“I finished My So Called Life this morning while I was on the treadmill.”

“Oh…” Mike is eating breakfast. He made himself this delicious bagel with Nutella and cream cheese. I can’t see him eating it, but I’m still jealous.

“I guess the problem that I’m having is that they didn’t know that they were going to be cancelled, so they left the series with all these loose ends that never got tied up.”

“Yeah.” I don’t know if he’s listening, but I’m really just talking to myself.

“I’ve been thinking about how it should end, but I really don’t know how it should be…”

“Why don’t you just imagine that someone comes into the school and shoots up everyone.”

“You’re a freakin’ genius.”

“I was joking.”

“No, really. You’re a genius. Now who would it be?” I’m really excited about the prospect of annihilating the entire cast of My So Called Life. “I know!”

“Know what…”

“Tino! The Elusive Tino!”

“Ok…” He has finished his breakfast and his attention is on me fully, but he’s obviously confused.

“There’s this character in the show that I don’t think is ever shown on screen. Everyone says things like, ‘I’ll get that from Tino,’ or ‘We’re waiting for Tino,’ or ‘I guess Tino’s my friend.’ Maybe in the final episode, Tino FINALLY shows up to school and shoots up the place!”

“I really was joking.”

“No, it’s brilliant. He would kill Rayanne because she tried to replace him in the Frozen Embryos. He would kill Jordan because he actually did replace him and renamed the band. He would kill Angela because he figured that she was the reason Jordan took over the band. Ricky would get shot trying to protect Angela and Rayanne. I don’t know why Tino would kill Brian and Sharon, though…”

Mike has stopped listening. Either that, or he’s patiently waiting for me to come back down to earth and start talking about something beside ten year old television shows.

“Maybe I’ll just have Tino kill Jordan and Angela and everyone else has to deal with the aftermath. Maybe Brian would marry Rayanne Graff. He deserves a wild and exciting girl like her don’t you think?”

“I was just joking…”

Man, I need a Chair of Self-Acceptance. Where can I get one?

Look at the smile on that guy. I need some of that…

It’s two in the morning and I can’t sleep. I tried warm milk and it’s just not working. I woke up at midnight with that horrible sleep paralysis. Mike was snoring next to me and I couldn’t move. The adrenaline kicked in and I was wide awake by the time that I could move. I thought that I might be able to go back to sleep, but by one am, I realized I had a problem, so I let Sid outside to pee and sat down at the computer with a mug of warm milk. I still haven’t felt drowsy. I have to work today. I need to get some sleep. I must be stressed or something.

I dreamt about Sceverenia’s house in West Valley again. It was still for sale and vacant. All of us were there reminiscing about old times. The house was in a state of disrepair. My mom showed up at the end and wanted me to come home. My cat, Maggie, was there and I was having trouble scooping her up to bring her home with me. I was stealing whatever I could out of the house (even though those strange appliances weren’t ever in her house). I was just packing that stuff into my car. In the dream, Scev’s dad, Dick, was dead, but I kept saying that he was there. I think this all has to do with him somehow. I guess I never got to say goodbye to her dad. I didn’t think that the last time I saw him would be the last time ever. I can’t even remember the last time I saw him.

I used to wish he was my dad. He never went insane. He was quiet. He would pretend that he couldn’t hear us because he was “deaf.” Really, I think he cultivated that idea because then he could listen to our conversations. I always thought it was hilariously funny when he could hear some things we said just fine, but others, he would pretend he couldn’t hear. I think I heard him say the word, “What?” more than any other word.

One time, I watched him eat. He left a bite of each kind of food on his plate: one bite of meat, one bite of potatoes, one bite of vegetable. I asked him why and he said, “That’s for the gods.” He went to his room and left the plate on the table. A few minutes later, I caught the cat eating the food that he had left on the plate. I had this shining moment when I realized that the cat was one of the gods. Suddenly everything around me felt holy and god-like. I could be a god. Spanky the dog could be a god. This time, the god was the cat. It was as if the spiritual world commingled with the terrestrial world in a strange mix of color and beauty.

I guess I keep dreaming about her house because I needed to claim all those memories as mine. I feel really bad that I never got to tell Dick how much I loved him. He was a great dad to Scev and me. I feel like the world is less because he’s gone and he never even knew that I thought that way about him. He was always patient and willing to lend a deaf ear.

The truck was driving in front of me. It was a pickup in pretty good shape. I otherwise would have ignored it, but it had awkward letters on its back window. Written out in red electrical tape, the words read, “RIP Chris LeDoux.”

This is how I get my news when I’m on a news fast.

The truck turned toward the high school. I drove past it and headed to work. Chris LeDoux. I hadn’t heard those two words for at least three years.

I used to have a secretary that was obsessed with him. She was a happily married woman who was bored by the requirements of our secretarial position. She was creative and artistic and ended up making the flyers for the agents in the office. In fact, she was the only secretary that I trusted to make my flyers. She was far better at design than I was.

“Who’s that?” I pointed to the cowboy on her computer screen.

“That’s Chris LeDoux.”

She looked at me like I should know him. She was surprised that I didn’t. She went on to explain how great he was. She showed me at least six pictures of him on her computer. She didn’t say that he was a musical genius. She didn’t say that he had been a bareback rodeo champion. She just thought he was beautiful.

The name of Chris LeDoux was logged in my mind under the category, “Bored Secretary” and I didn’t think of him again until last week when that truck flashed it’s red electrical tape letters at me.

Here I am. I find myself three years later, filed in the same category as that good-looking cowboy. We’re both in the “Bored Secretary” folder along with fingernail files and nasal voices.

I don’t even like Country Music…

I wrote before about Babu. I referred to him by his given name, Sethuraman Srinivasan Jr., but he goes by Babu among his friends and family. I emailed him when I found his website so long ago and we talked a bit.

I promptly forgot he existed.

When he emailed me an update, I almost deleted it without looking at it and considered reporting him as spam to Gmail. Fortunately, some glimmer of memory came to me. I just read his latest entry on his primative weblog and I am laughing at his pain and discomfort. His Haunted House story is scarier than anything Stinky Ghost could muster!

Babulon 2005: The Center for all things Babu

Check him out!

My dependence on caffeine has gotten phenomenally worse. If I don’t make sure I get a dose by ten in the morning, I end up with a headache. The thought of going off it completely makes me cringe, but the idea of having to drink a Diet Mountain Dew every morning just so I won’t have a headache bothers me even more. I guess I’m spending this weekend going off the Dew. Goody… Three days of head-splitting headaches. Better than every day, I guess.

Update 8:29 pm: I’m too chicken to go cold turkey. I decided to take 2 Excedrin when the morning headache comes. I won’t drink any caffeinated beverages, but the Excedrin has caffeine in it. Next week, I’ll lower the dose to 1 Excedrin a day and the week after that I’ll take a half an Excedrin. I just can’t bear to deal with those headaches.

Update 04-12-05 3:17 pm: It took less than a week to wean myself off the caffeine. I was down to a quarter of an Excedrin in the morning. Almost a week later, I had a morning without a headache, so I didn’t take anything. I didn’t realize it until 6pm that night. I was so happy. Now, I’m staying away from all caffeinated products.

Just doing my part to get the word out:

George W. Bush is a Miserable Failure.

If Google is a measure of popular opinion, then the world has taken a recount:

Google Search for the phrase “Miserable Failure.”

You get to vote about this too, even if you’re not a citizen of the United States. Just dedicate a blog entry to George W. Bush and link to his biography using the words “Miserable Failure.”

Why I think he’s a miserable failure:

1. He (and his administration) hoodwinked the nation into the war with Iraq.
2. He got to be president under suspicious circumstances.
3. He still hasn’t brought the man who took credit for 9-11 (Osama Bin Laden) into custody.
4. He brought our national approval rating from the highest it has been in years (right after 9-11) to the lowest.

I voted against him in both of the elections and I’m voting against him once again. I can’t believe half the nation voted for him last time…

When I first heard that they were doing a movie adaptation of A Scanner Darkly by Phillip Dick, I wrote about it. Now there is a trailer online for the movie and all my reservations about the animation process have been wiped from my mind.

• A Scanner Darkly Trailer

• My first thoughts about A Scanner Darkly movie

Man, oh man, oh man! I can’t wait for this movie to come out! It looks like they did a really good job adapting the story and have made it better than anything Phillip Dick conceived of. I can’t wait to see the whole thing, but for now, the trailer will have to do.

Now that I have been feeling better about writing, my computer has decided to revolt. Whenever I try to run MS Word (or any Microsoft program for that matter) I get an error that shuts down the program. I don’t even need to touch anything. It just crashes the program.

I can look at websites using Mozilla Firefox. I can talk on IM. I can play music. I just can’t write. Ok, that’s a lie. I can write on the Palm. I can write on paper. It’s not that I can’t write. I just can’t write the way I want to. I have to work around the computer instead of on it.

I can do this. When I want to write, nothing can stop me. As long as I can move my fingers, I can write. The only thing that can get in my way is me. It’s hard to find a way over or around or under or through myself. I tend to be a more formidable obstacle than broken computers or pressing tasks.

I have been reading Ruthie’s Top Secret Diary for years now. She stopped writing for awhile, but now she’s back, posting pictures and her diary entries. This week, she posted pictures from her birthday party.

I particularly like this one:

Empty

It captures the feeling of the house after a big party perfectly. That’s what it feels like. The people are gone. The lights are out. The house is strangely quiet after all of the activity. I feel full and empty at the same time.

If you would like to read it, here is a link to her weblog:

Ruthie’s Top Secret Diary

I’ve had trouble writing since December. At first I blamed it on writing for NaNoWriMo, but after a couple months, I felt like I should be over that. I finally realized why I’ve been tired and I feel like a fool for not noticing it earlier.

In December, I started writing for Starling Fitness. When I decided to take on another blog, I didn’t think it would be any big deal. I had been writing consistently for this weblog for over a year. I didn’t even conceive that adding Starling Fitness would be a burden.

Of course, Starling Fitness is a professional website. I’m required to write a post every day with a goal of fifty posts a month. That’s almost two posts a day. I’m not required to write a lot. I could just choose to link to another site and add a small comment, but I never do things halfway. I’m writing all out on Starling Fitness. I’m pouring out my soul and lecturing like my mother and grandmother never knew how. I’m giving it my all, baby.

I had no idea that when I agreed to write for Starling Fitness that I was essentially doubling my workload. Instead of writing one entry a day, I’m writing two entries a day. Even saying that now, it doesn’t sound like much until I realize that one of those posts is confronting deep-seated body issues. I’m delving into all the things that make me and my body the way that they are. Frankly, it’s kind of tiring.

So, I’m tired. And you know what? It’s ok. Right now, I’m learning to write consistently for two weblogs. It’s perfectly natural to be tired right now. I was so worried because I had no idea why I could barely keep up writing for Pick Me, much less think about writing any fiction. Now that I know why I’m tired, I feel better about it. I can accept it and work around it.

So, if I neglect writing here for a couple days, click on over to Starling Fitness and see what I have to say there. At least you know I’m still alive…

My friend, Braidwood, has written a great review of this month’s O magazine:

Yes, please!: “O”

I used to subscribe to O (and a bunch of other magazines), but I have stopped them all. I would get a pile of magazines and feel guilty about not reading them. Now, I pick them up at the grocery store and they feel like a treat instead of an obligation.

I thought that having a subscription would feel like getting a treat in the mailbox once a month. Instead, it just felt like yet another job I had to do each month. I can imagine it on my Task List in my Palm, “Read magazines.” Instead of a fun thing, it was a chore.

I guess I better pick up this month’s O magazine…

We had been with Sprint for over seven years when we switched over to T-Mobile last November. We got new phones at such a discount that the rebates actually paid us to move over to T-Mobile. The switch over was relatively painless and I was happy to replace my four year old phone.

From the beginning, there were problems. Our home was a dead zone. Our phones worked within a one block radius of our home, but at our house, we never got our calls and calling out was difficult. When we could call out, we could barely hear the person on the other line because the phones cut out so often.

Then, about a month ago, my phone got worse. Wherever I tried to call, I had this noisy static coming over the line. There was nothing I could do to prevent that static noise. No matter who called, all I wanted to do was to get them off the phone as quickly as possible because I couldn’t hear what they were saying anyway.

We had a year contract. Yesterday, we broke it. We’ll willing pay the fee to T-Mobile to go back to Sprint. They ported over our numbers easily. I got the free clam-shell phone from LG and Mike got himself a Treo 650, which is a Palm device and a phone all in one. We spent most of last night talking about the phones and calling each other once they worked.

Ironically, when we had Sprint, we had horrible experiences with their customer service over the phones. Their automated phone system, called Claire, was supposed to understand English, but it didn’t work well at all. Once I would finally get a hold of a human being, they were just trying to get me off the phone as quickly as possible, giving incorrect answers and, at times, they were even rude. We had been so happy to move to T-Mobile because their service department seemed so great.

After experiencing the coverage nightmare that was T-Mobile, we were set on buying out of our contracts. We could have gone with any company: AT&T, Cingular, Cricket, Qwest, etc. Instead, we went back to Sprint. We KNEW that their coverage was great. We were able to get calls in Kauai, Hawaii and remote camping locations with Sprint. Sure the customer service was a nightmare, but the phones worked every time. That’s why we walked in the doors of the Sprint Store yesterday. The devil you know is better than the angel you don’t.

She’s the mother of my sister-in-law. I guess that means that she is almost a stranger. I saw her last Saturday at a familial gathering. We see her every once and a while. I would be able to recognize her and remember her name if I saw her in an unfamiliar place.

We know that she is obsessed with family histories and genealogy. That line of study has a religious context here in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is almost a duty of the family to keep a record of the lineage. The church helps out and they have an amazing genealogy library both in the city and online. When she lived in Boston, she would frequently travel back home to visit the library.

She asked about my family. I grew up in the same neighborhood as she raised her children and she was trying to find a connection. She was trying to hear a familiar name. After exhausting my parents’ names, she moved on to my grandparents. For some reason, I was trying to shock her, so I told the risque stories that fill my family’s past. She wanted to hear them all. She was unshockable.

“You should write down your family stories,” she told me. She doesn’t know that I am a writer. She doesn’t know how I’ve shied away from writing any of my family stories. “I would, but I don’t know which ones are true.” She smiled serenely at me and said, “It doesn’t matter what’s true. You write the legend anyway.” I blinked at her a few times and then reached across the couch to hug her. “You are my new favorite person.”

I haven’t put my fingers to the keyboard about very many details about my family’s past because I didn’t ever know if what my grandma or father told me was true. It doesn’t matter. What I write down today will be a hell of a lot truer than what I could write in ten years or what my progeny would try to write when I’m gone. Additionally, it doesn’t matter what the real truth is. There is no real truth anymore. All there is are the memories of what my grandma told me. There are others on the planet who may argue, but to me, those stories are the only truth that exists.

So that’s what I have to do: write the legend anyway.

In the distance I can see fabric drying on a clothesline. I had no idea that people still used clotheslines. The fabric is white, pink and baby blue, hung like huge squares in the background. It’s not windy out, so they stay motionless like a painted backdrop.

“There’s the error. There’s the incongruity. It’s 2005, but there are clothes on a clothesline in the background. Shoddy work, fellows.” There is a critic within me that is always looking for glitches in the Matrix.

One of our drafters celebrates Chinese New Year every year with a big party. When the festivities are over, he brings in the extra fortune cookies. The fortunes linger in the office for months or even years. Last year, one said, “You will be happy in married life.” She received it within months of her wedding and it still hangs by her nameplate. Others sit by keyboards and are pinned to the fabric walls of the cubicles.

“This one would be perfect for you.” The engineer handed it to me while I ate my frozen dinner in the lunchroom. It read, “You would make an excellent critic.” I frowned and whined when he handed it to me. My pride ached when I realized that he considers me an excellent critic. It made me sound negative and I pride myself on being positive. Reality and my vision of it clashed on a tiny slip of paper.

I thought to myself, “I didn’t eat the cookie. He ate the cookie. It’s his fortune.” It didn’t make me feel better. The fact of the matter is that he considers me an excellent critic. I have to own that. I can’t recall ever critiquing his work. I couldn’t possibly do it. My math degree is so far removed from engineering that they speak in a foreign tongue to me and are surprised when I look at them with a blank face.

So, there is a critic within me that notices clotheslines and the mistakes of engineers. It is a part of me that burns through my skin so brightly that people who barely know me are blinded by it. It is something that I didn’t even know was there. I guess it’s like wearing ugly clothes. They don’t bother me because I can’t see them. This critic, who I though only turned its gaze on myself, is observing everything and everyone around me.

Stupid fortune cookie…

The young man bounces the basketball alone. I want to draw a picture of him, but my talent is shy of the task. I want to take a picture of him, but he is so far away and my camera’s zoom is too weak to reach him. I have to capture him in words, which is usually my preferred medium. The only problem is that I no longer trust my words. I’m sick of playing Hide and Seek with them.

He jumps and tosses the basketball at one of the three hoops at the far corner of the park. He plays a solitary game of three-hoop basketball, whose rules are known only to him. His white and blue shorts look silky, just like the ones the pros wear. I watch him jump and reach for the ball rebounding off the rim. He stretches in the reach and he looks a little like a professional ball player, except he’s alone.

I never see the pros practicing alone. They must do it. It takes lots of practice to go pro, so there must be hours of solitary practice for every professional on the court. I’ve seen pro teams practicing together, but I don’t remember ever seeing solitary practice on television.

Oops… He’s gone, walking north and carrying the ball under his right arm. He slipped away as I wrote the previous paragraph. Now he’s walking through the church parking lot all the way across the street. Gone. Before I could catch him on film or in a sketch or even in words.

How many hours of practice does it take? Did he stay out long enough to go pro? How many hours of practice do I need? I’m officially a professional writer. I get paid for my words (albeit not as much as I would like). When does it get easier? If I were to ask Michael Jordan, would he have an answer for me? A sick feeling in my gut tells me it never gets easier. I have the notion that any professional would tell me that it never ends. I always need to practice, no matter how long I have been writing.

A man in his forties has arrived on the court. He is wearing a sweat shirt and long sweat pants with a gray stripe down the sides. He bounces and jumps and chases after the wayward ball. Unlike the boy before him, he sticks to one hoop. It is the one furthest from me and my view is obscured by the baseball fences and bleachers. I can hear his ball bounce on the court. The springtime sun removes his sweat shirt, revealing a white t-shirt underneath. He bounces the ball behind his back and around himself to the front.

My camera can’t reach him and my pencil can’t capture him. All I am left with are my words, which are fleeting and untrustworthy. What is he thinking about? Like me, he practices alone. I scratch out Graffiti letters on my handheld and he chases his blue ball when it rebounds off the rim. It never ends until we die. There is always a need for practice, whether we are professionals or not.

I had a metaphysical moment in Vegas last week. We were at the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace. I was still really sick. Mike had to go to the bathroom, so I was sitting on a bench. I was tired and just happy to sit and rest. I let my gaze wander over the stores. I saw a pink dress suit in the store window and thought to myself, “That’s one of those Chanel suit knockoffs. I have one of those at home. Mine looks better, though. I should pull it out and wear it to work next week.” My eyes lazily moved to look at the store front. I was sitting in front of the Chanel store. It wasn’t a knock-off. It was the real thing. I was so sick, I didn’t realize how funny it was until I put on my Chanel knockoff this morning.

“Some nights he’s weightless…
Gas stations everywhere –
Not one drop to fill me…
Fruit juice everywhere – Not one drop to fill me…”
– Thomas Dolby, Weightless

“I’m walking through the desert
And I am not frightened although it’s hot
I have all that I requested
And I do not want what I haven’t got.”
– Sinead O’Connor, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got

“Well, I put a quarter right into that can
But all it played was disco, man.”
– Brian Setzer Orchestra, Rock This Town

“But no one’s watching you.”
– Talk Talk, My Foolish Friend

“Well you’ll never gain weight from a doughnut hole.”
– Tori Amos, Doughnut Song

“The rain falls hard on a humdrum town
This town has dragged you down.”
– The Smiths, William, It Was Really Nothing

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 02:58:18 -0800 (PST), diana frias wrote:

Sent via the form at laura.moncur.org

get over yourself, dealt with the same things growing up yet I feel my parents religion has made a stronger person. Don’t attend “meeting” but yet still have my “JW” morals and thats better than most people these days. Commerial holidays are overrated! Happy valentines day, nobody cares about your sob story or wish list! sorry I came upon your site.

Apparently, Diana found my Worst Valentine Memory entry from last year.

Dear Diana,

Imagine my confusion when I received your email this morning. I wrote that Valentine’s entry last year and had almost completely forgotten about it and then your email came today and I was confused. I’ve had trouble writing lately and I thought you were commenting on the fact that my words have left me. Luckily, your email had just enough clues to jog my memory.

It sounds as if my story hit a nerve with you. Your admonishment was far too negative and judgmental to be merely a “Get Over Yourself” response. I’m sorry you were raised Jehovah Witness. The religion preaches a separatism that is unhealthy to child development. If you fully agreed with their lifestyle, you would be attending Meeting today.

One of the things that I tell myself every day is, “My creativity heals myself and others.” Writing out my worst Valentine memory actually helped heal me a little bit. It sounds, however, that my story was not as helpful to you and may have opened old wounds that were festering under the skin. I wish you the best and I hope that you are finally able to heal after all of these years.

Good Luck, Laura Moncur

Just thinking about writing a blog entry makes me feel tired. It’s not like I have lots of other things to do. I’m completely bored here with nothing to do but write and write. I’ve gotten my wish and I have all the time in the world to write and I am tired. I am tired of writing, so I think I’ll take a break for a bit.

“Hello…”

He is calling from his rented car. I would judge him to be in his fifties and his kindly looking wife looks nervous. We are in the residential area to the south of the Smith’s on 9th East.

“Are we near the shops in Sugarhouse?”

I’ve never heard them called that before. We have many shops in Sugarhouse, but there isn’t a specific site called “The Shops in Sugarhouse.” He made it sound like a shopping mall instead of the hodge podge of stores that have evolved over the years. I called back to him, my arms straining with the grocery bags, “What are you looking for?”

“The Sundance store.”

Of course. I suddenly feel safer now that I know that I’m giving directions to a tourist. I get closer to the car and move the groceries from one hand to the other so I can point. The weather is a gorgeous 48 degrees Fahrenheit. Mike and I have walked to “The Shops in Sugarhouse” to eat a crepe and get some organic produce from Wild Oats. Mike answers the man first, “It’s right next to Wild Oats. You can see it from here.”

The top of the store quietly peeks out from behind the Granite Furniture warehouse. I dismiss his directions, “He can’t see Wild Oats from here.”

“It’s supposed to be on 11th East. Is that street up there 11th East?”

I shake my head and start pointing. “That is 10th East. Go through that into the parking lot, through the parking lot and you’ll get to 11th East. Turn right on 11th East and then the Sundance store will be on your left.”

“Through there, right, then left. Ok. We’re from Michigan and we were lost. Thank you.”

He slowly drives off and Mike and I head home. I’m glowing a bit from the effort of carrying the groceries and the good deed. I love tourists.

Dear Margaret Cho,

I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. If you’re familiar with the area, I think you will understand my surprise when I found your DVD, Notorious C.H.O., at my local library. I’ve enjoyed reading your blog, so I thought I would see what your stand up act is like. I grabbed it as if there were someone right behind me, ready to take it away.

You’ll be happy to know that in this conservative bastion of Mormonism, your DVD has been watched so many times that it is damaged beyond repair. It kept freezing up right in the middle of your frank discussion of Food Issues. I enjoyed it so much I had to get a copy of my own to see the end.

Sadly, Notorious C.H.O. is the only DVD the Salt Lake County Library System has of yours, although they do have I Am The One I Want in book form and book on tape. I have your other DVDs in my queue at Netflix as we speak.

Thank you for your honesty. By the end of your DVD, I was happy and wanting to hug my husband. I laughed so hard that tears came to my eyes and I struggled for breath. Sure, I was surprised at the details that you were willing to share, but I was raised in Salt Lake City. We’re not allowed to talk about those things here. That doesn’t mean they don’t happen, we just don’t talk about them. Thank you for being so open. It’s a breath of fresh air in the hushed land of Zion.

Right before the credits, one of the audience members said, “Margaret makes me want to be a better person.” When I heard him say that, I breathed a huge sigh. Yeah, he was right.

So, just a quick note to tell you, thanks.

Laura Moncur

Laura,

Margaret will be at a club called MoDiggity’s on Feb. 26th. She’s doing a couple practice shows for her new Assassin Tour. Thought you’d like to know. I’ve passed your message on to her. Thanks for writing.

Karen Taussig

I’m just the luckiest girl in the world!

I haven’t heard from you. You usually email me those junky emails, but I haven’t received one in a long time. I know I forwarded you the URL to snopes.com the last three times you sent me hoaxes, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear from you.

We don’t have much to say to each other anymore, I know. It has been almost a year since I last saw you. We ate lunch at the Joy Luck Restaurant by my work. I had rice and hot sour soup. You were excited about your new project and I was excited about mine. You ate all of your entree, even though you said it was too much food for you. I noticed, but I didn’t say anything.

We used to share a common employment, but now I’m just a secretary and you have started your own brokerage. That’s cool. You’re doing things that I could never dream of doing. You don’t know it, but I’m doing things that you would be proud of. I don’t have much to tell you about them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear from you.

Send me the one about the kid who needs everyone to send their business cards before he dies of cancer. I promise not to send you the snopes.com rebuttal.

I got my DVD of the CGI Re-Creation of Adventure Through Inner Space a couple of days ago. Since I remember so little of the original ride, I have no idea of how close it is to the original. I listened to the commentary track from the creator and I realized how utterly obsessed someone has to be to complete a project like this.

It took his computer three months to render the opening sequence. THREE MONTHS! And he had a really cool machine to work on (top of the line back in 2003). For three months, he waited for his computer to render just part of this project. I’m bugged when my computer takes a few minutes doing anything.

This is why I love the Internet. No matter how obsessed I am about something, there is always someone who is more obsessed willing to share the bounty of his work. That DVD was totally worth the $25 it cost me. Thanks, Steve!

Six more weeks of winter according to the chubby groundhog in Pennsylvania.

Phil’s Prediction

Shucks… I was enjoying that sunshine we had this morning.

Braidwood talked about the most beautiful woman in the world today. I’ve always had trouble picking the most beautiful. There are so many factors and so many beauties that I am completely incapable of making a choice. It’s like the toothbrush aisle. When confronted with that many choices, I usually choose at random. When it’s time for a new toothbrush, I say, “Which one did I get last time?”

The irony is that it’s never good enough to say, “I can’t possibly choose. I could list all day long and still not be able to decide.” This is a particularly egregious offense when I am talking to women about celebrity males. They crinkle their noses and squint at me as if I’m lying. “You don’t have a favorite?” Then they roll their eyes. It’s like they can’t possibly believe that I can’t choose the most beautiful male celebrity.

So, just like the toothbrush, I chose one at random. Back then, I had seen Interview with the Vampire, so I chose Brad Pitt. Whenever anyone asked me who my favorite male celebrity was, I would tell them Brad Pitt. They would nod or argue, but I didn’t really care because they weren’t crinkling, squinting and rolling. Whether they cattily pointed out Brad Pitt’s crazy Grizzly Adams phase or gushed about his blue eyes was inconsequential to me. Sure, Brad Pitt’s beautiful, but so are a thousand other male celebrities out there. He was just a random answer chosen to shut the mouths of the women who didn’t understand the concept of “Everyone Is Beautiful.”

Brad Pitt got married, but I still just used his name whenever the question arose. Now, he’s getting divorced and there’s a question of his fidelity splashed across the tabloids. Personally, I think I liked Fight Club so much because we get to see Brad Pitt beaten to a bloody pulp. Something dark inside me wants to see the beauty crushed. It wasn’t even his fault that he got chosen for the pedestal of beauty. He was a small time actor when he was chosen arbitrarily.

It’s not like I don’t get crushes on male celebrities. I do, but no one believes me when I say them out loud. My list of celebrity crushes is diverse, ranging from Alfred Hitchcock to John Goodman, William H. Macy to Jerry Orbach and Weird Al Yankovic to Steve Buscemi. The whole reason I chose Brad Pitt way back when was because of the strange looks when I told them who my current crush was. I learned very quickly that I needed to choose a strikingly handsome crush otherwise there was something the matter with me. Either that, or they thought I was lying. “You can’t possibly have a crush on Weird Al Yankovic!” It only took a couple of times hearing that before I wised up. “You’re right. I was just joking. It’s really Brad Pitt…”

I ate some little carrots on my break. It was 3:05 pm and I ate them so quickly that I barely noticed the taste of them. Sometimes that’s what I do: eat in a haze. I have to eat a number of vegetables and fruits every day to be healthy, so I space them out and scarf them down, barely noticed.

“Where are you going on your break today?” Every day at 10 am and 3 pm, he leaves the office for a break. Sometimes he goes to the post office. Sometimes he runs an errand. “Maybe I drive around. Find people on the street.” His Chinese accent is thick and he is jovial. He doesn’t sound nearly as ominous in person as he does on paper. “What will you do? Throw tomatoes at them? Scream at them?” He laughs and waves me away. “I go to Smith’s.” I call to him as he walks out the door, “You’re so punk rock!”

Smith’s is the local grocery store chain. It bought Fred Meyer a few years ago and now it has been bought by Kroger. I’m surprised they have kept the name. He returns with a see-through bag. He swings it around and catches the fruit in it. He pulls out a dark Red Delicious Apple. “That’s a Snow White apple.” I’m scared he won’t understand me. “That looks like the apple that the wicked witch gave Snow White.” To this day, I don’t think I like those kinds of apples because of that cartoon. He walks to the lunchroom to wash it.

He brings it back, glistening. He is wiping it dry with a paper towel and I try to explain more. “Snow White bites into the apple and she sleeps until the prince kisses her… or maybe that’s Sleeping Beauty.” He shakes his head. “No, it’s Snow White. We bought video for daughter. She watch over and over.” I realize that he is probably much more familiar with Snow White than I am. I haven’t seen the movie since I was a child… and here I am trying to explain it to him. Silly Laura… I ate my last two carrots in shame.

01-13-05 Laura Moncur to Michael Moncur

I looked on WordPress’s website for information about listing the archives in chronological order. This is the answer I found:

Coming in a bit late, but I was able to get ascending monthly archives in WP 1.2 by appending:

&order=ASC

…to the rewrite rules in .htaccess that call index.php with the archive parameters. With my particular permalink configuration, my new rewrite rule is:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&order=ASC&page=$5 [QSA]

Does that help any?

It doesn’t make any sense to me. Is this something that’s really hard to do or is it easy and I just need to learn it for myself?

Love, Laura 01-13-05 Michael Moncur to Laura Moncur

I can do it for you – remind me later. (It’s very easy, but I don’t think you have access to the file.)

Love you.

01-26-05 Michael Moncur to Laura Moncur

I finally got around to doing this. Check it out.

Right now the categories AND the monthly archives are in chrono order. Let me know if you want it otherwise. I think it makes the categories look bad except for Looking for Christ, but that’s just my opinion.

01-26-05 Laura Moncur to Michael

It looks great! Thanks so much! That’s exactly how I wanted it. If there is anyone who is obsessive and wants to read everything, this is how it should be set up, which makes me happy. Otherwise, the casual reader will never see those categories.

Thank you for doing this for me. I really appreciate it.

I have been working at my present job for over two years. Every day, since October 2002, I have driven past the two oil refineries in North Salt Lake. They sit on the west side of I-15 and the activist inside of me thinks, “They are polluting my city.” I watch the billowing smoke and the dramatic flames jumping from the towers and the hippie in me shakes her head.

The thing is, those parts of me don’t win out. The logician in me thinks, “Sure glad they’re around so that I can drive my Beetle to work every day.” The husband of a friend of mine works at one of those refineries and almost lost his life there. I’m grateful for those hardworking individuals at the refineries.

The artist inside of me looks that the billowing smoke and dramatic flames and thinks, “Sweet Jesus, that’s purty.” My artist has a southern accent. She is a 350 pound black woman who sings like Nell Carter, paints like Rothko and writes like no one else on the planet. She loves the oil refineries. When they are silhouetted by the sunset, she wants to sing. She doesn’t know any love songs dedicated to oil refineries, so she usually just sings whatever is on her mind or MP3 player.

Somehow, the activist and hippie are subjugated by my logician and artist. The oil refineries are one of the two major milestones of my drive home, the other being the beer billboard I pass every day. Once a huge swarm of starlings kept circling one of the refineries. I almost ran the Beetle off the road watching them fly around and through and over the towers and machinery.

I’m never stuck in traffic when I’m driving past the refineries, so I don’t get to just sit and enjoy the grandeur. My attention is always divided, focusing primarily on the road. I don’t know how I would get a picture of the beauty that I see every day to share it with you. You’ll just have to believe me when I tell you, “Sweet Jesus, it’s purty.”

I am all agog. I’m still waiting for the virtual Adventure Through Inner Space to arrive, but now I’ve found these cool documentaries:

The Extinct Attractions Club

I was tempted to do the 6 DVDs for $60 special, but I think that I should wait. They have films of ride throughs on some of my favorite rides and documentaries with interviews from some of the Imagineers themselves.

I need to stop reading The Disney Blog before I start turning into Cory Doctorow.

Hi,

I am struggling to work out how to phrase my comments without causing offence (non US spelling should be a giveaway!), but I’ll preface my note with a remark that I stumbled upon your weblog after using your collective Quotations.com page…this is very good work and will be a useful, entertaining and informative resource for those occasoins when I’m looking for a catchy tag-line on slide one of a presentation.

The item on your web log that caught my attention, even though it should not have, was your map of the states that you have visited…and its allusion to your having never actually left America: it begs the question: why are Americans such poor travellers (6 out of 7 don’t even have a passport), so apparently reluctant to acquire a bit worldly wisdom that goes with exploration? Setting aside the fact that I’ve visited aobut 50 coutries in my life and lived in two, I think I’ve even seen more of the US than you (although I’ve never been to Utah!)!

I have often heard americans say that they don’t leave the “States” because everything they need is there, but that assertion fundamentally misses the point of travel: to see, to learn and to understand that whereas the rest of the world might be different that difference is worth celebrating.

Anyway, rant over, enjoyed reading but a kneejerk response made me write.

Rory.

Dear Rory,

That map was a United States Map. There is another one for the world, but when I filled out the countries that I had visited, it was woefully gray.

The whole point of my entry was the fact that I am so untravelled, yet I still go to Las Vegas over and over. I was actually making fun of my lack of travel within my own country, much less the entire world.

Thank you for responding. Considering that Emily Dickinson spent most of her life in three rooms, I don’t believe being well-traveled is a prerequisite for a life well-lived. I’ve seen many people who believe they are well-traveled when all they did was step off the boat into various cities along the cruise.

Foreign travel is a difficult conundrum for me because the cost is so exorbitant and I believe that I must spend months in a foreign land to enjoy the fullness of it. Additionally, I fear travel outside my country because I am so ashamed of what my government is doing to other parts of the world. It’s so much easier to jump in the VW Beetle and drive away.

I believe the Internet has done wonders for us hermits. It allows me to explore other lands, concepts and even converse with strangers across the ocean. I realize it is a two-dimensional exploration, but it is better than three rooms. If only Emily could have had a glowing computer screen to keep her company.

Thanks again for responding, Laura Moncur