C.A. Talk Radio

I enjoy stumbling across random people's LJs and having other people be able to randomly stumble upon me. As such, I try to keep as many entries as possible public.

I only ask that you're a responsible reader -- as a whole, this LJ would probably be rated R, so if you're of an age that this could get you in trouble, please take a pass on reading here. Wait a few years, if you'd like, though I'll let you in on a secret: a lot of it is all hype.

Seasons greetings to all! To those who celebrate, Merry Christmas (it still is Christmas in some time zones!) and Happy Seventh Night of Hanukkah.

It's been nearly two months since I've been able to gather enough time and energy to write much more than some form of "fuck everything," and in the past few days of these nearly-two-months, LiveJournal has gleefully pounded the nails of obsolescence into its own coffin. While other disagreements over changes and actions over the past years have been more along the soft-power lines of site mission and userbase respect and the like, the most recent update has actually greatly reduced or outright eliminated site functionality for certain types of site use (thread-based RPGs, large discussion forums, memes, etc.) and for certain users (those with slow internet, visual impairments, visual sensitivities, etc.). There's an independent user poll collecting opinions about Release 88 here, if you care to take a couple minutes to check some ticky boxes. Last I checked, there were nearly 4000 responses; more data couldn't hurt.

I long ago resigned myself to being a horrible square. If things are too cool, I just can't deal with them. Apple computers? Nuh-uh, no thanks, I'll take a PC weighted down with Windows any day. And not only Windows -- my primary computer uses Vista, and it's done fine by me for years. My one Apple product is my iPod, and even that is an iPod classic, a big and clunky thing with nary a touch-screen in sight. I refuse to get a smartphone or a tablet computer. I have a netbook.

Nevertheless, I am finally disgruntled enough with LiveJournal that I'm searching out other blogging platforms. Over the past years, my user loyalty for LiveJournal has been eroded so that I only begrudgingly shelled out as little money as possible, and merely the bare minimum required for functional services rendered (i.e. icon space, comment editing capabilties, faster service during high traffic) rather than out of any desire to actually support the business. But given that LiveJournal no longer provides those functional services and has destroyed what was, for me, the site's biggest draw -- a large, open, centralized social networking community -- by driving away many of its own users (i.e. my friends), I have [not finished that thought, apparently. how mysterious!]. The Fellowship has been broken; the great age of LiveJournal is drawing to a close, and many are preparing their ships to sail off to the Grey Havens.

Clearly, given how many characters I have already expended in this entry, micro-blogging is not for me. I've shared with many people my irrational burning hatred for Plurk. It's not a personal judgment against anyone who uses it -- it's just very much a platform that isn't suitable for me at all. I'm still an old-school writer at heart, a terribly self-indulgent, self-centered verbal exhibitionist who is more interested in the sound of their own voice than in keeping up with other people's lives when it comes to pouring time and energy into a situation where I'm publicly displaying my own words. And I do like to keep it as public as possible -- my most formative online experiences were in open message board forums and communities, so I have this quaint, idealized commitment to an eighteenth century coffeehouse-type environment. I like to think that I make up for my pretentious narcissism with my habit of randomly bombarding people with attention over gchat and IRC. There are also my letter-writing efforts (which I plan to continue as routine part of my life, so please consider my offer to be an open one), which do absolutely nothing to counter my pretentious narcissism but at least might make it a little classier. And I am nothing if not a classy broad.

Anyways, does anyone have any blogging recommendations? I'm all ears. WordPress? Blogspot?

For now... Well, clearly, I'm posting here for the time being. I have also, however, started adding people's Dreamwidth journals en masse via openID and will be checking that reading list regularly as well as my LiveJournal flist. I doubt that I will get a Dreamwidth journal for regular posting, as that site has never appealed to me for some reason, but I will at least be keeping in touch with that network. I will likely be keeping this journal in order to post locked content, such as photographs and contact information, as well as any fandom creative content, due to the gray area of copyright. Maybe I'll do a Dreamwidth crossposting mirror, since it seems that so many people are moving over but there are still people who are remaining at LiveJournal. Perhaps linking entries in my Plurk? (Yes, I do have an account, despite my aforementioned irrational burning hatred. Please do not expect to be friended by it; I use it only as an official game communication platform and occasionally to harrass glitterdemon.)

And please forgive all of this completely thrilling contemplation of my online journaling future. It really is a ridiculously big adjustment for me. I've had this ol' thing here for over ten and a half years now. It started out as just an online journal, a digital version of what I did obsessively on paper, with no expectation of what the result of sharing this with others might be. I later found old friends from my early message board days here, and I discovered the practice of regularly following the journals of other people that I knew. I also began finding all of this fandom, far more open and interactive and lively than any other format that I'd experienced. And then? Oh, then. Then CFUD happened. And with that combined with all of the above, LiveJournal truly became a third place for me.

So it's not without some genuine emotional upset -- a good lot of nostalgia, a tinge of sorrow, a dash of uncertainty, a generous helping of an inability to let go -- that I find myself surveying all of these changes and deciding how I'm going to proceed.

In other news, for Christmas, I received some monies, Stephen Sondheim's book Look, I Made A Hat (his follow-up to last year's Finishing The Hat), a few Blu-rays (Firefly, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the 25th Anniversary Concert of Les Miserables... though I have no Blu-ray player), a Superman hoodie (the kind where the hoodie drawstrings have earbuds on the end and you can plug your mp3 player into the pocket), a few other clothing items (sensible and black), a gift certificate to my favorite Chinese restaurant, an infuser tea pot, some fancy monogrammed note cards, a small Papermates journal (the cover is William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More), a fuck-ton of chewing gum, several stocking stuffer-y items and a set of Lord of the Rings character Pez dispensers.

I feel that I am relatively well represented by that haul.

Happy Boxing Day!

[Warning] Note that there may be triggering material in any of the links here, particularly in user icons.

Text lifted harmlessly from socchan, who shamelessly ganked from filladex, who shamelessly jacked from russia_sushi, who shamelessly jacked from capkink.

In the recent LJ news post LJ-staff sneakily mentions that "Comment pages have been redesigned!" with no further information and that these changes will go live on Tuesday, 20th Dec 2011. These changes had been communicated to Russian language user-base for some time in their Russian beta-site, but this post was the first indication of the change for English-language users.

These changes means NO MORE VISIBLE SUBJECT LINES TO COMMENTS starting Tuesday, which means most meme activity will become difficult if not impossible. After pages of comments there has been only one message from the LJ-staff which tells users to switch to S2 style if they want to see comment headings. The S2 styles, which are not only unable to handle large numbers of comments but are also not very accessible to everyone. The only reason given for this change, is that (no subject) on collapsed comments entries with no heading looks ugly, and that "less than 1% user base uses headings".

So, if you don't like this change and specially if you have paid journals, please go and make your voice heard, please please try to remain calm and polite and rational, and remember that ficcing and RPing and Memeing is not the only thing that goes on, on LJ and that LJ provides a very important platform for the Russian political blogosphere, (which is not very happy with this change either). But please make you voice heard (and spread the word if possible).

For a screencap of the new comment form, go here [Russian language] (via ceilidh in this comment on the news post). Why yes, it does look like it would take more time to load, in addition to making accessibility more difficult!

Polite comments requesting LJ staff to change their mind on this matter are being encouraged at both the news post and comment in question.

Things I am really fucking excited to have the time to do tomorrow:
-catch up on reading e-mails
-catch up on reading and commenting to my f-list
-do laundry
-do the dishes
-take out the trash
-sleep
-eat food
-take a shower
-go to the bathroom

The above have been really limited in the past few days.

I would love to maybe write an actual entry, too, but let's not put too much on our plate here. Since if I'm going to even begin catching up on sleep, I'm not going to be awake before 1:00pm.

Periodically, I remember that I have an exam on Monday.

And then I promptly stop caring again.

Hot damn, I've reached the point where I've lost my ability to feel tired.

You know, I do feel kind of good about myself for being confident enough to do something that's bold enough to result in a fuck-up (professionally speaking) regarding a non-trivial item.

All of the other stuff that's fucked, that's not my fault, but I do still have to fix it.

Today is one of those "put a little more mascara on" days.

Another thing that I'm trying to do is to post in my LiveJournal more spontaneously.

Because I have had all that I know of Ingrid Michaelson's discography ridiculously stuck in my head for the past two days, please humor me and tell me: What are your current earworms?

Also, I swear that I don't have any more long-winded entries that were written while I didn't have internet access.

I am so fucking tired, you guys. So tired. You'll eventually get an exciting, real-time entry about how I blame icebellaseahawk for this and how she's not kidding when she says that her apartment is magical.

[From Saturday evening]

A skull and a human-sized cardboard dragon stare at me as I type this from a rehearsal room not my own. icebellaseahawk had a last-minute scenic painting project, so I met her at work and have been doing some production work and, clearly, writing as I sit here with my new friends, the skull and the dragon. There is no internet access here, so by the time anyone else reads this, I will have left my new friends, but let them live on in my memory.

In a great fortunate coincidence (as much of my life has been -- one could even say it has been from before I was even alive, though the exact timing of that is a debate that I am not discussing right now), my mother happened to be in New York for business when I had a free weekend, so I was able to take the train down on Friday afternoon and meet up with her. One of my classes is taking place in New York on Sunday, so that gave me a good excuse for making a full weekend of it, so I contacted icebellaseahawk, as I hadn’t seen her in a while, to crash at her pad tonight.

Friday and most of today was spent with the mother. We didn’t have any plans and just sort of wandered down 53rd Street until we stumbled upon the Museum of Modern Art, where there was an enormous crowd. It turns out that it was Free Friday Night, sponsored by Target, where admission to the museum is free after 4:00pm every Friday. Eh, why not?

And so that’s how one sometimes unexpectedly ends up a couple of feet away from The Starry Night.

I honestly never would have planned to go to the MOMA. It’s only been within the past few years that I’ve discovered my passion for fine art and visual art, but even with that, I tend toward preferring more historical or traditional works, so the "Modern" aspect is something that would make me hesitant. My tastes and ability to look intelligently really have expanded and developed over the past couple of years, though, I think. To say nothing of the fact that the "modern" of the title starts in the nineteenth century, with the Impressionists -- such as our friend Vincent.

So there were actually a number of my favorite artists represented, in addition to Van Gogh: Monet, Dahli, Kahlo. I’ve always been a big fan of Impressionism and Surrealism, and while I’m still not any sort of art historian, it was great to be able to see works from those periods with just the historical background that I’ve gotten from studying drama history. The special exhibitions were also fantastic. One only goes through November 7 , and I highly recommend that you see it if you’re able to. A contemporary collection called Talk To Me, it explores our modern relationships between people and things (and some of the pieces themselves are interactive). There were a lot of video pieces and a lot of pieces that were actually just documentation of interactive/experimental/experiential pieces that had taken place outside of the museum.

There’s also de Kooning retrospective that is absolutely stunning just in its scope alone. It takes up the entire sixth floor of the museum, and covers almost 70 years of work. Just as far as personal taste goes, my visual preference is for his earlier works from the 1930s-1940s, but it was so interesting to see the evolution of his work over the decades and try to see how the world peeked through all of it. That exhibit will be there through January 2012, I believe.

With my blood sugar dropping and no real plan in mind, the mother and I wandered around in search of food, and ended up at Bistecca Fiorentina on Restaurant Row. I say, do not let the, quite frankly, puzzlingly sci-fi-esque website put you off -- it is some damn good food. We were seated at a table that was passed by most of the patrons as they exited, and more than one gave glowing praise right to the host as they left after their meal, which is always good to hear as you're preparing to order. And it certainly lived up to the praise.

I ended my night with something else amazing: going to bed before midnight.

Today, I continued on my mission to eat my way through the city (now with added "drinking my way through the city"), treating myself to brunch with a mimosa at a little cafe on 53rd. I completely failed to find the new UNIQLO store, but that was all right, as I found a street fair on 52nd instead. And then decided that what I needed to do was invade all of the high-end stores on 5th Avenue. I got my heart broken by a $600 blazer in Gant, as it was amazing and also $600. But oh, it was this amazing dark brown/green tweed with brown leather elbow patches, and the cut and drape of it was fantastic. Really, there was tweed all over the place in that store -- no wonder the New Haven store fits in so well at Yale. I dropped into the Armani Exchange after that, but nothing in there held anywhere near as much appeal to me as being able to look like I was trying to be an 80-year old man for hundreds of dollars.

On just as much of a whim, I ended up in St. Patrick's Cathedral. It's been years since I've been in there -- I rarely am this far uptown anymore -- and it was so different going in now as an adult, compared to when I visited as a young tourist. If you're able to, I highly recommend making your way to the Lady Chapel at the very front of the cathedral (i.e. opposite where you enter), beyond the sanctuary and crypt. The fact that it's so far from the entrance and how there aren't any photographs allowed up there keeps it relatively free of tourists, and it's actually peaceful there. I was able to sit down and go through the readings for the week and just spend some quiet time.

Sadly, I really, really, really needed to use the bathroom.

So I left one high altar to attend to another -- namely, the designer collections on floors two and three of Saks Fifth Avenue. Similar to the Lady Chapel in St. Patrick's Cathedral, the second and third floors are such a relief compared to the street level floor, where everyone enters, or the floors with the contemporary collections, which are filled with shoppers. It was incredibly peaceful, almost like walking through a museum on an off-hour, but with the slightly electric, transgressive thrill of being somewhere that you don't really belong but strutting like you own it. I touched a $10,000 evening dress that was probably about two times bigger than I, volume-wise.

I also tried on a $6,000 Louis Vuitton overcoat, which I'm not going to even pretend to sneer at -- it was fabulous. Wool, lined on both sides with silk, with a diagonal stitching pattern, so it was warm without feeling heavy. It had a lot of body to it, with an intentionally bulkier look on top and on bottom and corseting around the torso. It's actually Look 12 in the Women's Ready-to-Wear Fall Winter 2011 Collection. The very nice young salesman had the catalogue there and noted the funny way that the catalogue photo actually doesn't do the coat justice at all, as it's built to severely accentuate curves, and really gives a very stylized exaggerated silhouette, but you can't tell from the catalogue because the model, you know, has no curves to accentuate. In any case, I have a couple of pictures of this exploit on my cell phone, taken by the nice salesman, with me wearing the most expensive piece of clothing that has ever draped upon my body, the Alexander McQueen collection exuding flair in the background.

So I walked back out in the world, smelling of Chanel No. 5 and feeling like I could make anything work.

And then I returned to the street fair and bought myself a $5 scarf and a $3 tamale.

It was delicious.

Eating was not done for the day yet, as I was meeting my mom one last time before she went back home after her training. More wandering ensued, and it brought us to St. Andrews, a Scottish restaurant and bar on 46th. Again, very good and recommended! I ended up chickening out of finally trying haggis, but I did have my first Scottish beer, the Belhaven Twisted Thistle IPA. Also, for those who might find this an attraction, it appeared that all male servers there wear kilts.

And then, I bade the mother farewell and, with some walking to and fro, I've ended up here, with icebellaseahawk in the other room, covered in paint.

Just me and my two new friends.

I’ve decided that the skull’s name is Stanley.

[Typed mostly on the train from New Haven to New York City on Friday 10/21/11]

Sadly, the party that I went out for on Thursday night was extremely underwhelming. It was supposedly a mega-mixer between the Drama and Forestry graduate schools with free food and beer, but it turned out that it was more something that the Forestry school was doing that our own respective graduate student government representatives got roped into, somewhat against their wills. There was free food, at least, of the amazing Chinese-takeout-that-can-kill-you-in-fifty-different-ways-with-its-bare-hands sort (and I'm not even being ironic about the amazingness, I love that shit), but that was pretty much all it had going for it. The free beer was non-existent, and there were hardly any Drama people there, which was not surprising, but that with a distinct lack of mixing made for some social awkwardness from our end of things.

This story has a happy ending, however, for while that party was the opposite of victory, I ran into a couple of my costume designer friends and got swept up by another party, a surprise birthday party for one of the scenic designers. That party was a great success. And full of all of the hilarity that you might expect from getting about ten designers (I was the sole stage management representative, though we also picked up a director and playwright by chance) in one apartment and trying ot organize themselves enough to pull off a surprise party. (he four minutes of sitting in the dark waiting, having been tipped off of our target's proximity by text message, were straight out of a slapstick comedy. Actually, there were a number of things straight out of a slapstick comedy before that, too, such as us standing under the apartment window and plaintively calling out the name of one of our accomplices to try to get let inside, but the waiting was the most concentrated example.

After the arrival of the birthday girl, a group of us briefly went back to the bar for some dancing, but that initial party was such a loser that it was taking place in said bar that shut down it's dance floor ten minutes before its already weak closing time of 1:00am. Needless to say, we returned to the birthday party, for more booze and cake and dancing to 90s music videos on Youtube while the kitchen looked like a meeting of the communist party back in the old country. (It is perhaps worth mentioning that the tenant of the apartment and boyfriend of the birthday girl is actually from Romania, so the picture was complete with some very heavy Eastern European accent happening.) The champagne and liquor flowed freely (among other things, there was whiskey, which made me quite happy, and a bottle of tequila that was just getting passed around communally), and the mood was, through everyone's mid-week exhaustion, utterly festive.

So hello, gentle readers. It's been a while.

Speaking of my designer friends, one of them recently made me aware of something. You see, I decided a while back is that I will never put my relationship status on Facebook. Part of it is my stubborn resistant to social networking overwhelming my life and wanting to retain some privacy. Not entirely unrelated, another part of it is my inherent pessimism regarding myself and relationships and my lack of a deisre to announce the inevitable break-up on the computer screens of hundreds of people at once. One thing that results from this is that no one is aware of the actual situation, which I suppose creates a certain air of mystery.

So as I was going about my business the other week, my one friend complimented me on how good I looked. You look great, she told me, kind of tired, yeah, aren’t we all, but you have just been looking really good lately. Something’s different about you, she insisted, something is going on in your life – are you in love? Is there a special someone happening?

And the thing is… I had been much happier in the past week. I’d remarked upon it to several people. Up until recently, the school year had been a bit of a drag to me, utterly tolerable but a little bit dead. And then suddenly – there was something new. And it’s amazing how things will change, the new things that will appear. A reason to go out at night. A desire to add that extra flair of style. A strut to my step. A knowledge that there was something waiting for me.

So it's official. That figurative Facebook relationship status has changed. I am now In A Relationship With… my job.

Yes, I know, I’ve claimed that I was married to my job in the past, but apparently I’ve really been exuding that early-dating glow. Or is it a honeymoon glow?

I certainly hadn’t expected to be in that state. My first production assignment for the year was still a week away, first rehearsal two weeks away, when I began receiving desperate pleas to stage manage a show at the Cab on short notice (i.e. it went into tech in a couple days and opened in less than a week). Their stage manager had been forced to drop the project due to a change in his work-study hours, and the production was now up shit creek in that area. So I dragged my feet a little and threw a hundred disclaimers at them because, not having planned on being in tech and running a show that week, my availability wasn’t totally clear, but they didn’t really have many (i.e. any) other options, so they got what they could of me.

The show, Rey Planta by Manuela Infante, was an interesting experience. A Chilean play Based on the mass murder of the Nepalese royal family in 2001, it was translated into English by a friend of mine in the dramaturgy program. In the events that inspired the piece, the murderer was a prince of the royal family and shot himself after killing his family but lingered in a coma for a few days before dying. Responding to that situation, the play features an immobile king with his stream of consciousness being spoken through another voice. For most of the show, the king basically sitting still onstage is all that is seen, with a couple of other characters occasionally passing through the space without speaking, just going about their business. It’s definitely not a traditional theatrical experience and demands a lot of the audience, but a number of people found it very moving. It was also interesting from my point of view to be able to watch it develop as a production over the week that I was on the project.

One thing that also came up during the show was that one night, I was making my way around, doing my stage managerly business, and I got into a conversation with my costume designer backstage who said, Oh, there’s a bunch of designers sitting at a table in there (the Cab is a dinner theatre) and they’re all just trading stories about working with you and how much of a badass you are.

Apparently, I am becoming a bit of a local legend, in my own way, and am considered the most badass member of the department. My own classmates have told me that that adjective applies, though the fact that I’m pretty sure that a good lot of this stems from the ability and willingness to chase down cockroaches in four-inch heels and remove dead mice from where they are stuck (and I haven’t even told them about how I catch snakes with my bare hands at home) makes me wonder if some other descriptor might be more appropriate, though what it might be, I couldn’t tell you. In any case, it seems that I am on my way toward developing that cult of personality that I always said that I would establish. I’m learning, however, that even my ego is not so incredibly over-sized as to eliminate the niggle of self-doubt that makes me wonder if I’ll be able to live up to all of the hype. But my ego is over-sized enough that I can brush that off and consider this all to be external signals that I am doing something right and so should keep up the work of whatever the hell that it is that I’m doing and strive to be harder, faster, better, stronger.

In all seriousness, hearing that truly warmed my heart. I love my job so much, and the fact that there are people who look forward to working with me as much as I look forward to working with them is so, so rewarding. It doesn’t surprise me that there was, perhaps, a visible glow. I’m so incredibly lucky that I was able to discover that this career existed and to then be able to pursue it.

The reason that all of this artistic proletariat joy didn’t pop up until a couple of weeks ago was that my production assignments timed out again this year in that I had a large work-study assignment (non-departmental production work for which you are paid as part of your financial package for the school) at the beginning of the season/school year. The result of this being that I end up having been at school for over a month and a half before doing a stage managerial duty of any sort. At least my assignment was primarily run crew, which has me very close to the production and in the same world as stage management, but nevertheless, it is always a bit of a drag.

This year, the show was the second leg of a co-production of Chekov’s Three Sisters. You know what Three Sisters is? It’s fucking long, that’s what it is. The span of the show (from top of show until the end of curtain call, which included an intermission in the middle) was three hours and ten minutes. That is a long, long show to run for three weeks. To its credit, even as I was sitting up in the booth as the light board operator and dicking around on the internet with my netbook while paying as little attention as possible to the high art that was happening onstage, there were still sections of the show that I would catch myself watching weeks into the run, because they were that funny, that touching, that alive.

What made the situation even more interesting is that I wasn’t at the board during my entire time on the production. I was also part of the electrics crew, which ended up throwing out my back for half a week to the point of not being able to sit, stand or walk. (The inciting event? Driving an unmarked white van. Which, for a full explanation, was to pick up some rental equipment, and it was a moderately long drive and that van didn’t have particularly supportive seating and it was terrible driving conditions that day.) As a result, I actually missed the first two days of tech, which was even more of a terrible, humiliating thing than normal (though I am very glad that my supervisors were sensible and compassionate, because as much as I hated missing tech, I would have hated being there even more), because I wasn’t just switching over from working on electrics to serving as the light board op. You see, the staff props runner had a baby over the summer. And at some point not too long before tech, it occurred to them that her maternity leave didn’t end until the show opened. Which meant that there was a week and a half of tech and previews that they didn’t a props runner. As a result, I was pulled from the run crew to serve as substitute props runner for that time, and then after the show opened, we would switch off and I would spend the rest of the show as light board op… until the show closed, and I was back on electrics crew for strike the next day.

It was a little bit complicated, but it worked out. Despite the whole “back injury” thing.

And it was a good experience, much preferable to pretty much any other work-study assignment that I might have gotten, and once the show opened, I had a good amount of time to actually just be a person. It’s been pretty well established, however, that I’m one of those type A masochists who isn’t happy unless my life is miserable, so I was lacking that spark for a good while.

Still, I strove to use that Be-A-Real-Person Time as best I could. I started running again, because I love physical activity, the weather was beautiful for making use of the Canal Greenway bicycle-pedestrian path and I definitely put on a few pounds over the past few months of drinking my way through my New Haven summer jobs, eating my way through my Seattle vacation and then inhaling as much free food as I could at beginning-of-the-school-year events, all without as much exercise as I usually like to do even under just normal consumption conditions. Once upon a time, I was this kid with exercise-induced asthma who couldn’t run. I was a vicious, competitive little shit in gym class, who would kind of frighten my opponents with my burning shounen spirit, but my body was never as able as my spirit was willing. I would even have dreams where I would try to run, but it would be like moving through molasses, my body would be so heavy. I’ve tried to work at that over the past years, though, and I’ve made it so that I can do a combination of walking/running intervals. My current route is 5-6 miles, round trip, and I’d say that probably a cumulative half of it is running.

It’s probably a psychiatrist’s field day, but there are very few better feelings to me than just leaving everything, closing the door behind you and running away.

I also kept up to date with e-mail during these past weeks, which for me means reading a lot of news articles, something that I picked up from competitive speech & debate back in high school (extemp, anyone?), though not in electronic form at that point. Clearly, I’ve fallen out of habit with my social networking outlets, so my Twitter is no longer the newsstream that I once strove to make it (though I do blame at least part of that on the new design, which I detest). Still, here are a few recent things that caught my eye.

This NYT article about the spread of ending female genital cutting nearly brought me to tears when I read it this past Sunday. It also struck me how I had read an IPS article about breast ironing just a couple weeks before. What horrible things we do to our girls out of love.

Thanks to lady_ganesh for marking the passing of Frank Kameny, who was fired from the Army Map Service in 1957 due to an arrest as a "sexual pervert" -- i.e., he was gay -- and went on to become a leading figure in the gay rights movement [Slate] [NYT]. Also passing earlier this month was Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth [NYT, Obit] “Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” [author Diane McWhorter] added, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory — meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”

Again, an interesting juxtaposition, as “[Shuttleworth] also came under criticism by gay rights advocates in 2004 when he lent his name to a campaign in Cincinnati to stop the city from passing a gay rights ordinance”.

And as a last bit from The Box (that terminology being another high school extemp holdover – you stored all of your research resources in your box, which you brought with you to competitions), here is the Your Man Reminder video for breast cancer awareness. Completely built out of heteronormative stereotypes and I don’t even fucking care, I laughed, even as I sometimes averted my eyes out of embarrassed discomfort. It’s so over-the-top and ridiculous and self-aware. And it’s striving for a good goal.

So that’s how I was a Real Person during all of my copious spare time these past weeks.

Of course, most of that time was actually spent being a fake person.

As anyone who has had any contact with my over the past couple of months will know, I am completely obsessed with the X-Men: First Class movie. Between XMFC and Captain America, it was a great summer for movies for me. Basically, both movies were the romances that I had always wanted to see but never quite been given.

Yes, the romances. While not news to most of you, just for the record, it’s not for nothing that people have nicknamed XMFC “Brokeback Mutants.” And the romances aren’t the main event in either of the movies – which is also part of what makes them the romance movies that I’ve always wanted. Because you have those relationships – Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, Steve Rogers and Agent Peggy Carter – that are so strong and so right, but there’s something bigger at stake and what might have been for those two individual people, those two insignificant people, is sacrificed, perhaps necessarily or perhaps not. “Love doesn’t conquer all” is one of my biggest relationship pings – I’m just so drawn to stories of things that are so all-consuming but just don’t work out.

In fact, if you look at my character line-up at CFUD, I think that Maladict from Monstrous Regiment is the only of mine that isn’t yearning, self-denying, repressing, regretting, sacrificing or lashing out in some way. Enjolras for France (and on the receiving end of Grantaire for Enjolras) from Les Miserables, Tatsumi for Tsuzuki from Yami no Matsuei, Takeuchi Sora against Kiric from Air Gear, Van Grants for Auldrant from Tales of the Abyss (my second one for his homeland – is that a sub-Thing?), Rorschach and life in general but also Daniel in that awkwardly weird way from Watchmen, Jack for the Doctor from Doctor Who.

And oh, right: Charles Xavier for Erik Lehnsherr from X-Men: First Class.

That was a thing that I did.

Actually, that was a thing that I did while drunk. In a way. Two years ago, someone had told me that I should app Professor X, and I’d responded that I never would do that, because he seemed like my type but I would never be able to go through that whole backlog of comics. (Incidentally, I also watched Wanted during that time and probably would have apped Wesley Gibson were I not working 80-hour weeks.) Fast-forward to this summer: I’d heard things about the movie and told that someone that I feared that if I watched it, I would end up apping from it, as it sounded as though it contained many of the themes and character issues that fascinate me. Whereupon that someone basically frog-marched me into watching it immediately. Predictably, I was hopelessly drawn to the character of Charles Xavier. Writing an app for him proved to be much more difficult. With the time ticking down, I finally ended up going out one night with people work for a company dinner, drank about five beers during said company dinner, went home and began writing a whole new app from scratch, passed out in the middle of it and then woke up about an hour later and finished it, that hour-long nap having been the only sleep that I’d gotten in perhaps the past twenty hours.

Apparently, that was the recipe for success.

What I hadn’t predicted was the way that would re-involve me with CFUD. I’d still been steadily active with the game (relatively speaking, at least) and enjoying myself greatly, but I’d definitely become more of an elusive presence with no real primary identifying character.

As one might gather from my saying that, that has changed. Immensely.

It was only due to having had that Real-Person Time that I was able to do it, but I got really involved in RPing again. And then when I got an Erik – hello, glitterdemon -- I suddenly found myself staying up until ungodly hours of the morning in ways that I hadn’t since I was still a teenager. It was irresponsible and unnecessary and so, so much fun. And rediscovering fun in a way that you hadn’t experienced in a while? That’s a wonderful thing. Especially when you get to do it with other people and even make new friends along the way.

Written Friday afternoon:

And off I go to Canada! The Pacific Northwest is so amazingly green and beautiful, and the weather so far has been nothing short of perfect. The last and only other time that I was west of Pittsburgh was over three years ago, when I ventured to L.A., touching down into a miasma of intense heat and yellow pollution haze floating over endless blacktop. This is just so much the opposite of everything that made L.A. horrible.

Right now, I'm pumping 13: The Musical into my ears, similar to how I did on the plane flight west. In an example of great decision-making, I'm playing piano for a summer camp production of 13 -- nine-to-five for a week in Eastern Standard Time, less than 48 hours after I get back from Pacific Standard Time. Luckily, I was able to get my hands on the score before I left, and the music isn't that difficult. So long as I make sure that I'm familiar enough with it to have it in my bones, the actual playing shouldn't be a big deal. Staying awake, on the other hand, will probably be more of a challenge. But as long as I don't die in a fiery highway crash as a result of falling asleep behind the wheel while commuting, everything should be copacetic.

I worked with the theatre group earlier this summer, in the couple of weeks before my westward journey. They're a young local community theatre group, and as much as certain amateur foibles now get on my professional nerves, I do find the ambition charming -- the head of the group was born during the 1990s, which still hasn't stopped freaking me out -- and I have a genuine admiration for the amateur spirit, if not for all amateur practices (or the lack thereof).

One thing I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle when I go back is the way that the leader/director/producer uses "Mrs." as my salutation. I honestly was so caught off guard the first time that I didn't know how to respond, and as time passes, it seems to just seems to be more and more of an awkward moot point. It's not as though I don't respond to it, though I would probably feel more natural being addressed simply by my last name without any title attached. And if the altenrative is "Miss," then I'll stick with the "Mrs." Funnily enough, I've never minded "Ma'am," which I know is not a favorite for all young ladies of my age. But I figure that anything that you'd yell back at an army officer is damn well good enough for me. In any case, it amuses me more than anything else. Do I seem to have passed the threshold of ripe marrying age? Is it the gray hair? Granted, the musical director for the shows that I'm working on, who was my connection that got me the job, is a "Mrs.," which is probably part of it.

Issues of personal address as related to gender and marital status aside, I had a grand time working on the other show with them. It was Hairspray, which is just an amazingly crafted musical. Really, the main thing that I took away from that experience was awe for how well-written that show is -- the book, the score, everything. Every line is either a winner of a zinger or brutally efficient at moving the plot forward or a combination of the two, and all consistent with character (and what fun characters they are!). And it is just so wonderously energetic and hilarious while taking hits at issues of race, gender and pop culture- and commerce-driven American society. And the music is infectious and such great fun to play. I love old-style 50s/60s rock & roll, so this is right up my alley, with a dash of classical Broadway "You're Timeless To Me" thrown in for good measure. My involvement in the development of a new work of musical theatre over the past eight months gave me a whole new perspective in seeing all of the ways that Hairspray works as a show and a desire to emulate its success as a creation.

Hairspray wasn't the first work of musical theatre that I've worked on this summer. As much as this might surprise some who know me, I have actually been doing things over the past couple of months in addition to putting myself at risk for alcohlism. I really could not have custom-designed this summer to be any better than it is if I'd had an actual secure plan further ahead of time than a month into said summer.

After tearing my own soul to pieces with The Normal Heart after the school year ended, I went home for a bit, taking in the clean country air and eating way too much food because my grandparents and I socialize mainly by going out to eat together. I was back in New Haven at the start of June to stage manage a program that was created as a collaboration between the Drama and Music schools to give a two-week workshop opportunity to early-career music theatre writers (under the age of 30 and/or less than 5 years out of school) so that they can develop their work with no pressure of production. In this case, "music theatre" can mean anything from traditional book musicals to opera to more avante-garde works. This year, there were two book musical and one opera; I was on the opera.

It was a great opportunity for me, given my musical background, interest in opera and lack of previous experience in this specific sub-field. The vibe in an opera room is another beast compared to that of a theatre room, and the balance of a director and a maestro is so different even from that of a director and a musical director. It also just felt good to have my musical background feel like a useful and appreciated thing. Overall, I learned a lot, met a lot of wonderful people and had a great time.

There was one day that was not so wonderful -- acually, the day itself was great, there just was one brief incident in the late evening that managed to piss me off so much that I had to drink away my rage late into the night. I try not to go to sleep angry, if I can at all help it, so I really was quite fine even before the next morning, but I am just the sort of person who has very few rage buttons, all of which require rather precise pushes and none of which will stay pushed-in for very long... but also all of which are very, very reliable.

In any case, that unexpectedly whiskey-soaked night ended up being Day 2 in the 8-day week where I drank every single fucking day. The day before has been Tony Sunday, and, not having a television but having ample time between rehearsal on Saturday and Monday, I decided to live my life like a Glee season finale and sweep myself off to New York City to mingle with the crowds and also get some cocktails at the Dove Parlour. Honestly, I don't think that younger-me could ever have even conceptualized that I one day be hanging out with friends in a quirky bar in the Village on Tony night, let alone formed a coherent fantasy of it.

So between that and that and the company dinner and going out after the readings and the champagne at the readings themselves and going out with the other stage managers after all was said and done, I was kind of a booze-soaked lush by the end of that experience. After that, I put my liver on break.

For a day.

And then synergic and hitode came to visit and I was going to be good, but damn, that cilantro mojito at the fancy hamburger joint was good. Also, we tried out my Les Miserables 25th Anniversary Concert drinking game, which I have to re-tool, because I gave up playing halfway through because even I didn't need to ingest that much alcohol. Even if we're only talking about the sober parts, It was still a grand time -- we hit the beach for hours on the first day of summer and got ourselves some famous New Haven clam pie.

It wasn't too long after that that I was heading in their direction, as I joined anatari, synergic and Angie for a really cool production of Spoon River Anthology that was performed in a cemetery in Brooklyn. We went to a midnight show, which, in addition to being a midnight show in a cemetery, featured a tour of the crypt beforehand. And the next day, we went to NYC Pride -- my first Pride ever -- which was a wonderful, joyous day of love and rainbows. I ran into a couple of drama school friends, and also, as I was watching the parade, some guy who was marching in it came over to me and complimented me on my make-up.

Doing. It. Right.

We ended the day with dinner at Southern Hospitality BBQ, which was pretty good for an urban BBQ joint. I had bought a Thrillist meal deal for there, which got me a serving of pulled pork, a quarter of BBQ chicken, five dry-rub ribs, eight wet ribs, a side of coleslaw, a side of fries and five shots of bourbon. And yes, aside from not finishing the fries and getting help from anatari and synergic with the bourbon, it all ended up in my stomach. It was beautiful. And I can also now actually make semi-informed comments on bourbon, which I feel ups my bro cred substantially. Verdict: I'm a traditionalist who likes some good ol' Jim Beam, but Fighting Cock bourbon is rather interesting, with an oddly fruity, wine-like taste to it. Not a big fan of Old Rip Van Winkle or Rebel Yell; both of those were a little more along the lines of paint remover. None of us could remember the name of the fifth one, but none of us were big fans of it, either.

And with all of that behind me, I started stage management work on a week-long reading/residency for Page 73, a NYC-based production company that focuses on early-career playwrights. It was more great people and good times and also drinking. After more than 25 years, I finally became a true American and had pizza and beer for the first time in my life. I've discovered that beer and dating are, at heart, quite similar. It can seem so intimidating to go on a search for The One, because it takes so much effort and risk and trial-and-error and also costs money. Along the way, you'll likely have to go through a number of bad life decisions, but hopefully, you'll eventually find the one that's right for you.

Of course, sometimes there are good decisions involved, too. It was that (six slices of) pizza and (five large glasses of) beer night that finally pulled a decent CFUD application out of me, and I now have added Charles Xavier (via X-Men: First Class) to my pantheon of fictional people that I pretend to be on the internet. It was quite an experience -- I ended up running his intro post for two whole weeks, after having, without exaggeration, given myself a repetitive stress injury from my first day of playing him that took two weeks of not using my right hand for anything except piano playing to heal. (That one goes in the "Bad Decision" folder.) XMFC was my perfect summer movie in so many ways, though, and I'm having such a great time that I give even less of a flying fig about character-play balance than I usually do.

Naturally, I'm on a break from RPing right now, what with my having adventures on the west coast. I got to Seattle on Wednesday afternoon, where I've been staying with wonderseal, who has been so amazing to this poor wayfaring stranger. I've been eating seafood and been to the Wing Luke Asian Museum (which I highly recommend -- it's relatively small but interesting and unique) and gotten lunch at Pike Place Market (mac & cheese, which I'm still amazed that I was able to eat without having a heart attack) and seen one of my fellow stage management apprentices from Orlando (just after she finished working on Aladdin at the 5th Avenue and before she leaves for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!) and overall felt like a useful human being because I am getting up at, like, 7:30 in the morning.

Right now, I am off to see lilorchid1023, who I hear is going to feed me and be serenaded by me. The second part of the weekend will have me in Victoria, to attach myself to carrythelight, harukami and mackzazzle and also give carrythelight booze wait but yes.

Who knows when I'll be able to actually post this entry. But apparently I'm not a terrorist and they just let me into Canada, so it very well might occur on foreign soil. I have to be getting relatively close to my drop-off point by now -- a casino, I'm wearing a dress and a straw fedora and red lipstick and everything -- so I'll bring this to a close for now.

Go west, young man!

DO ASK DO TELL
A consent comment fic meme!
This is a comment fic meme for talking. Two characters (or three, or four, whatever!) talking about what they want and figuring how to make everyone happy. The conversation can be as simple as "Do you want to have sex?" "Yes!" but the fics should all involve explicit consent to whatever is happening.


I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm going to request the randomest small-fandom shit there.