and had drinks at the West Side Brewery. She gave me a brief lesson on the difference between lagers, ales, and stouts, and we mostly made lewd comments to each other the entire afternoon while I fretted endlessly about the date with The Boy tonight. (Yes, we've decided to just call him The Boy for now, rather than that heinous acronym.)

Oh! The reason we actually were drinking at 3:00 in the afternoon (which is so incredibly white trash / hick that I'm sitting here cringing just thinking about it, and I'm imagining everything I'm typing up to be spoken with a heavy Appalachian accent) is that Philip, whom I work for, was holding a birthday party for his 7 year-old granddaughter. And her 30 friends. As Sherry and I were walking out of his apartment we commentated on the numerous children heading up to the apartment. I think we got out just in time, because otherwise I'm pretty sure we'd have been mowed under fairly quickly by a swarm of midgets. There were at least 10 adults supervising the party, but my money remains on the rugrats.

Anyway - Sherry helped me pick out a flower after we drank. It ended up being kind of a bulbous monstrosity anyway - a bright yellow and orange tulip on a stem that was probably two feet long. It could have been used as a bludgeoning instrument if it weren't so floppy. I had a major brain malfunction and didn't ask for the stem to be cut - I think because I liked the two little leaves jutting out near the bottom - and it wasn't really until we were in the subway that I realized how ridiculous it would be for him to carry this thing throughout the evening. Well, I had my bag, and I'm sure we could've stowed it if it became really inconvenient.

So I get to the Thai restaurant I'd scoped out earlier - Pam Real Thai Encore (I know. Did they draw magnet poetry out of a hat or something when they named the place?) I'd never actually been there, but I checked it out online and it had good reviews for a decent price. Anyway, in spite of a miscommunication in which I briefly feel like I've been tossed into the Twilight Zone, we meet up. Being the stealthy son of a bitch that I am, I manage to sneak up on him yet again, this time while he's reading a menu, and give him my flower without feeling too much like a buffoon. His reaction is about what I'd expected - flattered, but a bit unsure how to manage the flower for the rest of the evening. I really should've gone with the orange rose. That was comparatively small, compact, but still stunning and just about perfect.

Anyway, we spent a lovely time at Pam Real Thai Encore (I'm still not tired of saying that). The food was indeed excellent, as advertised, and his company was delightful. I'd actually typed up sort of a summary of the evening, but subsequently decided that I don't particularly want to go into details right now and deleted it all. Let's just say that he surprised me a couple of times, quite pleasantly, and I wasn't nearly as much of a ninny in that regard as I was on our last date. I will say, however, that we decided on our way out of the theatre that there will be a third date. We don't know when or what we'll be doing, but there will be one, and that makes me very happy.

So in conclusion...I'm awfully taken with The Boy. I think you knew that already, but it bears mentioning again. I'm awfully taken with The Boy. I guess what makes this more noteworthy is that...I think he actually likes me back. Perhaps not as much as I like him (would I be arrogant in sticking a "yet" in here?), but hell, it's only our second date. Which kind of brings me back to earth again, and reminds me that I get attached to people just way too fucking easily.

(*Whispers*) But that doesn't stop me from liking him!

On being too lazy to open a closet door

2008-05-14T16:25:00.000-04:00

So I have this interesting little complication at work.

On Thursday, Sherry, Jess (hopefully, if she's not still feeling like the black death walking), and I are going to go out and have a drink to celebrate the fact that Sherry is done with her finals. If I didn't have a date with the boy-whom-I-won't-mention-because-I'm-superstitious-and-don't-want-anything-to-jinx-this (henceforth referred to as the BWIWMBISADWATJT...I think I need an acronym for my acronym) afterwards, we'd probably be getting plastered. On a Thursday night. How trashy is that? But anyway, we'd be getting plastered and having a grand old time, because both Sherry and Jess are good-ole Southern gals with utterly un-Southern sensibilities.

My other co-worker, however, is planning to come with us. I'm going to avoid names, since she has her own real estate business and I don't want to embarrass her in a professional fashion, in case someone searches for her and, with that random one-in-a-million chance, ends up over here instead. Let's just call her...ah...Tang.

Tang is...eccentric, for lack of a better word. She's currently fixated on a man who's in the middle of a divorce and who has two children, and she cannot seem to understand why, precisely, getting romantically involved with him would be a bad idea. She seems to have sort of an intellectual grasp of the concept, but it clearly hasn't sunk in because she comes to Jess or me periodically to confirm that yes, dating the divorcing man is still a bad idea. Bad Tang. No man candy for you.

She also seems to have this unhealthy interest in me, I suppose since we're both Chinese. In any case, she intends to invite two of her friends, both apparently very nice Chinese girls, out drinking with us. And that would be fine, except that it's flagrantly, blatantly, full moon on a cold black night obvious that she intends to set me up with one (or both? Eek!) of these girls. Is it bad that my current impulse is to stand up and scream, "Get your fishy vajayjay twin-pack away from me!"

Jess has suggested that the solution to my problem comes in the form of two words: "I'm gay."

I sidestep a moment here to assure everyone that I am by no means a closet case. I'm not very flamboyant, but everyone in my work place (and all other places I frequent) knows that I'm a total queer. Everyone except Tang, that is, and I'm rather resistant to the idea of telling her. I'm not afraid of any vitriol - I could totally get her ass fired if she starts being overtly hostile around me - but the thought of having to field her questions about the matter, or worse, attempts to "straighten me out," is just wearying.

Yeah, basically I'm not telling her because I'm lazy.

I suppose I'll just let them know in no uncertain terms that I'm not at all interested, and console myself with the fact that I get to meet up with a cute, sweet, hilarious boy immediately afterward. I'm kind of excited about the prospect of getting him a flower for our second date. I was thinking something not too ostentatious - a single rose, perhaps, in lavender. Sherry has, however, been trying to convince me that I ought to get him a calla lily or sunflower or some other bug-eating monstrosity. And I'm like, "I want something sweet and simple. Not something I can use to club him over the head. I'm pretty sure we're past that stage of social development."

But dammit...the calla lily is looking pretty attractive.

On cutting habits without methadone

2008-05-13T14:55:00.000-04:00

I think my attention span for new and swanky things has gotten drastically shorter as I've gotten older...or perhaps the daily grind of work, then rehearsal, then bloody eternity on the A train has simply killed my desire to do, oh, just about anything else by the time I get home. Except Guitar Hero 3. I swear, that game is like crack. It will probably give me arthritis by the time I'm 30.

I am a little annoyed by the work-rehearsal-sleep schedule right now, because I'd actually like to start going to the gym again on a regular basis. That would, however, actually require me to get up at 6 or 7 in the morning in order to get to the gym before work, and since I don't get home until 11:00 or so, that would basically mean I'd become one of those people who doesn't do anything except work and go to the gym. Seriously igh. Still, this sedentary lifestyle is making me feel more than a little bit like a lazy slob. Mind you - I know that I'm not a lazy slob. Since I'm technically working upwards of 10-12 hours a day and I do an immense amount of writing on the train, I'm probably accomplishing more than a good 70% or 80% of the general population. Knowing, however, doesn't really help when I realize I'm getting a bit soft around the midsection. I suppose I could restrict myself to cardio for now, which is a little less time-consuming than the weights regime that I usually aim for, but...I dunno - I'd like to pack some muscle onto my frame before attempting to get cut.

Somehow, in the course of debating all this, it ends up being that the only thing I can readily sacrifice is sleep.

At least I've more or less managed to cut World of Warcraft out of my life for the time being. There's a time-consuming addiction if there ever was one.

On springing eternal, as always

2008-05-09T01:15:00.000-04:00

Psst...can I tell you a secret, oh online blog? And it will be a secret, because nobody knows about you. None of my friends are aware that you exist. Only the faceless crowds who browse the community might stumble across you, and I don't care if they know. Will you be my hole in the ground? Will you hear my little secret?

I like a boy. He's sweet, adorable, witty, and hilarious. We've only gone on one date, but I like him. I like him a lot.

Keep this to yourself. Let milkweeds and bluegrass and stalks of fennel grow over the earth with which I bury this secret. Let them whisper it into the winds, if they like, and let that wind carry it like dandelion fluff around the world. I don't mind, because by then, I'll have either let him know just how much I like him, hoping he feels the same way, or I'll have once again found myself in the position of the fool.

And I'm okay with that.

On the inanity of online journals

2008-05-07T23:35:00.000-04:00

It occurs to me that half the reason I don't post more on online journals is that I don't really consider the day-to-day details of my life really much worth mentioning. I mean, would I really care, years later, whether I had pizza or salmon for lunch today, or whether I had to fence yet another phone call from someone with too much money and too few manners?

I have a pair of journals from when I was somewhere in the vicinity of 7 or 8 years old. They were required writing when we first got into class...and although I'm glad I kept them, I wonder a bit what the hell the point was. To make us write? We had English assignments for that. Maybe they were meant to make us more introspective, more...hmmm...thoughtful, maybe. Or however thoughtful you can be at 7 years old. I'm looking at an entry right now, and it reads: "Describe how your life might chang if there were no t.v. It will chang a little then I'll have to work every day your friend Yingzhi"

Yes. Very thought-provoking. I'm a little astounded that, even though I was only 7 and relatively new to the US, I wasn't able to come up with something a little more interesting in half a bloody hour. Come on, younger me! You're embarrassing me! I'm also mildly disturbed that we were encouraged to befriend an inanimate object. Isn't that like saying, "Here, since you're so socially inept you can't seem to get along with the other kids, why don't you try talking to this bundle of notebook paper instead! It'll be great for your self esteem!"

Or is that cynical of me? *GRIN*

I probably shouldn't make fun of it. I might not have fallen in love with writing if it weren't for those strangely nerve-wracking half-hours every morning. And truthfully, I'm pretty glad I have this little window into my much younger days. I'm not sure there are that many people who can say the same.

On money shots (or lack thereof)

2008-05-06T15:26:00.000-04:00

I'm of a mind to start talking about space fish and tropical pink dolphins and boxes that talk and an evening sky in which alien stars peer down and offer differing opinions about which team will win the World Cup.

But I'm not going to talk those things today.

I have been thinking about various stories that have been swirling around in my head since time immemorial, or maybe just time that I'd prefer to be immemorial. My neurosis won't allow me to physically work on more than one story at any given time, so while I'm wrangling with Homecoming the rest of these ideas are floating around in a sort of metaphysical pease porridge. I'm sort of hoping the simile won't extend too far into the realm of truth, and that I won't have to throw out the entire foul concoction after nine days (or years, as it may be).

It is, in fact, possible to think too much about a story. You can outline yourself to death (or, in this case, boredom, which may as well be death). I actually have monolithic towers composed entirely of binders organizing my notes and character profiles and histories and worlds and systems of magic and dead gods, and I suspect by sheer press of imagination they're on the verge of attaining sentience. I spent so much time trying to sort out all these little details and to make sure everything was not only coherent, but novel and interesting and possibly even pertinent that in the end, I got cold feet when it came to actually writing those stories. I keep thinking I'll get back to them someday...and who knows, maybe I will. For now, however, I'm coming to adopt a much less...premeditated...method of writing.

You know, after all meandering I do in these posts, you'd think I'd eventually come to some sort of grand, majestic, life-affirming point. But really, I kind of just dribble off and go nowhere. It's like a poorly shot porno that ends before the money shot.

On dues

2008-05-01T12:04:00.000-04:00

My coworkers are easily among the most patient people alive, because I am an incredibly difficult person to work with. This is not because I am myself difficult, stubborn, stupid, or incompetent...but because more often than not I am WAY too chipper for any given work day, enjoy singing completely random songs while I work (today's selection, "Poor Unfortunate Souls" brought to you by Walt Disney's "The Little Mermaid"!), am a nosy git and have a habit of looking over people's shoulders when they work. They also suffer the brunt of my angst whenever I'm in the throes of yet another crush on yet another cute, delightful, marvelous, and utterly uninterested boy. I love my coworkers (except when Jess is in a mood, which she's occasionally in. She's delightful when she's had enough sleep and isn't being stressed by a hundred batty old rich women.)

Although I am surprised one of them hasn't just stood up and bitch-slapped me at some point in the past. After being on the receiving end of endless questions from the coworker I mentioned in an earlier post about why, exactly, she shouldn't date this divorcing man, I've gotten a certain appreciation for how annoying an infatuated person can be. I blame it on my sparkling personality and charming demeanor. How could you possibly hit somebody as eloquent and as pleasant as me?

Changing topics, I'm going home to Virginia to help Mom move from her temporary apartment into a new house. I've been meaning to talk with her about certain things that have been occurring in my life, so I expect that by the end of the weekend we will have either grown closer to each other emotionally or be attacking each other with sharp objects and nuclear devices. Maybe both!

On utter irresponsibility

2008-04-30T11:17:00.000-04:00

It's 8:17 in the morning, I've gotten roughly half an hour of sleep because I stayed up most of the night doing yet more of those bloody irresponsible things I'm so incredibly fond of doing (but not what you think), I'm currently so pepped up on caffeine (my first caramel macchiato in years, because I suspect I will be in dire, dire need of caffeine this entire day), and the foremost thing running through my mind right now is how someone can become such a cynic that they can sit in the elevator with you and not respond when you smile and wish them a good morning.

The second thing running through my mind is what a fracking idiot I am. Funny how we revisit these themes every time I blog, no? Except you get a double helping today. Woot for you. I should rename my blog, "Warning: Incoming Wangst!"

On coworkers

2008-04-30T03:21:00.000-04:00

It's 3:22 am, I'm still up for no apparent reason, I can tell that I will probably go to sleep and wake up around 8:00 am for no apparent reason, and I'm blogging because I'd decided today during lunch that I'm bloody blogging tonight and no amount of exhaustion was going to stop me, by golly!

I truly, truly wish I had a shot of whiskey or tequila something strong and vile and suitably engine-cleaning right then, because the end of that statement demanded a shot of something that really ought never to touch a human esophagus. Although, in very instantaneous retrospect...anything that ends in "by golly" probably doesn't deserve a drink stronger than warm milk.

I digress here to mention how much I hate warm milk. This is a story I often tell friends who (I think) haven't heard it before, and I'm reasonably certain that's the case for most of my friends in New York and a goodly many in Virginia. Basically, during my first few years in China, while my father was getting his degree here and my mother was supporting him by working at the local photography factory, my grandparents on my mother's side felt that the most suitable breakfast for a growing boy was boiled milk with an egg or two made sunny-side up tossed into it. Yes, it tasted about as good as it sounds, which is to say I'd almost rather have eaten live, wriggling nematodes. Almost. But being the obedient Chinese boy I was supposed to be I ate it and never complained. The entire awful concoction was also laced with a small amount of sugar - arguably to make it more palatable - but really it just lent the thing a sort of insidious quality that makes me surprised I still like sugar as much as I do. It's like it was trying to fool me into liking it. Here, little boy, eat this! It's sweet, so it must be good! What? What do you mean this tastes like soggy pig bladder?

So, to this day, warm milk and sunny side up eggs, together or otherwise, are two substances guaranteed to nauseate me.

This may also be part of the reason I get maybe one good night's sleep in seven.

Anyway, back to work - one of my coworkers is romantically fixated on a man going through a divorce with his wife of several years. He has three children. She doesn't seem to understand why, precisely, getting involved with this man would be a bad idea. My general manager and I have actually spent some time trying to explain, much as you might to a ten year-old, why dating a divorcing man is generally a horrendous idea. ("No, honey - you can't date the emotionally unavailable man with three children. Now go back to bed.") I couldn't believe I was having the conversation. It smacked of trying to explain to a person why strapping bleeding beefcakes to her ass and jumping into a shark tank was a bad idea.

Halfway through, however, I stopped wondering how on earth this woman had managed to avoid being eaten by ravenous sharks the last thirty-odd years, and started wondering whether this was really what mainland China was doing to its people. Now...I've lived in the US since I was five, and for all intents and purposes I am an American. I still do hold to some strong emotional bonds with certain Chinese ideals, but on the whole, they've been filtered through my parents and, thus, aren't nearly as concentrated as they might have been had I grown up there. I look back on my parents' marriage - the colossal, possibly even leviathan, gaps in communication; what seems an almost complete unwillingness not only to compromise, but even to accept the other person's viewpoint as potentially valid; the years of festering resentment over the most trivial matters - and in that context my coworker doesn't seem all that strange at all.

I haven't visited China in ten years, but relating to people, communicating with people, and being willing to open yourself up to people can't be such an alien concept in my ultimate homeland, can it? I mean, humans by their very nature need to reach out and touch people, find other people in sympathy with them, socialize! Can an entire society exist that makes a woman fundamentally unable to understand why, exactly, a man who is trying to sever a very strong emotional bond with the woman he's loved for years isn't exactly prime dating material? And so unable, in fact, that I think she's asked me to clarify at least a dozen times the last two weeks why, precisely, seeing him is probably a bad idea?

Unless, god forbid, this is some kind of bizarre Chinese mating ritual? "I'll talk to the computer guy about my fixation with the divorcing man! That'll make him like me for sure!"

Don't laugh. I wouldn't be contemplating this if it weren't a definite possibility.

On repetition

2008-04-20T03:07:00.000-04:00

A certain consideration I've had recently, is the repetition of certain events in our lives. The idea that certain things, however different their superficial characteristics, are actually an iteration of the same kind of things that we've already experienced and have come to accept as a part of our lives. In some ways, I wonder if, even if we believe we seek out new and novel experiences, we actually have a subconscious tendency to draw to ourselves what is familiar and, however tired we believe them to be, comfortable. I don't think any creature can exist in a state of constant flux, regardless of how much they might believe they need the stimulation of novelty.

Is it an indication of cynicism or experience, when one looks at something that ought to come as at least sort of a surprise and says, "Hmmm...that's new, but nothing I didn't expect." If things always change, do they, in fact, stay the same as far as we're concerned? Does it make sense that someone can get used to even a state of consistent instability?

Sometimes it feels like I'm running in circles, even when I think I'm taking a left turn into new territory.

On what's in front of us

2008-03-24T03:22:00.000-04:00

Today was a good day.

(Editing note: What the FUCK was I thinking writing such short, unrevealing blogs? "Today was a good day"?! This is meant to help me remember with fond nostalgia my misspent youth? Hell, it's been barely half a year and I can't remember the tiniest detail about what the hell happened on this apparently good day. Ugh! Get it together, past me!

--Edited 8/22/2008)

On dilemmas

2008-03-03T15:46:00.000-05:00

Why do we do this, form these endless iterations of ourselves that circle around the real thing, like vultures around a camel dying of thirst? Why do we hurt the ones who would be close to us, for fear that they might actually touch us at our core, and scathe ourselves no less in so doing.

Why do I constantly spout rhetoric that has nothing to do with the real matter at hand. God, I'm such a Libra (or a procrastinating fool. That works too.)

I stand at a Gordian knot, but I can't seem to find a knife sharp enough to cut it with. And the two obvious solutions tear and shred at two things so central to me that to act on one or the other is to deny something fundamental about myself. Unfortunately, time is not on my side.

On still dodging responsibility

2008-02-28T15:22:00.000-05:00

My god! He does it twice in the same month! Shock! Insanity! Horror! Madness! Steamed Vegetables! Potatoes! With cheese! And a nice juicy steak done medium rare, I think. I'd add some kind of wine as well, if I knew anything about wines, but worst comes to worst I can always e-mail Geoffrey and ask for his suggestion. The man can rattle off a wine description off the top of his head that means as much to me as if I were to rattle off the specs to my optimal gaming machine to the nearest mountain goat.

That would suppose that I'd find a mountain goat somewhere in Manhattan. Weirder things have happened, I'm sure.

Anyway, taking a short break from the grindstone (Ow! My nose!), I'm rather pleased to report that Homecoming, Part Two: Lost, is actually coming along rather nicely. I've gotten a few more pages done, and it doesn't sound retarded in my head, which is always a good thing. The funny thing is that I already know the climax of the story - I wonder if that's true of most writers when they begin on something new. Certainly, a common method (as I understand) is to take a seed scene - something really interesting happening, a point of high drama - and then to build the rest of the story around that. Multiple seed scenes, of course, need only to be linked so that the story follows in an interesting, consistent manner.

The climactic scene to Homecoming has been...hrm...directed, for lack of a better word, in my head already. It's the scene that, theoretically, should make everybody reading the story jump out of their seats and scream, "Oh my God! G, you bastard! I hate you!" I confess I take a certain sadistic delight in contemplating my audience's reaction to the story's ending, at least partially because as things currently stand...well...aheheheheh...

Actually, I lie like a dirty mangy dog begging food from an abusive, alcoholic master, who in this case is probably my muse. (Oh god! I'm sorry! I'll write more often and more consistently! Please don't make me write crappy yaoi romance!) I'm quite torn about Homecoming's ending, as I actually have two of them envisioned. One is actually sort of an addendum to the other.

One is much more appropriate to the nature of Homecoming as a horror story, and a semi-Lovecraftian one at that. The other, however, fulfills my own vision of the world, and of relationships, in a much more satisfying way. They both have their merits, and they both have their flaws. I find myself unable to choose between them, because they appeal to two equally strong, and vastly different, aspects of my personality.

Perhaps, in the course of writing part 3, the most appropriate ending will come to me.

Oh, and yeah...I occasionally use my lunch breaks at work to write. Wanna make something of it? Huh? Want a little taste of the Chinese ninja skills? A little bit of thunder and lightning to brighten up your day? Yeah, I didn't think so. Move along, move along.

On magnifying the situation

2008-02-27T21:27:00.000-05:00

So I just went to see Definitely, Maybe, and while it was in most ways fairly standard chick flick fare, it was rather exceptionally well done chick flick fare. Well, the movie was slightly unusual in that it started with the end of a relationship - a divorce, to be precise - and moves from there through varying stages into love and happiness of varying degrees and types. It has, of course, a happy ending, but we all knew that. The presence of Ryan Reynolds may also have had a factor in how much I enjoyed the movie, because I think he, with his combination of flippant humor and charm, was perfect for the movie. Chris Evans has sort of a similar appeal, but probably would have seemed entirely too young for the role.

Okay, okay - and Ryan Reynolds is unreasonably attractive. As is Chris Evans.

At any rate, what's more striking is that as Luis (yes, we're still friends) and I walked out of the movie theatre, my reaction was a combination of, "What a lovely movie," and a sort of resigned, "Now if only reality actually worked that way." Since I'm almost constantly looking at and evaluating my own reactions to things, my second response was, "Huh...when did I become a cynic?"

I say this because the events of the movie happen over the course of...actually, over the course of over a decade. That's a very long time for relationships to evolve, for that happy ending to come, and so it's probably even a fairly realistic look at the deal. We fall in love with people, but circumstances aren't right. People fall in love with us, but for whatever reason we feel we can't reciprocate that love. We fall out of love with people whom we've loved for years. We fall back in love with people who now are attached to others. The movie - almost all movies, really - supposes that somewhere along the line, we find somebody that will make us happy, and vice versa. For the rest of our lives.

And...I know I used to believe that back in high school. I certainly believed it in college as well. But somewhere between college and now, possibly when I came to New York, all these doubts started sinking in. Kind of like particles of dust and ash that slowly stain a white (or mostly white) sheet, and suddenly one day you look up and realize the sheet has turned more of a...peppery gray, than the color it used to be. Somehow, my initial reaction isn't to say, "Oh yes, true love, the kind of love that lasts, is possible for everyone" anymore. And, what bugs me is that this happened without my conscious realization. I just sort of looked up from my life today and realized that somewhere along the lines my response to happy endings went from "how cute" to "how unrealistic."

I'm certainly not bitter (at least...not as far as I'm aware). I'm still certainly hopeful, and thus optimistic. I don't really think I've gotten cynical, and yet...there it is. Or maybe it's just this introduction of a middle level, because I'm inclined to believe that even the most jaded cynic still believes in love and happiness, kind of like jewelry that becomes tarnished and encrusted with grime over the course of varying ages. Or, hell, maybe it's just all the things that have surfaced in my life lately, all sort of happening at once.

Or perhaps I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. Or an antmound, for that matter. I've been told that I do that.

Because I suddenly feel considerably better. Once again, the power of writing, folks.

On endings and new beginnings

2008-02-26T07:38:00.000-05:00

I got to thinking this morning about the cris-crossing threads of our lives, the people that we meet and form connections to, the things we do that may extend with far-reaching consequences we're never even aware of, the subtle influences we exert simply by existing, by dreaming, by reaching for some misty, elusive goal of happiness that we may not even recognize when we achieve it. Happiness is a rather abstract concept, after all, and both very relative and very subjective, lacking definition if taken out of context.

This reminds me of a talk I had with Myia, actually, wherein she said that life can't be just one big high, or it loses context. It has be a rollercoaster ride, with some deep troughs and long, flat stretches of middling interest, if the highs are to have any sort of meaning. The points of light are only interesting if they stand out from the patches of shadow.

Of course, inherent in that is the thought that we can't really sustain happiness. It comes and it goes, flickering flashes of light to illuminate a journey otherwise shrouded in twilight. And we walk from point to point, constantly aiming for these little motes, these little fireflies in the night, following them toward a destination that is still largely abstract.

Regardless of the incredible stresses that came with it, I was happy working on the Wild Party. I didn't really think about it that much at the time, because the commute and the hours were utterly horrendous, making the thing sort of a mixed pleasure, but I found a certain measure of peace working with the cast and seeing the show each night. It culminated and flared with a spectacular, wild (hardy har har), and utterly insane cast party afterward, wherein I consumed ENTIRELY too much alcohol for my own good. And now it's over, the lights are dimmed, and the fires have burned down into a pile of cold ashes. I'm saddened by it, but knowing that it had to come to an end eventually, I also have faces, moments, scents, and laughter stored away now. Motes to keep me warm.

I hope I'll get to see them all again, in the meandering, wandering threads of our lives. In the meantime, Musicals Tonight starts up again next week. I thought I'd be happy for a week off...but right now I'm just wishing that next Monday would hurry up and arrive already.

On finishing last

2008-02-25T05:19:00.000-05:00

I know this is true. I know we do. I know that the world generally tears us apart, chews up the pieces, and spits out the bones. I know it's thankless. I know it's mostly unappreciated. I know that, in all likelihood, I'll be bitter and regretful when I'm fifty.

I also know it's necessary. I know I can't see a friend walk home when I could pay for the cab ride. I know I can't ignore it, when a friend is in pain, and I can do anything at all to help.

I have to believe the world needs us. That we make a difference, however small. That we make an impact, somehow. I have to believe that we have meaning, that all things we do have meaning, with or without a God to watch over us, and that to do the right thing is important not because it ensures a place in some paradisial afterlife, but because the world is made a better place because of it.

I was reading "A People's History of America" today - borrowed slightly from Jeremy - and I need to believe that in spite of our...self-centeredness, our greed, our pride, our egocentrism, somewhere deep inside we all of us know what's right, and we all of us are ultimately important in a deep and personal way.

On dodging responsibility

2008-02-19T15:47:00.000-05:00

[singsong]
Iiiii'm blogging at wooooork...
[/singsong]

My officemates leave tomorrow to manage the cruise to the Amazon, and I'm staying here to (finally) do proper maintenance on the two computers that we have. If that sounds like I got gypped...I really didn't. As interesting as it might be to visit the Amazon, I think I'd be much happier doing it by myself or with a select group of friends than with the hundred-odd extraordinarily wealthy and equally extraordinarily crotchety people our group director will have to handle. She's decided she's going to be drunk for the next two weeks, and having dealt with many of these people over the phone the last month...I frankly don't blame her. Rich people really suck sometimes.

Anyway, as one might imagine, it's been insanity today, with people calling left and right asking for confirmations and tickets and final updates and chickens and black lambs and the lost headdress of Ramses II. Despite being busy with a number of things, I've still managed to feel a profound sensation of discontent the majority of the day. I could, of course, ascribe this to the fact that there just wasn't enough work for my ginormous brain to handle, but more likely it's the result of a) not knowing where "Homecoming, Part 2" is going, b) the sheer number of phone calls I was getting, thereby interrupting me roughly every 10 minutes, c) having to suddenly take on extra work I knew almost nothing about because Jessica (my group director) was already overloaded with handling last-minute details (including the fact that the INS sucks monstrous donkey anus, and therefore her husband can't go with her on the cruise), and...

Of course, d) my recent talk with Luis. That's a kicker right there.

I actually don't think anything has necessarily changed. There is only, perhaps, a mindset shift on my part. I realized that, despite my intention of just taking the relationship one day at a time, I still managed to have certain expectations. I guess I'd hardly be human if I didn't, entering into a relationship for the very first time. And Luis didn't mirror them. A little disappointing, perhaps, but I'm certainly not going to fault him for it (I know you read this blog occasionally, Luis. Despite all my incessant wrangling and slightly masturbatory contemplations, I really am fine with where we are. Really. Honestly. Promise. Stop staring at me like that. *Poke*).

What is contributing to the general malaise, however, is a sensation of overall purposelessness that not even writing has been able to altogether dispel. I'm partially inclined to think that maybe, just maybe, it's a result of seeing so many of my friends achieve a measure of success that I just haven't been able to manage. It's a bit of a blow to the ego, despite my acceptance of the vicissitudes involved in a theatre career (Yay! I got to use the word "vicissitude"!) And...maybe a good part of it is also that I keep having this inclination to look ahead, I mean years ahead, and wonder whether I'll be in effectively the same place that I am now. That would be a decidedly unattractive view.

You can't do that, I think, in a theatre career. You can't honestly plan more than a few months ahead (unless you're a bigshot with some true leverage, at which point I wouldn't even be thinking about this crap.) My attempts to take each day as it comes are generally foiled by this itching need to tiptoe over to the wall and look over, even when I know there's a good possibility that somebody's waiting on the other side with a big-ass can of Mace and a penchant for dissuading guys like me from trying to look too far ahead.

Oh well. I'm having lunch with Darien tomorrow, and we haven't really even talked in such a long time, and I'm going to have cheesecake, dammit, and we'll talk and laugh and fend off a zombie apocalypse with nothing but a rolling pin and a pair of heavy-duty steel spatulas. Woot!

I actually feel better already. Writing really does make everything better!

On change

2008-02-18T19:08:00.000-05:00

So, Luis and I have decided to be just friends, for now. And...although I'm a bit saddened, I am rather surprised to find that I'm hardly devastated or heartbroken over it. I'm disinclined to overanalyze my own reaction too much in this, excepting possibly that if I can take it so calmly, maybe it wasn't mean to be after all. My voice of insecurity is, of course, trying to come up with all sorts of reasons why it might have happened this way, but I'm happily and quite stolidly ignoring it. In the end, I'm okay with where we are.

That said, however, I'm wobbling between vaguely desirous and utterly disdainful of rejoining the dating pool. I don't particularly feel like trying to start up another relationship anytime soon...or even dating anyone casually, for that matter. Maybe I'll feel differently in a few months. Or if the right guy happens to suddenly show up, I suppose.

In other news...there actually isn't much in the way of other news. Still working on bloody Homecoming, Part 2, and the story is sounding sillier and sillier in my head the more I review it.

On reconciliations

2008-02-16T03:15:00.000-05:00

I was thinking, sitting on the john today, that part of being happy in life is reconciling the degree to which you are lucky, and the degree to which you have put in effort. We are all of us fortunate, in some degrees, and with the fortune of what we are given, what we may accomplish in a lifetime is then measured by the amount of effort that we exert. The question then, I suppose, becomes how much may be accomplished through sheer effort, given however much luck, seredipity, or fate intercedes in our lives. It seems a fairly simple equation, but the dynamics end up being incredibly complicated when measured over the course of even a few years, much less a lifetime.

For example, my being here in New York, I ascribe to my decision to try out for a role in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," some six years ago, in which I got the role of Theseus. However, I would never have even contemplated trying out for a role if a) I weren't a part of the Writing Minor's mailing list and b) we hadn't just seen "Much Ado About Nothing" a week earlier as a class field trip in my critical reading class. Of course, then it may be said that I certainly wouldn't have chosen to be a part of the mailing list if I hadn't developed a love and appreciation for writing back in the fifth grade. This, in turn, was actually the result of playing entirely too much Nintendo, and reading a stupid number of those "Worlds of Power" novelizations back in grade school. The actual catalyst for the writing, however, was a snowy Thanksgiving day, wherein I got the idea in my head to write my own "World of Power" book, based upon a video game (or several video games, rather), with a much maligned hero rather similar to me, adventuring in video games not covered by the Worlds of Power series. But then, I wouldn't have been playing Nintendo in the first place if my father hadn't been one of two people to place extremely highly in a regional English competition back in China, and who were elected to come to the US to study as a result. The progression continues, in an endless chain, back to that mysterious moment when a superdense molecule of matter decided it would become a universe.

Sounds rather like fate, doesn't it?

Then again, we hardly know, do we? We have never experienced the alternatives, so of course in a certain sense the progression of events seems to be locked into a rail. As Neil Gaiman puts it, and so eloquently, the Garden of Destiny forks many times, with each path opening up countless others, but at the end of your life you will turn back and see but a single path extending behind you.

Existing in a closed system, as we do, we can hardly extricate ourselves to observe the situation from a truly objective standpoint. It's Shroedinger's Cat on a cosmic sort of scale, and the only one who can really observe the state of matters without entrenching himself into the mess is...well, God, of course.

Is there a point to all this? Not particularly. I was just thinking, as I often do, and following this flickering trail of considerations into whatever wacky places they might choose to take me.

On a somewhat more grounded note, "The Wild Party" is going rather well, and it's hard to believe we're nearing the end of our second week. Saturday matinee shows start tomorrow, and Luis is coming to see it in the afternoon. I wonder if we can catch a movie tomorrow night after the show...*ponder ponder*

On another edition of late-night rambling

2008-02-13T05:07:00.000-05:00

So, here we are again. Blogging late at night is awfully peculiar sometimes, because for reasons stated in an earlier blog, I feel like I'm a completely different individual very late in the evening. Which, I suppose, I am - tucked away in the quiet darkness after a day's rush, with only the pale monitor light and the flickering orange sodium glare to keep me company...I can put away the spiked armor for a while.

It was snowing earlier today, and as a result the lamplights outside have that peculiar fuzziness to it, a kind of luminous ambiance that only happens when the light bounces off the newly fallen snow. I can look out the window and see that much of it has already been plowed away - the streets are just glistening black asphalt and the sidewalk this pitted mass of slushy gray - but it feels, nevertheless...serene. First snowfall of the year. How lovely.

I'm actually blogging now because I can't sleep, and I don't particularly feel like doing any of the other non-constructive things I do when I can't sleep. I'm fairly sure I'm to blame for this one. I got home incredibly late after going to Jonathan's party, so woke rather later this past morning than I'd have liked. I ended up napping on the subway, but chose to bed incredibly early tonight. I'm inclined to think there were also dreams involved somewhere in there, and that they were a fairly standard chaotic mess with just enough subconscious meaning to make me wake and wonder, "What the hell was that?" I wish I could remember - they may even have been important.

After my Eberron session this past Sunday, I related an anecdote to my group about the way I tend to react to things. Or, rather, how my mother told me I reacted to things when I was a child. When my cousin and I were both very young, we were virtually inseparable, although we had vastly different personalities. If she, or any of my aunts, crossed my cousin, my cousin would cry and scream and stomp her feet and do everything in her power to make sure everyone knew the extent of her displeasure, for however long she remained displeased. I, on the other hand, would seem to shrug off the offense as something of no particular moment. I would then flush my mom's earrings down the toilet when she wasn't home.

Mom always said she wasn't sure which reaction she preferred, but mine was definitely the more disconcerting of the two.

My friends laughed when they heard the story, but Kay mentioned a rather peculiar angle that I hadn't even considered before.

"You know what's weird," she said, "is that your cousin reacts in a stereotypical guy way, and your reaction is exactly what we'd think of as a stereotypical girl reaction."

I just nodded, and made a mental note to kill off her character next session.

No, not really, but it DID strike me as a rather interesting observation. I'm not really prone to machinations or subtle plotting, nor to thoughts of dire vengeance, but as I mentioned to my group, I have noticed that sometimes I do things subconsciously that, after the cogs fall into place, shock me with how utterly calculated and manipulative they seem. But I think that's hardly unique to me, and in fact is a sort of universal truth. We orchestrate things and people in our lives, trying to structure them in a way that makes sense to us, knowing exactly what we're doing all the while, but rarely allowing ourselves to consciously accept our subtle manipulations. It reminds me of this statement I read in the Sandman, where Death proclaimed that we really know everything, but pretending we don't is the only thing that makes life bearable.

I segue here into a tangent, owing its roots to a pair of stories Luis sent me earlier tonight. Two pieces of queer fiction, the links to which I have unfortunately forgotten. Both were very well-written, but the first dealt with an extremely worldly guy being dealt, as it were, his first bout of real romance instead of the series of anonymous flirtations he was used to. The second concerned a rather violent response to infidelity. I liked the first a great deal, but the second struck me as rather...unrealistic, I guess, with an ending I can only describe as peculiar. The stories, nevertheless, got me thinking, which is always a hallmark of good writing. Or maybe not - even terrible writing gets me thinking, most days.

I never went through a slutty phase. Or maybe it was just a really, really diluted slutty phase phase compared to every other one I hear about, in that it consisted of maybe three guys over the course of about a year. I don't really regret this - I came out of it, after all, without any lingering presents from those sporadic one-night stands, and in the end I consider them fairly educational. I occasionally wonder what it might've been like - what I might've been like, actually - if the practical portion of my sex education were more inspiring, but that's mostly water long gone out to sea. It does, however, highlight another pecularity of mine (or maybe not so peculiar, but I'm going to avoid that until juuuuust a little later).

I've noted that when I have a crush on someone, I very, very rarely wonder what it might be like to get him in bed. That's just not where my mind goes, initially. Instead, I wonder what it might be like to hold him, to be held by him, and knowing that it's exactly where he wants to be right now. I wonder what it might be like to lie in his arms as we watch a movie on the couch or in bed, or to run along the river in the summer while it's pouring rain. To hear him whisper my name while we stand on his (or my) doorstep after a particularly inspiring night out. In short, I wonder what it might be like to have a relationship with that man.

I wonder whether a slutty phase would've broken this trend, or whether it's a much more deeply enmeshed part of my personality. Myia and Darien have both told me that's rather sweet, because it suggests that what I really want is affection, not just another guy I can hop into bed with, and most days I think it's a good thing that I don't...jump...for a physical encounter. Or, at least, the physical encounter being merely an extension of the emotional involvement. At the same time, however, I think it's possibly one of the more dangerous parts of being me - that I don't really do casual flirtations. That I simply don't become physically involved with someone without becoming emotionally entrenched as well.

Hrm. Well...that was kind of unpleasant. It's hardly a new revelation, but still not an aspect of me I particularly enjoy scrutinizing. I wonder why I do it so often?

Oh fuck me. I know why I've been hovering around this topic. How searingly obvious. Valentine's Day is coming up VERY shortly...and this will be my first of any significance whatsoever.

Bah. I'm going back to bed.

On short posts

2008-02-12T08:19:00.000-05:00

Went to Jonathan's for a "not really the cast party, but...yeah, kinda" party and discovered that I kind of suck a big one at Guitar Hero. Well, okay - maybe not a big one. Maybe just a reasonably average one that you wouldn't write home or talk about to your friends in moments of drunken frenzy unless the the rest of the package was highly impressive. Damn medium mode and its blue button of inconvenient placement.

Also discovered that it's possible to be a stage manager (or ASM) and actually hang out with the cast and not be totally weird. Who knew, right? Isn't there some kind of law against this sort of thing? Objectivity and all that? Ha, like I exert any authority.

Also discovered that Jonathan, Zak, and Jeremy form this bizarre trifecta of Guitar Hero balance (but only on medium mode.) I am substantially more impressed now by that 100% Freebird on expert mode video I saw on Youtube...although I'm not sure that I have more respect for that/those individuals. Playing enough Guitar Hero to nab 100% on something that insane-looking seems to just require too much time and effort for a diversion.

Also discovered that I'm a bloody idiot for blogging at 5 in the morning. (Well, more like re-discovered. I have plenty of 5 am blogs.)

On defenses

2008-02-05T03:29:00.000-05:00

Will this actually be a normal blog, instead of the weird, twisting, semi-philosophical hedge maze that I usually manage to work myself into? Probably not, since it certainly hasn't bloody started that way.

Luis was working tonight at XES, which is the only place he works at that I can actually reasonably meet him, so I decided to go after I got off work. We've seen each other for all of four hours the past month, and even though we talk just about every evening, I was, and still am, really feeling his physical absence. (Come to think of it...I can't really recall an evening recently where we didn't talk in one way or another...even if it was just me complaining endlessly about how stupidly difficult Zodiark is. Which he is, by the way. I'd go so far as to say retardedly difficult. There is simply no reason something should be able to whack you repeatedly without a cooldown, and then launch Darkja when you've just barely managed to recover from the last time it happened. Even with Demon Shields / Black Masks equipped, the silly thing managed to wipe my entire party in a single hit. MY ENTIRE PARTY! With dark-absorbing equipment equipped! SILLINESS! At least Final Eclipse is worth it - for the cutscene alone, in fact, which is a good thing as Zodiark got stomped when I whipped him out against The Undying. F'ing Terraflare.)

Anyway, XES was at that pleasant medium between uncomfortably packed and utterly empty and me, being the somewhat anti-social individual that I am, just sort of settled down to have a quiet drink and get snatches of Luis where I could. That somehow managed to radiate the message, "Come talk to me, oh loud-and-obnoxious-individual-drunk-off-your-ass-at-7pm! I'm entirely too polite to tell you off!" Which, of course, one did, and I, of course, was too polite to tell him off. He did, however, also hand me one of those black plastic bases disguising a fairly powerful magnet, and a large collection of flat metal slivers shaped like stylized people. I proceeded to focus my attention on building something relatively aesthetically pleasing, in a symmetrical sort of way, and seeing how high I could stack the slivers on edge.

Said drunk individual then proceeded to explain to me the concept of magnetism, why my endeavors were largely futile, and why I ought to just throw them into a pile and play with them as an infant might squiggle in a pile of mud. I was mildly inclined to snap something along the lines of, "I broke the curve in my E&M class, you atrocious boor! I know how fucking magnetism works, and I don't need your parochial sense of aesthetics telling me what to do!" It's possibly fortunate that my patience wasn't quite that frayed.

At any rate, he eventually turned his attention to someone else, and I eventually made my way to the counter so as to better intercept Luis during his rounds between the bar and the downstairs storage. After a brief, somewhat banal conversation with the cocktail waiter, whose name is Derek, I met Luis's friend Francis.

That turned out to be quite a highlight. Francis is an extremely interesting individual, in the course of our conversation and we touched on topics ranging from events in China and Africa to personal traumas and philosophy. We meandered a great deal, as slightly tipsy conversations often do, and at one point my defenses slipped in a really drastic way. He told me a story - two stories, actually, horrific and touching, and I actually teared up hearing them. The alcohol probably had something to do with it, but that was still kind of a shock. Anyway, Francis said a few more things, words of advice on relationships, and on being yourself, and on letting people in. On the whole, it was an extremely engaging conversation - one of the best I've had recently - and I was utterly stunned when Luis told me it was half past eleven.

Half past bloody farking eleven! I'd been in XES for four hours and it felt like a quarter that amount!

It left me ruminating about various and sundry things, but the most pertinent was a piece of parting advice from Francis, regarding letting my defenses down. That it was something I needed to do, and should do, more often. That it's healthy, and that it's not a matter of weakness.

Which was something about me I'd been contemplating for a while - really since my second year at the Academy, but much more so since I came back from B'burg last summer, and decided that I would give dating a real, serious try. I've been scathed a fair amount in my life, and the worst of the damage was dealt by the two people who were supposed to protect me from getting hurt, at least until I'd gotten old enough to deal with the world in a manner less...self-destructive than my chosen method for the last 13 years or so. I've generally come to terms and to peace with that, and with them, but the defenses have already been erected and they don't come down easily at all.

Myia actually pointed it out, some time ago, all the things I do without even realizing to protect myself. Keeping my cards close. Keeping people at a distance. Keeping my opinions on anything that really matters to myself. Adopting a neutral stance, in all matters of substance. To the point where...I do it instinctively, where I don't even realize that I'm talking without doling out a single piece of personal information. I think everybody does that, to some extent, but her observation seemed...peculiarly sobering, for some reason. Then again, she has a way of doing that.

I'm not even sure why I'm writing this, and writing it now. Just things I was thinking about, on the subway, on the way home. A bit of introspection, a bit of self-criticism, a bit of consideration. Ways that I could be...a better person, maybe, than I am now. I don't know.

Ha. I suddenly realize I kind of did exactly what I was talking about earlier. Waffling around all over the place being somewhat witty before getting to the point. And the really fun part is...I actually haven't even gotten to the real point...

On return visits

2008-01-28T01:12:00.000-05:00

Some days, I find that returning to blogging is of a great comfort to me, like visiting an old, dear friend whom I haven't seen in a goodly long time. This is often the case, in fact, as I now discover I don't tend to blog unless something is bothering me, and, as we've often noticed in the past, I will dance around the topic like a centipede with tap shoes on a hotplate. We shall also ignore all the logical inconsistencies of the metaphor I've just written, and instead applaud it as a reasonably clever use of imagery. (On a semi-tangential note, William recently mentioned to me a string of words to the effect of, "blows like a Hoover in reverse," which, I've decided, I like a great deal, despite a certain...inelegance to their arrangement.)

God, I really am a pompous ass some days.

I've lost what I was planning to say. I think it was somewhat insightful, to me, at least, and that is, of course, what ultimately matters in writing something like a blog on Myspace. Writing a Myspace blog is a little like masturbating in public, I think. It requires a certain exhibitionism to really be successful, and unless you are gratified by the process itself you just end up with a soggy sort of mess at the end.

I am here reminded that Isti and John Brooker, back in my AP Chemistry days as a high school junior, actually laughed in my face when I proclaimed, in a slightly offended tone of voice, "I'm rational!" (I'm not particularly sure why this occurs to me. I know perfectly well why they laughed in my face).

Ah. For a moment, I actually recollected what I was planning to talk about, but once again, it vanishes like smoke in a stiff breeze. Bloody hell.

Tangent. The Wild Party, which is the show I'm currently ASM'ing, is going extremely well. The cast is very skilled (note here that I prefer the term 'skilled' to 'talented' when it comes to trained actors. Talent without skill is, in my opinion, something of a tragedy.) The direction and choreography are superb, and the composition, for those of you Philistines who don't actually know anything about Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, is quite marvelous. I will indulge a moment in hypocrisy here as well, because until I actually started working on The Wild Party, the only song I knew was "Life of the Party," and I remembered that I wasn't altogether all THAT fond of it. I do admit that I have a certain fondness now, however, for "Maybe I like it this way" and "What is it about her?" or, as they tend to appear in my notes, "Militw" and "Wiiah". Like a couple of incredibly unfortunate individuals with truly sadistic parents.

I could waffle some more, but I'm modestly tired and a bit frustrated with...life, the universe, and everything! No, not really, but...with myself, perhaps. Some days I'm quite pleased with myself in all my aspects. This is not one of those days.

On nothing at all

2007-10-04T00:48:00.000-04:00

I default to blogging when I have nothing interesting to say, except that I am once again embroiled in the daily chaos that is working at Theatre at Sea, and then going to stage manage for Musicals Tonight. I observed to my coworkers, in a fashion that can really only be described as slightly whiny, that I've stage managed about eight shows since graduating from AADA, but I've only acted in one. By the time May rolls around, I'll have stage managed fourteen (yes, I've committed myself to stage managing another six bloody shows between now and the end of April) shows, and in all likelihood...I'll still have only acted in one.

Great googly moogly, what's wrong with me?

It feels a little bit like the universe is trying to tell me something, and I'm too thick-skulled to listen. Ha. See, actually, that I'm acknowledging this information already means that I'm listening, but there's a big difference between listening up here and listening down here. Higher. No, higher still. Get your mind out of the gutter, you perverts. I'm talking about head and heart, not head and...yeah, that.

I love acting. I love being on stage, and performing. It still feels nerve-wracking while I'm up there, but it's like...I can safely access parts of myself I'd never allow myself to experience while I'm on stage.

That said, however, I often wonder...I've been wondering a great deal lately whether I might not have been happier trying to make my way as a writer instead. At the risk of sounding like an arrogant ass...well, okay, I already am an arrogant ass, but at the risk of sounding like an even more arrogant ass, I'm a damn fine writer. If I do say so myself. A much better writer, I tend to think, then I am an actor.

Or maybe this is how it gets you, the negativity. The sensation that maybe, just maybe, that's not enough. Confidence and support from your friends and family isn't enough. Even determination isn't enough. Everything starts fraying at the edges, like a soft fruit tossed into a vat of acid, and it's only so long before the world starts eating into you, seeping in the soft center...

Ha! I'm unduly influenced by a horror story I've been writing lately, heavily influenced by Lovecraftian themes. I just had...sort of an argument earlier this evening with Whally (hey Whally!) about how I'd smother his cynicism with light and hope and peace. It's hard to remain optimistic some days, but I generally manage the fortitude of spirit. Then again, arguably...I've also had it pretty easy, as far as my theatrical pursuits have gone, at any rate.

I do have a rather spectacular piece of news - I got accepted as a writer for a gay sci-fi/fantasy/horror site, called www.doorq.com. Now, I know there are dozens of instances out there where some random site or place wants you to write for free, and can't offer anything except exposure. But...this just feels...different. I don't really know why. Maybe it's because I've felt sort of...alienated...from the gay community for a long time. Once again, at the risk of sounding arrogant...I'm not your stereotypical gay man. I'm not very flamboyant (except when I'm dancing. Hoo boy.) I like technical stuff in addition to art. I like rock music, and I don't know the bloody first thing about interior decoration. I dress like a total dork, and it shows. God, how it shows. I mean...Myia had to pick out the most "stylish" pieces of my wardrobe. I'm going to have to ask Kevin or Jason - two straight friends - to help me pick out my new wardrobe when I go shopping. Did we all hear that? My straight male friends have better taste in clothing than I do.

I'm a horrendous gay man. About the only thing that qualifies me, really, is the fact that I like guys. I really like guys. And I don't dig girls, like, at all. I mean, I'm friends with Darien and Myia, and they're easily two of the most attractive women I've ever met. I love them both dearly, but...I'm about as attracted to them as I am to a kumquat. Although a kumquat doesn't feel as nice if it were to hug me.

How fortunate it is that liking guys is the only real requirement for being gay. Thank god.

Oh, yeah - doorq.com. It's filled with gay sci-fi/fantasy/horror geeks. You heard me. There are more of us.

And it's like...for the first time ever, I really, really feel like I belong in a community. That I have people who understand me on more than just the level of "we're both dorks" or "we both like guys" or "Star Wars is better than Star Trek, and I'll Death Star your ass if you don't agree with me." (I don't, by the way. Star Wars might be "cooler," but Star Trek is way more pertinent.) It's a warm feeling. A really warm feeling.

On wit

2007-08-14T23:49:00.000-04:00

I had a sort of epiphany today. It happened just as I was talking to someone online, actually. It's long been a matter of some distress to me that my wit tends to come and go, rather like a cheap hustler. I could not, for the life of me, figure out what sort of currency would convince the little hussy to stay for a while, as I enjoy having her around. I pause in an aside to note how interesting it is that my wit seems to be female. Normally when I think of wittiness, I consider that paragon of mental agility, Oscar Wilde. I had thought that the personification of that rather fleeting aspect of my personality to be a British gentleman in a finely tailored suit, making snide remarks while eating cucumber sandwiches. But no, my wit wears a black and red bustier, and she is not afraid of showing off her more prominent attributes.

So epiphany, yes! I've discovered that at least one secret ingredient is cynicism. That's it. Nothing terribly esoteric about it. I'm a fairly observant person, when I want to be, and I'm dreadfully creative when I feel like it as well. It is, I think, the optimism that's the problem. A rapier wit usually isn't used to encourage someone to strive for their dreams. Speaking poinards, as it were, is somewhat detrimental when you're urging the chubby girl to shake her bon bons, baby! If that's her dream. Unless you're being cruel, and I'd sooner spoon out my eyes than be intentionally cruel. There's more than enough of that to go around as it is.

Maybe that's why I can verbally spar with my Blacksburg crew so much. The closer I feel to someone, the freer I feel about making fun of him mercilessly. Particularly if his name starts with a C, ends with a y, and he refuses to respond with a barb as pointed as mine. Except that one time, when the Battle of Midway was apparently between Godzilla and Alexi's Mom. But that's a story for another evening.

So I just have to tempt out my sultry inner wench of wit using a sufficiently bleak world view. Ahmmmm...let's see. There is no ultimate meaning behind everything, no place under Heaven, no plan external to what we have to make for ourselves. For better for worse, our meaning and our place in the universe is what we make of ourselves. Even if the insensate stars are ultimately uncaring, it is enough that there are people down here who do care for us, and care deeply, and for their sake we have to make as good a go of it as we can. We will determine ourselves whether our legacy is one of hatred and violence, or one of tolerance and understanding.

Huh. I think that kinda backfired. I was going more for an angsty sort of, "Life is pain. We suck. Rock on!"....damn! Where did that come from? I don't think "Rock on" is part of the goth creed.

Ah well. Even if I must surrender a bit of the edge on my words, I guess for now I'll stay a tried and true optimist.

On chaos

2007-08-14T00:21:00.000-04:00

Chaos, in a primordial sort of way. The Greeks regarded Chaos not in the modern connotation of the term, as a mass of confusion, but as the endless void. The infinite nothing from which spawned everything. Chaos is more appropriately written Ka-os, pronounced Kah-aws. The break in the middle, the awkward hesitation, the actual phonetic representation of that momentary lapse in sound, is actually of greater significance than most laymen realize. Although the word signifies the meaning, the break is representative of Chaos in a more accurate way than the word itself.

In the Theogony, written by Hesiod, after Chaos came Eros, Gaia, and Tarteros. It is an important note to mention that it was not Chaos that birthed Eros, Gaia, and Tarteros, but in fact the three came into existence on their own. They willed themselves into being, if you will (no pun intended). Although, if one stops and really examines the situation, creating oneself into the void, an infinite span of ultimate nothingness, can only be likened to being birthed by the void. There's nothing there to give birth to you, so only Nothing could have given birth to you. Or is that arguing semantics?

I imagine, were I a much better philosopher, or perhaps a much more competent abstract thinker, I could find the distinction between the two. Perhaps it's really a matter of power, the kind that occurs when something gives birth to another, or when something forces itself into a space that (if we may assume, in this train of thought) didn't want the intrusion.

Nevertheless, I've always found it a point of fascination that Hesiod chose Love, the Earth, and the Pit of Ultimate Suffering to be the three primordial entities after the void. Love, in particular, as the other three can arguably be described as places. I do think it significant, however, that even as early as Hesiod a place of punishment was considered a primal aspect of creation.

At any rate, I think it is perhaps an indication of what a tumultous force Love was, to the ancient Greeks. The God of Love was nothing less than one of the first four entities responsible for creation, and the Goddess of Love the result of a rather violent struggle for power, a betrayal of a particularly intimate sort, and the emasculation of the very Sky. Love is powerful, creational, promordial, and therefore also dangerous and potentially ruinous.

And then, somewhere in the order of the 12th century or so, the bloody French came along and turned the whole thing romantic in the worst sort of way. The noble knight, forever adoring his lady from afar, doomed to love her but never able to claim her. Perhaps she returns his love, but, alas, even if she weren't wedded to the lord, or baron, or marquis, she was still a noblewoman, and therefore as out of his reach as the stars in the sky. A romantic notion, maybe, but ultimately a foolish one.

Is there a point to this? Ha. Yes, actually, but not for anyone but myself. Read the subtext, if you like - I'm just writing to add a layer of serenity to a rather disheveled me.

On revision

2007-08-11T05:12:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, we become so focused on what is far away that we completely miss what is in front of us. Thus it is with me, particularly in realms wherein I have little experience, and little I may use to guide me.

I am told that I should be more forgiving of myself when I make mistakes. I think I'm going to take that advice.

On rollercoasters

2007-08-09T00:59:00.000-04:00

Ah, hello blog.

First off, I've decided to move my little pet project to a different forum. It simply seemed much more appropriate to section off that aspect of my life from this one, which I think I will continue to use as a public method of complaining.

My stories may now be found on http://dispater27.blogspot.com/

That's for those of you who are actually interested in the stories I'm writing. Even if you're not, let's just pretend that you are and go with that. Salvage my ego!

So, here we are again. It is once again stupidly late at night, or insanely early in the morning, depending on your point of view. My soapbox looks dusty, and my spotlight could probably use a bulb replacement, but here I am again, ready to sing my grievances into an unhearing world. Perhaps I believe, in my own way, that if I cast my hopes into the vasty dark long enough, they'll somehow finally reach the one for whom they are intended, as he stands on a distant shore listening for my voice.

A decidedly romantic notion, no?

I was talking with a friend tonight, and we touched briefly upon the subject of optimism. He's been disappointed a great deal in his life, and his optimism is ebbing, although he remains at heart a romantic. I've suffered a great deal of disappointment as well, but I still remain a tried and true optimist. I believe, truly believe, that things will work out, and by extension, I suppose, that means that I ultimately do have faith in mankind. In spite of all our idiocies, I think we do learn from our mistakes, eventually. I choose to believe that we'll overcome our worse natures in the end.

But that's not really the reason I'm discussing this topic. On a random aside (you all should be well used to these by now), I suddenly had the mental image of a penguin as a lounge singer, as an almost direct result of my choice to use the words "sing my grievances." I do not know why I choose the penguin, save that I find them rather ridiculous birds. I certainly don't ordinarily associate myself with the penguin, nor do I sing in lounges. It might be fun to be a penguin, however, particularly if I get to be the mascot for Linux. I could lounge around all day while nerds with computers feed me fish. Oh yeah, baby! Nerds with fish! It might also be fun to sing in lounges, but I'm not sure I could resist the urge to wear a sparkly, sequined dinner jacket. Yes, that's tackier than minute-long superglue. Hell, it's tackier than David Hasslehoff. Good God, I've just admitted to being tackier than David Hasslehoff.

Segue! Segue! Oh my God, I need a segue!

Ummmm...modern comics! Yes, I read comics, and I think I've mentioned this in my profile. Just another way that I escape into something that nevertheless has real life pertinence at times. It's interesting, when you stop and think about it, how comics reflect a shifting attitude in American culture - particularly about illustrated stories. They've gone from generally being extraordinarily campy, even goofy, to stories that can have a truly visceral impact, with some incredibly sophisticated ideas behind them. I point out the Grant Morrison run of New X-Men as a particularly fine example of this.

Hrm. I didn't give that a very good run, now did I? To be honest, I wasn't really prepared to engage in a discussion about the artistic integrity of comic books. I just wanted to completely leave behind the idea that I might actually be cheesier than David Hasslehoff.

Alright, I should get to the real reason I'm typing tonight. I think it's because I've allowed myself to hope again, knowing full well that the odds of those hopes being met, or even heard, are probably somewhat worse than the odds on the New York Powerball Lottery. I said to my friend earlier that it may be because actors are peculiar creatures - we have a certain masochistic streak when it comes to our emotions. I'd rather have my hopes get trampled, then allow myself to hope again, then to retreat away. Maybe it's because retreating is what I would have done, years ago.

Bah. This is gotten decidedly taciturn and just a little morbid. I seem to have become rather morose, and I must conclude that I don't look good in morose. I'm much more of a...benignly amused. And in a state of benign amusement, I shall go to bed.

On first dates

2007-07-14T05:30:00.000-04:00

Now I can't bloody sleep.

So this is what the teenage years I missed out on feels like.

Hell and damnation.

On many sudden returns...

2007-07-01T08:03:00.000-04:00

Ah, online blog...how I've missed you.

I've found an interesting blurb from an online from about what it means to be a Libra - in a nutshell, although many people think about the scales as being particularly balanced, it's worth remembering that most scales, before finding that rare moment of perfect balance, spend quite some time shifting wildly from one side to the other. Kind of like a particularly funky philosophical roller coaster.

As it applies to me - I think I blogged almost continuously for several months, and then went on a five-month hiatus. Extremes much? Maybe it's time to find that nice even balance.

One thing that's punctuated my writing recently is rather more troubling. I've noted a certain...hesitancy to my work. Words don't seem to come as easily as they used to - I don't mean inspired passages or that sudden flash of particularly well-constructed prose. I seem to forget synonyms, lose entire words, and have to sit there trying to remember what perfect word fits into this sentence. I'm aware it happens to everyone, but it's generally be a rare occurrance for me, and twenty-five seems rather young to be suddenly going senile.

I'm putting it down as being rusty...really rusty...

But in an effort to de-rust myself, I've decided to start writing more. Even if it's bad. That's a key point, is to write even if it's bad. Especially if it's bad, because hey, that's one more terrible story that's no longer in your system. It's worth noting, however, that being an only child and a borderline genius has made me, paradoxically, both emphatically lazy and neurotically perfectionist. Which, basically, means that I never get anything done because it takes too much effort to make it perfect.

Hmmmm...I was kinda aiming for a joke in there somewhere, and it saddens me a bit that the last statements are neither humorous nor, unfortunately, particularly untrue. Well, okay, I might be exaggerating with the borderline genius part...but only a little! Don't take away my delusions, dammit! It's one of the few things I have left to hold on to! *sob*

Once again, I segue. I'm thinking that, for an exercise, I'll write one short story a week. Just one. Won't matter how long it is, won't matter how crappy it is, but just write it. Might even have it be a sort of "stream of conscious" sort of deal where I just start writing the first thing that comes to mind, and hammer it out as the week goes on. Exactly one week, and no revisiting when I discover the inevitable grammatical errors.

I think I will also take long walks on the beach and go visit the Museum of Sex.

On the musings of a fevered mind

2007-01-11T22:49:00.000-05:00

And here we are again, once again writing without knowing anything about what I want to write about, save that there is the urge to rattle away at the keys and let the little narrative in my head out.

I have a thought about what the little narrative in my head looks like. It's a little purple and blue fuzzball made of rubber, with googly eyes and a set of incongruous, yet wicked-looking claws about sixteen inches long. It peeks out every now and again when my skull unhinges. It's mostly harmless, most of the time. It gets surly when you prod it, though, and I don't recommend feeding it leetspeak. Nor do I recommend telling it that warlocks are overpowered, 'cause they're NOT, dammit, and people only think so because they need to l2play!

New York and living by myself has done something kind of unusual to me. I've always fancied myself insular, very much an introvert, but I'm starting to suspect that's more of an imposed introversion rather than a natural state of being, set into place by a combination of factors ranging from moving at an early age to a country where I didn't speak the language, to my parents' very messy separation. Of course, my nigh-constant insistance that being anti-social is my natural state of being really doesn't help either. That's another matter that needs some addressing - taking responsibility for my actions and decisions, regardless of what I determine to be my "natural state of being" - but that's also a matter for another day.

Random aside. God, I'm going to be an alcoholic when I'm forty. I can feel it.

Anyway, it's interesting to me that people who are generally social outcasts, loners, insular, or whatnot tend to find outlet in artistic activities. What's more stereotypical than the image of the goth sitting all by himself, writing poetry or doing artwork that is charitably described as fucking depressing? Yet, the very act of writing poetry or doing artwork is a means of self-expression and thus, I think, a means of being social when ordinary methods of being social are unusable or unacceptable. Or, for that matter, undoable. Which brings us back to the tremendous balancing act that is being a social individual. Just as I have this urge to type out, oh I don't know, SOMETHING when I don't have any qualifiably useful to say, for no other reason than because I have something I want to say and the cockroaches in my room aren't the best audience. And although I believe in a form of God, he's unfortunately just not responsive enough to make a very good confidante. Or maybe I feel silly talking to God. I haven't decided yet.

Oh, and yes, there appear to be cockroaches in my room. This is a rather unfortunate development that occurred either a) fairly recently, b) over the course of the last several decades, or c) over the course of several geological eras, depending on your outlook on the matter. Then again - this IS New York, after all, and I rather doubt there are any apartments here, no matter how immaculate, that don't have a cockroach or two hiding in the spaces between the walls.

Regardless, they're making their presence known to me now, and it's starting to, how do you say, ick me out just a little. I don't really have much against cockroaches - I'm not really that susceptible to your average set of creepy crawlies with (number of legs > 4), but I do have a rather horrendous mental image that I'm going to open my bag of Home Pride Honey Oak Wheat Bread and be greeted by a torrent of brown carapaces and scuttling legs.

Ick.

I don't mind creepy crawlies - I'd just prefer that they keep to their corner, let me have mine, and stay the hell out of my food.

My final aside (although it does occur to me that my asides tend to overwhelm my main points. I think my asides actually ARE my main points, and my main points are actually my asides, and I do this because I'm a tricky, tricky bastard) is how ironic it would be if this cold I have complicated into something else at the start of the new year. Because guess what - the medical insurance that I was under (i.e. Mom's medical benefits) has offically declared that I'm too old to be covered. I'm fine with that and I can understand that. I'd just be annoyed if opportunistic infections decided that the moment I officially become the uninsured artist is the perfect time to floor me and shove me into a hospital.

'Cause that would just, ya know, be mean.

Cheers, mates. (And I'm not even British!)

On post-holiday depression

2007-01-03T00:36:00.000-05:00

It bites the biggie.

On the origins of homosexuality

2006-11-27T20:10:00.000-05:00

Men and women everywhere were rocked today by a scientific breakthrough that came, of all places, from the tiny offices of the Tas travel agency. Despite a complete lack of research, no adherence to the scientific method, and no discernible hard evidence, the company - which to this point had sadly restricted itself to selling luxury cruises - has proven beyond a doubt the true cause of homosexuality among men and women.

P. L. Marshall, president of the company, issued a press release over a lunch of bran flakes and feta cheese describing the incredible find.

"It's really very simple," the honorable Mr. Marshall stated. "What if a child has a crab-faced mother and an insanely gorgeous father? Isn't it possible that the child is so repulsed by his horrifying mother that he becomes attracted to his father instead? Then, when he grows out of this reversed Oedipus complex, he naturally displaces this affection onto other men."

The information - so blatantly and revoltingly obvious that it had clearly escaped the higher minds of the American psychology community for decades - promises a massive paradigm shift; perhaps one that rivals the dramatic shift in thinking after Darwin's earthshattering "Origin of Species."

"It's absolutely astounding," reported Dr. Taylor Fields, senior psychologist at the Chimaerical Institute for Psychological Health. "We never even imagined that something so abjectedly retarded as crab-facedness among mothers could be the cause of homosexuality among men. Of course, it all makes sense if you just imagine that the universe really is out to get you, and that we ultimately mean rendered dog turds in the grand scheme of things. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go redeem myself by drowning in a porta-potty."

Margaret Cohen of North Fork, Tennessee, was stunned to hear the news. Mrs. Cohen, whose face has been described by neighbors as "the very sphincter of Hell," stated, "Oh my God! It really IS all my fault!"

Her husband, Mr. Andrew Cohen, commented, "I never actually noticed it before, but you're absolutely right! She's hideous! She looks like the ass crack of Hades! What the hell was I on? I want a divorce!"

Not everyone, however, believes in the validity of the research. The Cohens' son, Robert (known locally as Pricilla McQueen), remains skeptical.

"Well fuck-a-doodle-doo...another BS scientific discovery about why I like to suck cock. Why don't you sons of bitches do something important, like find out why people still wear pleated jeans?"

Others insist that they knew all along.

"Ah knew it!" added Jimmy-Bob McCree, native of sixty years to Podunk, West Virginia. "Those gawddamn homersexuels're a gawddamn unnacheral insult to God and nature an' this here research proves it! We oughtta line'em all up and give'm the firin' squad. Er put'em to work diggin' ditches. Er sumtin'." Mr. McCree was unavailable for further comment, as he returned to performing various unmentionable acts of a carnal nature with his pit bull.

Podunk is one of several thousand charming towns scattered throughout the American south where certain pigment-challenged residents may still occasionally awaken to the sight of a flaming cross on their lawns. Homosexuals here, though uncommon, are nevertheless regularly ostracized in a ritual process involving bundles of sticks and a tall stake meant to reduce further incidences of "sexual immorality." However, it is in small towns like Podunk, where reduced gene pools often result in physical deformity, that news of the research struck like lightning. When informed that they would have to either promote homosexuality or marry outside the family, most residents of the town spontaneously imploded.

Scientists are not, however, discouraged by the mass outbreak of gruesome death in rural America.

"Does it matter?" Dr. Fields remarked from inside a porta-potty in Central Park. "Another few generations and they'd have bred themselves into extinction anyway. The point is that we now have an easy way to prevent the spread of homosexuality. Just don't let ugly people have kids. I know it's kind of hard-wired into our shallow, shallow society anyway, but alcohol can still cause a lot of flukes, particularly in Las Vegas. Now go away! You're distracting me."

A proposal for a constitutional Amendment is already underway in the House of Representatives, requiring all couples who want to have children to register and pass an objective test on hotornot.com.

In an even more sweeping motion, the Pope declared that allowing ugly people to breed would now be tantamount to condoning sodomy, and as such be a direct act against God. It was a therefore a matter of course to officially ban such a blasphemous thing in church doctrine. To further discourage misplaced affections among the youth, only ugly men would henceforth be allowed in the priesthood, and stunningly gorgeous women permitted in convents. The habit, long a staple of the convent, would be replaced by string bikinis and thongs in order to jar younger adherents in the proper direction. When noted that such a thing may, in fact, condone lesbianism instead, an anonymous bystander stated, "Sweet! Lesbians are hot! I'm so converting to Catholicism!"

Certain individuals, however, have suggested a more moderate approach.

"There's, like, no need to be so drastic," asserts J. T. Morgan of Sanatee, Pennsylvania. "If people are so concerned about it, just put a paper bag over the mother's head for the first few years. That ought to do it."

Note: I actually hadn't intended this to be so long, and it seemed to get rather darker than I intended as I wrote...but anyway, this little work of satire does result from an actual conversation at work. No, obviously none of these people actually exist, or said any of these things. The crab-faced mother comment, however, is a real one, and I might have disputed it if I weren't busting my ass laughing.

On homesickness

2006-11-13T04:23:00.000-05:00

I miss the way sunlight streams through a canopy of red and gold leaves, and autumn winds that taste like mountain streams. I miss the sight of two-story split-levels of vinyl and brick on either side of the street, with half-acre yards neat as turf and speckled with dandelions. I miss the smell of damp earth on freshly raked leaves, and the ridges of a decade-old handlebar against my skin. I miss the way the trees rustle as a wind combs through their leaves, in just that way so you know a storm is brewing on the horizon. I miss the feel of carpet underneath my feet as the first swollen drop of rain pitters against the window, knowing that the purr of an engine will soon sound in the driveway. I miss the vaulted evening sky, spotted with stars so innumerable they seem to crowd against the distant darkness, until the spaces between us seem to shrink and grow at the same time. I miss soaring down narrow streets on a bike at three in the morning, until the wind slices at my face and hands with cold razors, and knowing that nobody will ever be there to slow my way. I miss the way moonshine reflects off the snowfields at night, so that the ground itself seems to be glowing white, and the air is so cold it hurts to breathe, and so clear that you only wish you could take deeper breaths.

I miss all these, as I sit in this jewel-speckled city, with its palaces of glass and steel. I've traded a great deal to be here, for the right to pursue my dreams. Sometimes, in the depths of my complacency, it's good to remember what all of us gave up in coming to New York.

On idiotic crushes

2006-11-12T03:06:00.000-05:00

I love Steve Sandvoss and I want to bear his children.

Okay, that was a bit simplistic and a trifle exaggerated. Let me exposit. I just saw a movie called "Latter Days," rented via Netflix about...oh...forever and a month ago. Minus the forever. I got Netflix because it was more economically viable than continually paying late fees at the local Hollywood Video, which is a 45-minute commute from where I live and therefore very inconvenient now that I'm out of school. Who wants to sit in a subway for an hour and a half just to rent a fucking movie? (I almost capitalized the Subway, and it's worth noting being forced to watch people eat overlarge sandwiches for an hour and a half just to rent a movie would not only suck, but reeks of unacceptable surrealism.) Anyway, I keep putting off watching the damn movies due to a lack of time, so in reality they're costing me something like seven bucks each. Did I ever mention that I'm a goddamn lazy artard?

Getting back to the point, in "Latter Days" Steve Sandvoss plays a rather sweet-faced Mormon boy who happens to be gay. He discovers and eventually accepts his sexuality over the course of the movie. If you happen to be Mormon...what are you doing reading my blog anyway? Depart this palace of sodomy and sin! Depart before it sucks you in! Depart and read nothing herein! Okay, so you don't have to be Mormon to realize that being gay and Mormon is kind of like being gay and right-wing Republican...and we all know how well drag and George Bush go together (although, admittedly, that's a rather amusing mental image.) So, the movie's pretty much about how he comes to terms with himself, and how his true romance comes to terms with how meaningless his party-boy lifestyle really is.

It's a low budget film and the script is hardly Pulitzer-prize material, but I found it generally rather enjoyable. Not just because there are legions of gorgeous semi-naked men (I seem to recall having had this discussion earlier), but because I actually did find the movie holding a certain resonance. However, it did feel a little like they were trying to cram three and a half hours of storytelling into an hour and a half. The script and scene-work was choppy like a Ginsu. I was also uninspired by most of the performances, although as I said Steve did a rather good job. I may be slightly influenced, however, by his wholesome, corn-fed, disgustingly attractive boy-next-door good looks (which could turn the heads of straight men and bull-dykes alike!) Actually, that can't be it - his co-star, Wes Ramsey, was arguably just as good looking, and I thought his performance campy and a bit forced.

One point of unintentional hilarity, however, were all the shots where someone would have been naked but for some very cleverly angled cameras and well-placed limbs. It was pretty skillfully done, and the actors didn't look like contortionists or anything, but I still found it profoundly funny how often we would have gotten a faceful of penis but for that errant wrist or convenient shadow.

I can't say it's a great movie, but it is pretty good and I would recommend it to my gay friends and anyone who isn't bothered by copious amounts of man-ass.

On working too much

2006-10-27T22:31:00.000-04:00

Well, no...not really TOO much. I'm rather enjoying being a light techie/stage manager and I get to watch the show every time it's on. 12-hour workdays are kind of a pain - particularly when you consider that I spend roughly another 2 hours commuting to and from work every day, which leaves about 2 hours left over to do things. If I got Mondays off, though (which I currently don't), I think I could definitely run lights and semi-stage manage for a few months. I feel all nifty going backstage and calling out places and so forth. It's also really quite an experience watching Broadway actors do their jobs every night. Damn, but these guys sound good. I also find it heartening to know how often lines get flubbed even by professional actors.

Unfortunately, long days also leave me tired and sleepy and unable to formulate proper coherent thought to share with the world.

On hedgehogs

2006-10-18T05:50:00.000-04:00

For someone who styles himself a writer, it's interesting how I can dance around the topic so much. Or that so often, I can't seem to express precisely what it is I want to say, and I end up engaging in a huge amount of intellectual waffling before either coming out with an answer or dribbling away into nothingness. It's like my mind is some big metaphysical cow that has to chew an idea for fourteen hours before finally either realizing what it's trying to digest, or just packing it away to become psychic compost. (At least I feed lots of astral flowers.)

Some days...some days I feel positively inhuman, in the sense of being distanced from humanity. In some ways, it's a carryover from my childhood, and on those days I feel like...well, I don't really feel at all. It's like all my emotions are inside this tightly crushed up little piece of paper, surrounded by an utterly impenetrable iron shell. Then I draw a smiley face, tape it to the ball, and it's business as usual. In that way that I do, (and I'm quite aware that it's a way of mine) I say it's all part of being Chinese, when I think it's really just all part of being me. I am exceptionally good at compacting everything into a neat little package that can be locked behind a big metal door (or doors), and then going about as happy and as charming as usual. In spite of everything I write here, I really am quite good at not letting it show when something is bothering me. Or not letting what I'm really thinking surface. Or not letting it show when I'm really completely, utterly indifferent to everything that's going on around me. That's actually a little scary, sometimes - I imagine that serial killers probably do exactly the same thing.

Wow...that sure killed the mood. (Pun intended.)

I always found it kind of funny that to say someone "isn't human," is always meant to imply a certain monstrous aspect, or a lack of emotion or empathy. Yet, when you get right down to it, being human can be being quite monstrous. Humans are by nature egocentric creatures - in fact, child psychology suggests that until a certain age, we are completely incapable of empathy. Isn't that funny? Children are the innocent and the pure, and until they pass that magical age of roughly 4-5 years, they'll happily dissect a family of rabbits simply because they're curious what they look like on the inside. It's a monstrous thing, and yet it's also not, because the child doesn't know any better. Until they're told or otherwise informed that it's wrong, it's simply not wong. But I'm sure that's of little comfort to the family of rabbits. And, of course, there are people who would happily dissect a family of rabbits even though they were told it's wrong, but they really don't care. Or because whatever positives they might derive out of the experience outweigh the negatives. There are monstrous people out there, but they're as human as any of us. Then again, there are some marvelously good people out there, but they're as human as any of us as well. How are such dualistic creatures possible?

That's actually a bit outside the hula hoop, because that's not how I feel today. There's something called the Hedgehog's Dilemma, which in its literal aspect is of course completely malarky, but illustrates a point well enough. The idea is that the hedgehog suffers pangs of loneliness, but two of them trying to come closer will only hurt each other. The hedgehog thus has a choice between remaining lonely, and allowing someone close enough to get hurt. This is a notable point, because in all of New York City there have been exactly two people close enough to me to know what I might be thinking at any given time. One of them is no longer here, and I feel her absence daily.

Of course, she would never allow me to wallow like I'm doing now - she was always exceptionally good at kicking my ass into proper order. What would she say to what I'm writing right now, I wonder?

"G, you're being ridiculous. You're an emotional fucktard sometimes, but you're certainly not inhuman. You're just finding an excuse for waffling around, like you always do. You like things being easy and safe, all packaged up with this neat little bow, and honey, they're just not. You're never going to grow as a person if you stay inside your comfort zone! You know what I think it is? I think you just need to get laid."

Ahhhh...Jiiiiiesus. In front of an audience you say this to me?

"I'm sorry, but it's true! Every time I see you you're like this big...ball of sexual frustration. It drives me boooonkers! Listen, next time I'm in New York, we'll grab Darien and go down to some bars in Chelsea. You can pick someone up and have some wild monkey sex, and you'll feel much better."

Ugh. But I hate casual sex.

"Pish. Pish! We're going, and that's that!"

But-

"Pish!"

Wow. Not even here and she's still managed to hijack the conversation. Well, there you have it, folks. She sure gets right to the point, doesn't she?

Heh. I was hurting when I woke up this morning - I was really feeling the horrendous solitude of living alone in New York City, and I all ready to be gloomy and angsty today. Now...well, now I feel a lot better. Isn't it wonderful to be loved?

On physics, quantum or otherwise

2006-10-17T19:44:00.000-04:00

First off, I'm utterly offended that there isn't an entry under the categories for "Science and Technology." I mean, what the hell? I find it insulting that Myspace assumes nobody here is going to talk about the universe around us. And before anyone says anything, this is most certainly NOT a web or HTML topic. What, am I supposed to classify this under...life? News and politics? (Are there interstellar wars out there? Stars lobbing flares and planets at each other?) Romance and relationships? (Shock! An illicit affair between a quasar and the Large Magellanic Cloud!) Lunacy, I say!

Anyway, I was thinking about the dimensionality of things on the Subway, trying to wrap my mind around the idea of dimensions above the fourth. Really, I was trying to decide whether the concept of a fourth spatial dimension as anything other than time is asinine. I think that it is, because space as a word is very specifically defined as three dimensional, with "physically measurable" components. Tack on a fourth, and you're automatically talking about time. Unless you talk about a fourth dimension that moves along WITH time, but I think that would just end up being a fifth dimension. Weirdness! Or maybe I'm playing with words instead of playing with concepts, which is just ridiculous. Anyway, everything that defines space seems to be derived from space. If an object is defined as three-dimensional, then it is said that it can be moved from one location to another, but the terms "location" and "moved" seem to me themselves entirely dependent upon a definition of space in the first place, thereby rendering the whole thing circular. It seems the mathematicians have it right after all - only math can really define this in a nice, clear-cut way.

What does this have to do with the fifth (and above ) dimension? Well, it's hard to imagine because we can't perceive it in the same way as the other three, but time is just another axis, perpendicular (orthogonal, as we engineers call it) to the other three. We just can't...measure the fourth axis the same way we do the first three. Now, we've established that two objects can't exist in the same place at the same time, which brings me to my first point of speculation. Why can't an object exist in two places at the same time? Of course, we would be completely unable to perceive such an event (I really ought to read up a little more about the discreteness of time, and the relevance of Planck's constant. Quantum mechanics has always been a difficult topic for me to wrap my mind around. I think it's because I'm a very visual person, and quanta are very difficult to properly visualize.) because the object is effectively changing its position in only three dimensions, and not moving along the fourth. Actually...oh, right - that would require said object to be moving at the speed of light. Well, that answers that question.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I want to just talk to a quantum physicist about all this. Reading a book is all well and good, but they can't always answer your questions in a meaningful way. What really brought this whole thing up was a speculation on my part that so-called "psychic" or "telekinetic" powers may actually just be a result of someone capable of picking up cues that exist along a different dimensional axis - one that we can't readily perceive. If we're heading into the realm of disembodiment, it's not necessarily unreasonable for something to exist solely along the axis of time, with no components along the first three. Throw a fifth and a sixth dimension in there, and it would have a fully realized three-dimensional "space" of its own without ever having to touch a "physical" space where we can readily perceive it. Hell, superstring theory (which I don't really understand at all) suggests at the existence of anywhere from 11-26 spatial dimensions, and if we're stuck looking at four, well...that's a lot out there that we just plain can't see. Why should humans necessarily exist in only four dimensions if there really are dozens more floating out there?

Perhaps there could be a nice, scientific explanation for ghosts, telepathy, and all the other pseudoscientific wonders of the world after all.

And maybe this has been much more of a philosophical speculation than a scientific one.

On iambs

2006-10-15T08:11:00.000-04:00

Dance your dance, oh Shiva, dance, dance away my tears.
Sing your song, oh Shiva, sing, sing away my fears.
My heart is cracked, my heart is torn,
for you were there when I was born.
So lay me down to sleep, oh Shiva,
Say that I can rest.

Dance, oh Shiva, dance dance, dance away my tears.
Sing, oh Shiva, sing sing, sing for all who hear.
My love has fled, my heart is dead,
And lonely days are days I dread.
So music me to sleep, oh Shiva,
Play me to my rest.

Dance for me, oh Shiva, dance, dance away my tears.
Sing for me, oh Shiva, sing, sing so I may hear.
There's nothing here, there's nothing left,
Don't say that I should stay bereft.
So gaze into my eyes, oh Shiva,
Look, that I may rest.

No, I'm not actually that angsty. I got an idea of a sort of myth, about someone - a god perhaps. He is a good god...maybe the best of all the gods. Because of this he was betrayed and in the process lost everything he loved. So in the end all he can think to do is ask someone else - a goddess, maybe - who loves him to dance her dance and sing her song.

This dance is called the Dance of Shiva, named after the Hindu God, whose dance is of cosmic significance. It's an ultimately selfish thing to ask of her, but if he's allotted one selfish thing in all eternity, this would be it. And because she loves him, she dances away the world and sings down the heavens, and in the process gives him the rest he asks for.

Then the second world is created, and it is forever missing a certain something, because the god who was betrayed had no hand in making it. But perhaps if that original betrayal was somehow sufficiently atoned for, he'll come out of his rest, and take hand in the world once again.

Yeah, my stories are usually pretty dark. Believe it or not, it helps keep me maintain a positive outlook.

On the perversity of friends

2006-10-12T00:39:00.000-04:00

So I was in the Great Wall restaurant underneath my apartment with Darien. Yes, it's a Chinese restaurant, and I'm sure there are hundreds in New York called "Great Wall." We're not, as a whole, terribly creative when it comes to naming things in English. Anyway, I eat there a lot, and I do mean a lot. Their eyes light up when they see me, and even the owners' kids know what I'm going to order when I walk through the door (Hunan shrimp with brown rice, incidentally.)

So yeah, I was in there with Darien, and after a brief discussion about cash we decide that I'll pay for dinner. So she goes, "I'll have the meat dumplings, and he LOVES the cock." And I was all like, "Omgwtfpwned!"

(Pause.)

Okay, no she didn't. We were actually just talking about it after leaving the restaurant because the lady at the desk thought she was my girlfriend. I found the idea, however, hilarious in a manner difficult to fully articulate. I mean, say you've been working in an oily, sticky, dimly-lit, low-brow dive of a kitchen for some seven and a half hours. Your English is spotty, one of your most consistent customers comes in with a gigantic redheaded girl (Darien is six foot, one inch), and while ordering she just casually goes, "Yeah, he LOVES the cock."

How the hell do you respond to that? Do you even understand what she's talking about? Isn't cock a term for a male chicken? You thought he liked shrimp! Should you just ignore the statement? Smile and nod? Oh my god, what do you say? Quick! Need an answer!

"Ohhhh, really! Yeah, me too!"
"Okay! We have lots cock! Best cock!"
"Oh no, the cock no good here."
"Do you like cock too?"
"What kind cock does he like?"
"Whaaaat? He is The Gay?"

The potential for hilarity is spectacular enough that I almost want her to try it out one day, just to see what their response would be. It would probably have to be the day that I move to midtown or something, because I do like eating there and the food's remarkably cheap.

Heeheee...he LOVES the cock!

God, I'm such an artard.

On the mysterious you

2006-10-08T04:16:00.000-04:00

Blogging has become a remarkably addictive activity for me, particularly given certain recent events in my life. Part of the reason is that I like to stay up far, far past my bedtime, and inevitably around three or four in the morning I want to talk to someone. Most of my friends would gnaw out my liver if I called them up at 4 am just to shoot the shit (what a bizarre colloquialism. I keep seeing the two guys from Brokeback Mountain, taking pot shots at piles of cow dung), so blogging becomes my proverbial hole in the ground. Unlike Midas' hairdresser, however, I remain keenly aware that there are actually people reading this. Maybe that's why I like it - I kind of feel like I'm actually reaching out and touching someone, except without the molestation charges. Hah! I kid. The only person I've ever molested in public is Chuckles, and I only did that with my eyes. (Didn't know about that, did you Chuckles? I'm going to get that tattoo someday. You know which one I'm talking about...)

Back to the topic at hand. It's curious - if I really only wanted to write about how I feel or otherwise express myself, I could easily just make a word document and spill as much as I want on there. I don't even necessarily have to worry about spelling or punctuation or capitalization or anything like that. I could just unwind, and...talk, about anything at all. (Yes Dave, I can actually write without necessarily capitalizing and punctuating everything. I might even misspell a word or two here and there. Try not to faint.) If all I wanted is a hole in the ground, then I could easily make something totally private, for no other purpose than to let my fingers rattle over the keys. Something to let me relax as the words just dribble out of my fingers. It might be even more therapeutic, in a way.

And yet, here I am, again and again, rattling off words to my unseen, unknown audience hidden in the dark. It's like I'm standing on a stage, flooded in a cold wash, and all I can see is the white projector light reflected off the back of my audience's collective heads. A sea of anonymous faces sitting in the shadows. Well that can't be entirely accurate, can it? I have a supposition about who reads what I write - I assume its people on my friends list. I've already addressed two of my oldest friends, but for all I know they pay no attention whatsoever to what I'm writing. At least one of them, after all, only put up a Myspace page because his brother hacked his computer. It's not simply a matter of talking to my ideal audience member (and the old goat does get rather boring after a while. You can only hear "Hrmmmm" and "I see" so often before you want to whack the guy with a keytar.) It's...knowing that there's someone out there, reading and relating, perhaps. Maybe it satisfies my need to stand on a soapbox and be heard, every now and again (or every twenty hours or so). The internet is undoubtedly one of the best media for such a thing nowadays. (Parentheses are fun! I love parentheses! I can digress and go all sorts of places inside a pair of parentheses! It's like having a totally random subroutine sitting in the middle of otherwise very clean code! It's like, while the program is in the middle of calculating, say, the optimal shape of a low speed wind tunnel contraction, it suddenly comes across a subroutine that screams, "I demand that you output rows and rows of pickles to the screen!" And the program can be all, "WTF?! No!" but it can't resist the power of the subroutine, who can totally bitch-slap it and go, "Ho! Give me pickles!" And voila! In the middle of a wind tunnel contraction you suddenly have rows and rows of pickles. But only briefly, because then the subroutine ends, and you're back to something that makes sense.)

I was tempted...almost tempted, for a moment there, to ask "Who are you people? Who is actually reading this? What is it that brings you back here, if indeed you're a regular reader?" Well, hmmmm...I guess in stating my intent not to ask the question I've actually rather asked the question, haven't I? Aren't I a tricky fellow? Do I really want to know? Should the house lights come up, and reveal just who is sitting in the seats? Part of me says yes, but part of me is going, "What if you end up with an utterly creepy man in, say, a bunny suit?" I have, mind you, no particular onus against bunny suits, excepting possibly the one from Donnie Darko, but...come on, a grown man in a bunny suit? In a dark theatre? Are you telling me that you don't find the idea completely skeezy? But then, maybe that man is actually Ricky, who can pull off such things without being creepy, because he's just that kind of guy. See? I can suppose all I want, but until I have confirmation, my audience remains whoever I think it is. Maybe that's a good thing.

I was feeling rather...sad isn't really the word for it. A sense of longing for something far, far away is probably the best way to describe it. Perhaps it is the sensation that a cow gets when it looks up at the moon, and knows that although music and literature makes it sound terribly simple, it's really a logistical nightmare for an 1,100 pound mammal to clear 238,000 miles of dense atmosphere and hard vacuum, then return to the earth intact. Not only is there a lot of equipment involved, but it doesn't even know how the moon feels about such an endeavor. But that doesn't stop it from wanting to try. God, how it wants to try.

At least the silverware's getting laid tonight.

On the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

2006-10-07T07:55:00.000-04:00

Absurdity is what happens when there is a conflict between what you think the universe should be like, and what you encounter tells you the universe should be like. Did I learn that in theatre history, or was it somewhere else?

In a perfect world, everything turns out exactly as it should. Well, in a world with six-odd billion egocentric people, what precisely does that mean? What is justice, or even a fair sense of equality when there are six billion slightly different views on the topic?

I'm good at what I do. There are better people out there, although whether that's because they're naturally gifted, worked hard, or both could be a matter of some discussion. Is it fair that some people were born with greater gifts than I have? Is it fair that I'm more adept at recognizing patterns and solving problems than 99 percent of the population (at least, according to standardized tests. And while I'm on the topic, who the hell decides what is "standard," anyway. What does that mean? Why should a bunch of ultimately inane questions asked under a very specific situation determine someone's capabilities? For example, in spite of everything, I don't deal well with pressure. I crack easily, and I make lots of mistakes when under a time constraint. I don't think quickly, I'm not very clever, and I'm not particularly witty. Understanding and memorization, however, comes as easily to me as a sparrow takes flight. However easily that may be. And I'm a very fast learner, at least on a scale where the base unit is a matter of hours or days. Does that make me smart? Do I get a gold star?) Does fairness even fit into the grand equation of things in a meaningful way? Not everyone can be a rocket scientist, after all. Someone's gotta sweep the factory floor.

I'm not a naïve person. I understand that the world isn't a pretty place. But every now and something rises out of this little bog of complacency I've settled into, and everything just looked skewed. And I start to wonder what it would all mean if it didn't really mean anything. Nobody's out there, nobody's watching over you, and the fact that a pigeon just shat on your head has no cosmological significance whatsoever.

I know exactly what's bothering me. Well...sort of. I'm just doing the philosophy dance again, because it distracts me from what I should be addressing, which I have no intention of going into detail here. Eh. It's 5 am. I'm less than coherent. I just wanted to write.

On boundless inanity

2006-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

I really ought to go to sleep, but I procrastinate, as usual, even though my brain feels like it's made of moth balls and cotton candy. Rambling on seems like a decent activity, except that I don't have any alcohol on me and my sleep-deprived ramblings are a lot less interesting than my alcohol-driven ones.

Speaking of sleep deprivation, I think I actually had a bout of microsleep on the phone today while making a phone call. I was asking a question of the noble people over at Delta Airmiles. The actual question escapes me, but when the representative asked me a question in return, I had already fallen into a brief sleep on the phone. I recall being cognizant of the fact that I had been asked a question, and I thought that I had answered it...but in fact I'd only dreamed that I'd given an answer. I realized this and promptly woke up, just in time to hear the representative go, "Hello?"

Speaking of dreams, I had an interesting one last night. It involved several Chinese people putting on a very bad play, in which a girl missed her cue and then promptly knocked over a prop. The odd thing (and there is always an odd thing) was that the play seemed to be taking place in the Virginia Tech War Memorial Gym...which any Hokie will tell you isn't the most optimal place to be staging a play. The prop that had been knocked over was a stack of presents, which had been sitting underneath a rather improbable Christmas tree on the edge of a gym railing. While the cast attempted to push their way to the end of the play through pantomime, I made a hasty retreat downstairs. My father, who lives in Hong Kong, happened to be coming up the stairs at the same time. He patted me on the back, and I could only roll my eyes, thinking, "Well, there goes Dad again, up to watch another god-awful Chinese play." Which, of course, is wrong, because my father has never seen a play in his life, Chinese or otherwise.

And then, for no reason at all, as I headed toward the locker rooms I decided to jump into a ballet point in my sneakers. When I executed it perfectly, feeling as weightless as though I were underwater, I realized that something was wrong. I am quite incapable of doing a ballet point, even in hard-toed boots. I am also about a hundred and sixty pounds too heavy to be weightless. This fact somehow got through to me, and I promptly thought, "You know, I do believe I'm dreaming. I should wake up now."

And I did.

Now I sort of wish I'd done something better with my absolute control of my dream realm. Summoning legions and legions of gorgeous, muscular men comes to mind. Or leveling mountains with a wave of my hand. Either one would've been satisfactory. As in they would have satisfied something. I've always wanted to level a mountain. I've always wanted legions and legions of gorgeous, muscular men. Perhaps I should combine the two, and level a mountain by gesturing to my legions of gorgeous, muscular men.

Ah, does my inanity know no bounds?

On the foolishness of men

2006-09-29T12:49:00.000-04:00

Pride is a stupid thing, particularly when mixed in the right amounts with its diametrical opposite, uncertainty. When uncertainty tells you that you might not be doing the right thing, pride inevitably responds, "Of course I am!" Intelligent, reasonable behavior then goes out the window.

Ahhhh...screw it. I'm too irritated to be abstract and philosophical. I play an online game. I'm in a guild. One of my guild officers asked me last night to do something that, as far as I'm concerned, was ridiculous. I requested a confirmation of the instructions (mostly because I couldn't believe what I was hearing), and was told, effectively, to shut up and not question his orders, he knows what he's doing. And all I can really think is, "If you're asking me to do that, you obviously don't." We're still discussing the matter, privately and via e-mail, today. He's not budging and while I'm trying to remain diplomatic, my patience has thinned considerably.

I think living in New York is starting to make me rather abrasive. Speaking from history, I don't like giving my opinion if I think it will stir up waves. That is changing with alarming rapidity, and I'm acquiring a certain shocking bluntness.

Or maybe I'm just not the bottomless cup that I always thought I was.