Listening:
Poe, Hello
Dead Can Dance, Boxed Set (Disc 1)

I haven't really felt like writing here all that much I think in part because I wanted to get more feedback than I've gotten. I've been impatient to build a dialogue there but I've come to realize I have to sell to an audience first. I'm not sure I really want to do that. I mean I want to know what people think, and I want to know what my words are making other people think but I find the notion of encouraging a dialogue in my own space somewhat dangerously close to compromising my original thoughts.

Not that I have that many original thoughts.

So for now I'll just back up and meander around in my head a little bit.

I need to email some folks, see if they want tickets to Tori.

I need to get more rest, I used to be able to hang with five or six hours a night, not any more. I couldn't even get up today in time to take a shower. Blech I hate skipping morning showers without a darned good reason (camping, for example). But I don't like the feeling of sitting at a desk and moving around just the slightest feeling of grunge on my skin.

I need to move to the Moon. I absolutely give up on this race. We think that diplomacy can be found at the end of a gun barrel, or better yet like to say fuck diplomacy, my car bomb will do I want to do in life. This is not a sign of a race hellbent on self-destruction but evidence that our old way of thinking is not cutting it anymore. Evolve or die. That goes for thought paradigms as well.

If I haven't mentioned it recently, I'm sorry, but my neice is the most adorable child I have ever laid eyes on. *grins shamelessly*

The brakes on my car are making funny noises again. Damn.

I want to take a vacation come winter, but I definately don't deserve it if I don't make every attempt to mount a play first. For that I need money and I haven't the faintest idea where I'm going to get it. And at the same time I have to have a play. Urg. Must. speak. with. Space. Dog.

I really want to take a weekend away somewhere where it's silent except for natural noises. Maybe camping but Molasses and I aren't that great at it alone. Not that it matters, it's already too cold. But maybe a tiny beach town up the coast. We'd have to head up far to get to some mountain spot that wasn't closed by the fires. I just want a break from listening to the whir, hiss and hum of machines chugging along and the human chatter of "getting by."

Owie. Need to see a dentist. Sweets of any kind make my teeth hurt. That includes SlimFast snack and meal bars. I should get a dentist I guess. I haven't been to one in so long I'm terrified of what they'll find. *sigh*

Something happened a couple of weeks back that to all appearances was pretty normal but I was only ok with it because I forced myself to be so. I'm still kind of forcing myself because it would seem that I was making a mountain of a molehill if I made it clear that I'm not ok. Also enough time has passed that it would just be dumb to bring it up. But it still kind of annoys me. I guess part of it is that I can't think of a better way around it.

I still hate children.

I *really, really* hate it when my efforts go unnoticed, and hate it even more when I offer advise or otherwise my two cents on a subject and meticulously explain what the alternatives are and why they suck and then the person to whom I offered the advise to ignores it and then gets burned. It makes me feel like my worth in the relationship has been cheapened for no particular reason other than I didn't lie to that person. But I still feel like I have an obligation to help the person up from their situation. Even while they cry for how much they wanted things to be eventhough I just spent a sizable amount of time telling them that reality wasn't designed that way. I really wish I had it in me to be hard-hearted but I don't. And I always fall for the person who can point to the relationship that he doesn't have. This has happened more than I want to admit to.

(Ani sidenote:
now you bring me your bruises
so i can 'ooh' and 'aah' at the display
maybe i'm supposed to make one of my famous jokes
that makes everything okay
or maybe i'm supposed to be the handsome prince
who rides up and unties your hands
or maybe i'm the furrow-browed friend
who thinks she understands
From "2 Little Girls")

Really, I don't know a single person for whom being a friend isn't some amount of work. I generally take a lack of effort as sign of a lack of interest. And I want to keep my friends but sometimes....

So anyway, have I ever told you just how wonderful my boyfriend is? Cause he's wonderful. Sometimes an asshole but I think that's him giving as good as he takes. And he takes it very, very well. Mmhh. }:>

I've been getting louder and louder in recent times and I think it's a sign of comfort. I like voicing my opinions and speaking my mind. Often I find myself tempted to think that those who don't speak up haven't got anything to say and even when I pull back from this I still feel frustrated that they want to keep their thoughts rather than share. But these days I remember how silence is and how hard it is to learn anything about people if I'm doing all the talking. I need to go back to keeping quiet and listening. People reveal so much when they breathe, say hello and generally talk about whatever. Must be tough if I'm steamrolling them.

I've had some other frustrations at work that aren't really worth being frustrations. But in general (and this dosn't just happen at work but it's where I can see it most clearly) I get annoyed and jealous when someone comes in and does something for less time than I do it and advances past me. Three of the people that I have been instructed to go to were hired after me. The fourth (the one I would look for first, as it happens) was hired on the same day. It's really hard how much I have to remind myself it's because they're hunting down management experience and a corporate career. I am merely hunting down a reliable income. On the one hand it's indicative work being lame - no one really knows when there is a new project they can get on board; we usually find out about projects when the positions were already filled by hand-picked personnel. On the other hand it also shows how I don't like working with other people if I can't get my way and thus really hate giving the higher-ups any sort of leeway with me. I dunno, I view it as a compromise to try and advance here, but then I get annoyed when other people do. For God's sake someone needs to do those jobs, and us old folks are too jaded to try.

I suppose I should hunt down a theatre that will be playing Frida. I'm just worried of course. At (the very) least they have a Mexican playing the Mexican icon. That's better than usual. I mean Frida Kahlo was half Polish but that particular mixture is kinda hard to come by. It's just that I've met to many folks up here (by up here I mean *white*) who don't really understand Mexicans and thus don't really understand Frida. They think they just have to know the facts about her life and that will explain the rest of it. Her life was intense in the extreme, and there is no way you could convince me that it was a *good* life. It was fraught with heartbreak and excruciating pain, multiple miscarriages, a cheating husband, a wrecked body and the hollowness of being for the Left but unable to affect any change in that direction. Her hysterics, her playfulness, her ideals and her lifestyle were coping mechanisms the society she knew afforded her. On purpose she tried to be as Mexican as possible to the point of preferring peasant blouses and skirts when she could afford fine dresses and when the Intelligensia of the Left saw women dressing more and more like men. So it frustrated me when a year ago I went to an art lecture on Frida Kahlo and the (white) art historian kept letting her voice get scandalized at the sort of things Frida would do or say to get attention. Pre-marriage Frida had a playfulness to her that strongly reminds me of my mother. She met Diego Rivera when she was a teen and he was at her school to paint some of the walls with his murals. For the heck of it she would run to where he was shouting that he should hide because his wife (at the time, his third wife, Frida would become his fourth) was on her way in. It was quite well known that Diego was a womanizer and only his third wife never developed a sense of humor about it. Women get so suprised and horrified that she would put up with a man like Diego. I can see this point of view but to me it seems like they're missing the point. In Mexico women are expected to know who they are marrying. While it is quite courteous for the man to ask the woman's father for permission (some fathers will still get annoyed if they don't get asked) marriage isn't held as some mystery for kids to fall into. It's taught (usually) as a "till death" kind of thing and so both parties usually get it drilled into them that they better be frickin sure it's what they want. If after the wedding Frida realized she made a mistake trying to take it back (if she had gotten that far, she had a sizable amount of denial going on, also a Mexican trait) would have been embarassing on an extreme level. So anyway. I hope the movie does the artist some justice. Her work is so fabulous and sublime a statement on what it is to be a Mexican woman it deserves nothing less.