First Bernie Mac, then Isaac Hayes, and now LeRoi Moore from Dave Matthews Band. Good Lord, this has been a tough summer for famous black men, especially when you throw in Morgan Freeman's accident.
Ever since I first heard Moore play with DMB I've had immense respect for him as a saxophonist-- he pretty simply owned that instrument and was a blast to watch on the stage with them. And gone so fast. Damn.
So much to say.
... but I just have to share this website I just Stumbled Upon: The Skeptic's Annotated Bible. I was laughing out loud and snorting loud enough that I was afraid I was going to wake up The Muse. Case in point:
"And Cain knew his wife." That's nice, but where the hell did she come from? 4:17
Noah is called a "just man and perfect," but he didn't seem so perfect when he was drunk and naked in front of his sons (9:20-21). 6:9, 7:1
God swears to himself. 22:16
"He washed his garments in wine ... His eyes shall be red with wine."
Did Judah really wash his clothes in wine? Were his eyes bloodshot from drinking too much? Or is this a prophecy of Jesus? (I didn't know Jesus had a drinking problem.) 49:11-12
"Be careful what you eat during these animal sacrifices. Don't eat fat or blood -- these are for God. (And he doesn't like to share!) 7:18-27"
"So what were the two words God said to you that first day?"
"Fractal theory."
"What the hell is fractal theory?"
"How the hell am I supposed to know? I'm just God's sock puppet. He shoves his hand up my butt and words come out the other end. Who knew math was involved?"
-- from "Strange Attractors", an episode of Jeremiah
I am an inveterate procrastinator at heart. Most projects I undertake get finished at crunch time or not at all, and I'm a creature of deadlines and to-do lists for a reason: if I don't have a deadline I'll never finish. Sometimes that's because I overbook myself or burn out, but usually it's just because I forget or it falls off my radar until I'm down to the wire.
Now this can become a real problem when it comes to my philosophy of gift giving, especially for events like weddings and baby showers: I hate giving nondescript stuff off registries, or at least to give only that kind of thing-- I've had way too good of an example set for me by Sister Sassy and my aunt in terms of thoughtful giving. This of course means that I have to plan ahead, and well, you can see where that train of thought leads.
Procrastination was definitely the case for my friend's baby shower today-- I had a great idea for a gift weeks ago and simply got too busy with painting, cleaning and concert PR and let it slip my mind until my commute last night to the theatre. Crap, I thought, and resigned myself to another night of watching the Olympics like a zombie while I worked.
I had hit on the idea a while ago to do a watercolor calligraphy setting of this poem for her newly decorated nursery, but just hadn't dug out my aquarelle pencils and paper, so that's what I did when I got home. Hour by painstaking hour I outlined, inked, and washed, and eventually was left with the piece that I wrapped up for her this morning before I left, never having seen my bed and having burned through about five episodes of Jeremiah and a lot of esoteric sports coverage.
I honestly have to say it was worth it, though-- after opening mounds of cutely wrapped bibs, blankets, clothes and equipment, she was eventually handed my brown-paper-wrapped packages (note to self: if your package doesn't have riotous scrawls of pink and blue or puppies on it, the Vera Bradley-toting shower coordinator will place it at the back or under the table like a red-headed stepchild no matter how big or small it is) and after pulling the paper open, her eyes filled with tears and she hugged me close. (It didn't hurt either that the other gift made her howl with laughter.) At least I hit this one out of the park, even if it was last minute. Woohoo!
D on why he likes his job:
"Woodwinds are so finicky-- you have to play test them and pick around to see if they're fixed. Brass work is great, I mean it's like being a plumber: you don't have to sh*t in the toilet to see if it works, right?"
In honor of the upcoming college football season, I bring you one fan's thoughts on the University of Tennesee from a Tide student's perspective:
Roll Tide.
(P.S. And also, have your daily dose of cute kitteh. You're welcome.)
Three words for you people: Grilled. Cheese. Sandwiches.
D and I went to the Montgomery County Fair tonight, to ogle the livestock and the other oglers and partake of that most expensive nasty indulgence-- fair food. And let me tell you, it was gooooooooooood.
For some reason I've never really indulged in fair food-- we've always just sort of shared a sandwich and gone to peek at the bunnies, but this year we decided to give it an all-around go: one last hurrah (I seem to be doing a lot of those) before we beat this diet question back for good. I think what's always put me off was the price-- nothing there sells for less than two dollars (sodas and water) and usually more like six or seven (sandwiches, desserts.) I'm not going to say how much money we spent, but it was considerable, even if it was mostly worth it. We avoided all of the cheaper, chintzier items like pizza and Chinese chicken on a stick (well, almost) and tried to stick to more traditional fair offerings, which pretty much left us with fried everything. So you don't have to make the same trial-and-error choices, here's the rundown:
So I think by now we're all aware that I can be a little OCD about organization. The cleaning thing was the first admission, this just follows for a Type-A person, right? (That was for The Muse and for Heidelah, with whom I was debating where we fall on the whole A-B continuum the other night. The first step in recovery is admission I guess.) Anyway, for a while one of the things on my OCD little list has been to catalog all of the books we've got in this house and sort them out in terms of keepers and traders.
Keepers are defined as books we're particularly attached to, have special memories of, or are likely to read again at some point in the near future. There are particular one-offs there, but mostly there are a lot of series authors in this category: Tolkien, Jordan, Goodkind, Carey, Willams, Rowling, Rice, Montgomery, etc. Stacks and stacks of pristine hardbacks, and a list of to-be-acquireds to replace the paperbacks that have become ragged and overly loved.
This kind of brings us to the traders column: books that we're done with or have too many of in some form, which are promptly posted on PaperBackSwap and hopefully soon winging their way across the planet to people who have some use for them and earning us book credits so we can get the books we're looking for too.
But back to the keepers for a minute-- I have to have a way of keeping them all straight, so to do that I use LibraryThing. (Many thanks to domesticat for that heads-up a long time ago. Smooches-- love ya' for that, and a lot of everything else too, but that's beside the point.) LibraryThing rocks my socks, because Zip, Boom, Bonjour! you whip out your :CueCat and you have a neatly assembled and searchable list of your entire library, complete with duplications and swapping capabilities on the most popular book swap sites.
There are all kinds of other cool bells and whistles, book suggesters, lists of people who have overlapping collections like yours, and probably my favorite one, The Unsuggester.
Basically what The Unsuggester does is figure out what books you are least likely to have in your collection based on those that you've entered, and man does it come up with some seriously awesome and spot-on assumptions. For instance, after my long bout of entries today, The Unsuggester has decided that my sci-fi collection and Christian biblical analyses and sociological literature are uniquely unsuited for one another, which I find strangely validating and pretty much exactly correct-- the only Christian lit I have was basically given to me at some point, outside of a couple of C.S. Lewis analyses that I find interesting on a purely theoretical basis.
To further back up its track record, it also lists Sophie Kinsella and some Jodi Picoult, to which I say, bang-up job, you lovely piece of software because neither of those are even close to on my radar. Apparently I have no love for queens and presidents either, but at this point there's not much room in my heart as I'm spending my days drooling over Aaron Peirsol (rrrrowwrrr) and the American swimming boys.
I wonder what it would "unsuggest" for you guys?
When you grew up in the 80s and 90s in the Southern Baptist church like I did, chances are that at some point you sang the santized cover of Peaceful Easy Feeling along with your youth pastor.
And then a few years later you totally laughed your ass off at that South Park episode: you know-- the one where Cartman forms a Christian band. Enter humanivy, who offers up a top ten list of some more possibilities guaranteed to make you snarf your iced tea:
The Cartman Prophecies.
Enjoy! (Praise 'baby', praise 'baby'.)
(Thanks to The Muse for the heads-up.)
Yoshizawa Hitomi vs Iida Kaori - Bass Clarinet Showdown: Kaorin and Yossy throw it down to see you can play the bass clarinet the best... or at all...
The death stares are the best part:
Or for something a little more serious, check out Squonk playing Jonathan Russell's Double Bass Clarinet Concerto with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.
There's just something about a well-played Elvis song that can completely take your heart and mind to another place.
I meant to write this entry a couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of mine and D's eighth anniversary, but I never quite got around to it with all of the shows and housecleaning and running around that I'm doing, which is entirely appropriate to the state we find ourselves in. Since the last anniversary entry I wrote, things have gone upside-down, backwards and totally askew in our lives. We've gone from stability and a shining almost-certain future to uncertainty and day-to-day survival.
The constant we've had throughout the summer has been that almost every night of the week, we pack up, pick up, and go play the summer show at the theatre, which this time happens to be based on a litany of Elvis songs. Now I don't know about you, but hearing Elvis songs of any fashion brings me vivid memories of watching the old movies in which he sang them, and none more so that Blue Hawaii. I don't have a memory of the plot at all, but I do remember him strumming whatever stringed instrument and crooning I Can't Help Falling In Love With You as my twelve-year-old self sprawled on the floor gazing up at the T.V.
More importantly, I remember singing the lyrics along with him and falling for them and the ideas they held wholeheartedly:
Wise men say
Only fools rush in
But I can't help falling in love with you
Shall I stay
Would it be a sin
If I can't help falling in love with you
Like a river flows
Surely to the sea
Darling so it goes
Some things were meant to be
I am so excited I don't know what to do with myself-- by the time I get home tonight The Muse will be at Chez Sassy, back in D.C. for good and all and crashing with us until she finds her own digs. (See, she's scooted back up into the D.C. blogroll over there.)
So what have I been doing all week? Scrubbing and vacuuming and rearranging and washing and filing and generally returning order to a house that has been egregiously out-of-whack ever since I went back to school three or so years ago (geez-- that's a long time.).
As I may have mentioned before, I am a devout believer in the art of the To-Do list, and house cleaning is no exception: every week I endeavor to work my way through a three-column, ten-point-font list of tasks, and every week I somehow fail to finish or reconcile them all. Anal-retentive, yes I guess, but you have to remember that my house is also my place of business and I have kids and parents in and out all week, inspecting the bathroom faucets, lounging on upholstered chairs and sofas and hopefully not getting covereds in cat hair, and perusing the contents of the magazine rack and the bookshelf.
It's always been a point of pride for me to try and keep a clean house-- my mom always had us helping her keep the place ship-shape on Saturday mornings after cartoons and before we went out to play, and I can vividly remember the disgust in my mom's voice when she talked about the house of somebody she knew when she was younger-- clothes thrown everywhere, trash piled up in the corners and dog hair everywhere-- and how it was her worst nightmare. Not that I'm OCD about it necessarily--anyone who's ever been her could tell you that Chez Sassy has its share of clutter-- but the point is that I try.
At any rate, for the first time in a long time, I'm actually close to FINISHING. THE. LIST. I may be one of the oddest people on the planet, but I can also tell you that if that happens I'll be one of the happiest, too.
Dr. Randy Pausch passed away on July 25th, and if you've never watched his Last Lecture from Carnegie Mellon, Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, I highly recommend you do so. I'm sure many of you have probably watched this, and most of you have probably heard it, but I can't tell you how inspirational it is and how much it will probably either change your perspective or remind you of some life-lessons you should remember, so here it is, all 76 minutes of it:
Godspeed, good Doctor. Your mother would definitely say you were the kind that helps people.
You know, there are so many reasons why downtown D.C. is not so much the cat's ass, but rather, well, just ass, but tonight I got a real doozy after our gig.
So after we played, I schlepped all of my gear back to the car with the aid of The Boss, down the street and around the corner from the Verizon Center where way too many people were going see The Eagles tonight.
Just to clarify: like right around the corner. In plain view. Surrounded by parked cop cars and limos waiting for the schlubs to leave the concert.
When we got there, we were surprised to see the car behind mine swaying a bit on its wheels, then looked a little more closely at the front seat, where some random young dude was getting what was probably the most vigorous B.J. I have ever seen, ass pressed to the windshield (why that way, I have no idea, but still.) The Boss and I sort of looked at each other blankly and he said, a little wide-eyed, "Is he doing what I think he's doing?" "Umm, I guess so..." I replied, and popped my trunk to load in my gear.
Now people, my ass is nowhere near small, and we were both all tarted up for the show, so one would think maybe the couple in question would notice that there was an audience right in front of the windshield, calmly loading the trunk, but not a chance.
What was awesome? That the window was down just enough, or she was loud enough with it shut that I could hear her cries of "Oh shit! oh shit!", and she was obviously enjoying herself a lot. What was more awesome? When I shut the trunk and turned around to go about my business, they had really gotten going and started in on the deed itself-- his bare ass in the air behind the windshield working like a piston. (Now I ask you, who does it in the front seat?!?! Seriously.)
At that point I just looked at The Boss, shrugged, and we started making our way back down the street toward the bar to drink with Frankenberry and Heidelah and the rest of the crew, and when we turned the corner we just totally lost it laughing.
Thank God for beer.
In other news, if you want to see Gorgeous George's big rockin' feature debut tomorrow (or rather today), come one come all-- details are here. To quote my favorite student, it's gonna be stupid cool.
Oh my holy cow, it is (to borrow a phrase from Dan P) hotter than two rats screwing in a wool sock up here.
I am so done with heat rash, and with summer. The really crappy thing about teaching music lessons for a living is that about this time every year all of your income dries up for a couple of months when your pupils make a run for Cape Cod or Kennebunkport or wherever they spend their hard-earned (?) free time..
*sigh*.
So about this time every year we find ourselves scraping pennies and praying for a monetary windfall and shuckin' and jivin' so we don't fall behind on rent. You'd think, at age 30, we'd be past that, but shit happens and people lose their jobs and suddenly you're back to square one. And being afraid for your life, your self, and your sanity while you have a raging heat rash really doesn't help. Oy.
Oh my Lord people, here's a piece of advice-- never try to type an entry on your Crackberry when you've consumed as much blueberry ale as I have.
I have not, in fact, perished from the face of the Earth, but have simply been swallowed into work (Elvis lives, I'm sure of it.) I am finally getting some perspective, though, and fully intend to get back here and blab some more. Just as soon as the Muse, Dan P, and I sleep it off. Xoxo
Okay, seriously, The Muse (who's here visiting this week) and I just about died when we heard this video, especially the lead-up to 1:25. He always seemed line a shady character to me, you know?
In case you're wondering where I've disappeared to this past week, it's because of rebuilding this site. Still working, but it'll be done soon. I hope. For the love.
In honor of the Man's retirement, I give you Windows Music:
Bring more music neepery, you ask? Hack your Wii Guitar to play like a real Guitar and rock Guitar Hero like a god. (Guitar hack found at over at My Home 2.0.)
Have you ever noticed that deaths seem to come in threes? First Tim, then George, and now Bruce.
Bruce?
Yes, the last scion of the fishy dynasty of Chez Sassy has passed into the great hereafter. We all raise a glass of Maker's to his fishy familiarity and toast him on his way to the Great Fishbowl In The Sky. (By way of the toilet? That's so wrong.)
Bruce had a great four-year run here, and now that he's gone I can get on with my decorating plans for the living room. And I don't have to clean the fishtank. (I feel so wrong saying that.) At any rate, where we were five, now we were four. Goodbye, Bruce.
Want a really great blast from the past? Check out this list of toys that, according to Fark.com, "would be causing non-stop lawsuits in the 00s with injuries to the world's current frail group of obese precious snowflakes."
*laugh snort*
Sister Sassy and I survived at least three of these as far as I can remember: we had a Sit N' Spin and our own respective Big Wheels and backpedal-brake bikes.
More than one awesome family anecdote revolves around toys of this nature-- sis was reminding me today about a really hilarious story, told by my dad, about my fearless ride down a hill and in a beeline right toward some gnarly traffic on my Big Wheel. (I think that was the start of my bad karma with bikes, evidenced by the backpedal-brake bike that broke my leg in the first grade and the road bike that rid me of my two front teeth in college.)
The comments on that entry also bring up a couple of other contenders, too-- we never had lawn darts (I mean seriously-- what kind of pansy-ass kid in Alabama in the 80s had those? We made our own bows and arrows from scratch-- Jarts were for amateurs), but we did have a Slip N' Slide, and seriously there's nothing as crappy as grass burn, and the metal staples were sheer hell when you got a good run going. At one point we actually resorted to sliding down the slimy hill of the concrete culvert drainage ditch in our jean cutoffs because it hurt less. Tough little shits, us.
George would call it natural selection.
What were your favorite dangerous toys as a kid??
I think perhaps Jessica Hagy said it best: Well, Shit.
As I know most of you have already heard, George Carlin passed away yesterday of heart failure. He will be greatly missed.
New favorite movie quote:
"Losers talk about doing their best. Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen." --Sean Connery's character in The Rock
For everyone who like me is fortunate enough to have had parents who believed in you and supported you in following your dreams, something to think about when you go out the door to your dream job or work "hard" every day so you don't have to "sell out": "When You Weren't Looking, They Were Working" by Ben Stein.
Via Christine.
This morning left a little to be desired, even though all I had to do was accessorize my new dress: people, nude shoes are becoming as scarce as hens' teeth. Yes, I said nude shoes.
I've been meaning for a while to shell out for a good pair and a matching bag, but I just never seem to get around to it. I'm sorely lacking in any sort of brown accessories, but it makes sense I guess: I looked through my whole closet last night and realized that I didn't have one solitary dress that wasn't black or black-based in some fashion. (I'm a musician, okay?)
Yay for Loehmann's, because I walked out with a smokin' dress for next to nothing, at which point I realized I had no shoes, no bag. Yikes. Run to Filene's-- nothing. Run back to Loehmann's-- nothing. Note to self: advance preparedness is good. In the end, it didn't really matter and I cobbled something together and got to the wedding.
Speaking of which, maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but when did it become okay to whip out your point-and-shoot, flash and all, during someone else's wedding? I can only imagine how frustrated the photographer must have been, having to try and dodge about twenty different flashes and not get shots filled with other peoples' cameras. And if I were the bride I'd be more than a little pissed if my friends' asshattery ruined my thousand-dollar investment in a pro. I realize we all live in an age where information is instant and content is personally supplied, but common courtesy would seem to dictate that people sit on their hands and let the man do his work. It was her wedding, not theirs. I'm just saying.
Regardless, it's been a while since I've been to a wedding, and today was a party nonpareil-- D's college roommate finally got hitched and seriously, those two know how to throw a shindig. We ate, drank, and danced 'till we couldn't move. It was rockin'.
More importantly though, it was exactly what a wedding should be: the bride was beautiful, the groom was handsome, and it was clear to everyone that they love each other completely.
*le sigh*
I am broken. Scooped out, hollow, spent, a dried-up husk. I have expended the energy allotted to my season and my soul is no longer fertile with the possibilities of energy, activity, and change. Its fuel has long since been spent, the flames sunk to embers-- one small wisp of smoke trails from the remains. I have poured my effort and time and thoughts into a chasm of work and seen it still yawning before me. I have reached the end of my ability and it is not enough.
I have a problem: I like to DO, and sometimes that sets me on the path to trouble. Not the doing part, per se, but the agreeing to do. Every so often I tempt fate and ask for more work than I can handle, and usually I've managed to power through until I have it done, usually nearly at the cost of my sanity, and the price is paid in weeks of lethargy and heavy, drunken sleep. This time, however, I think I have had my bluff called.
I don't have enough time, this time. I don't have enough energy. Somewhere in the past year I've gotten lost. I remember a self who was able to take joy unashamed and unadulterated. I remember a self who could get lost in her passions. I remember a self who could manage the burdens she had shouldered and then lay them down.
Somewhere along the line that self fell away, prey to ambition and work and demands. I've forgotten how to let those things go and put them down and they've become intertwined with my soul like a dark clinging vine. Burnout has come and gone, and there's really not much left behind. I feel like I'm sitting alone in a darkened room, quiet and fearful. This self knows that this too shall pass, but for the moment it shivers and quakes and cannot move, paralyzed by the thoughts it carries and the shades that hem it in. It sees the darkness and can feel it looking back, silent, airless, vast and empty and meaningless.
All it longs for is escape. Escape in body to comforting hands and hearts, escape in mind to a place where the fearful wings of doubt and stress and demands don't enfold my heart from my first waking moments into the next night's dreams. Silence. Peace.
Fear not, gentle reader. I do know that this state of mind, while strange, is passing so. I can see the pathway out of the valley and know its steps well and truly. I've been here before. Except that this time something seems to be staying behind here-- a younger self, a lost dream, a change of mind: a shift in the fabric of my reality. I leave this place a little lighter and a little more shadowed than when I came this time. I leave, nonetheless, to sunnier climes of the mind, but with the memory of the shadow left behind and the knowledge that it waits for me on the road ahead, ears cocked and black tail wagging.
People, I know it's not news to anybody, but it's damn hot outside. Hot, hot, hot.
This kind of heat saps my initiative and turns me into a giant slug, not that I've been that far off from that anyway lately. No one is outside if they can help it-- my street is normally teeming with people on any sunny day, but not a soul passes by unless they have no other choice, and then they look positively miserable. Even the cats are lethargic-- they basically manage to stagger a few steps to another relatively cool spot in the house and then sprawl out and pant for a while. No amount of coaxing will interest them and even kitty treats get only a half-interested eye. This lethargy isn't doing me any favors, because I have insane amounts of work to do. And against my better judgment, I struck a blow for my goal to be less connected when I got my new toy up there.
Following suit, I have been perfectly content to sit in the La-Z-Boy and fiddle with my new Crackberry. Yeah, there's a reason for that name. I seriously stayed up waaaaaaay past my bedtime customizing and downloading and syncing and playing around (hence the iPhone looking screen going on over there.)
Lately I've been getting more and more overwhelmed with the amount of information I have to process and the amount of work I'm responsible for, and it's getting to the point that I kind of feel like I need to disconnect from the unnecessary technical insanity that seems to be assaulting me. It's kind of twisted that I've been so busy that I haven't even had time to finish all the pending entries I've started to write here-- this used to be as connected as I got in the course of a week and now it's emails and coding and meetings and shows. Learning to say no has never been a strong point with me, but it's rapidly going from a choice to a necessity.
And why is it that I find it so hard to let people help me with what I need a hand with? Frankenberry's going to laugh at this, I think, because we spent an incredible amount of time on Sunday night talking about the possibility of his becoming my boss for one of our projects, and one of his main concerns was getting me out from under the weight of all the work that's gotten piled on top of my head. To which I responded cagily and and with more reserve than I should have: next time I will nod and smile and say thank you and yes, we should let someone else handle that and swallow my fears that someone else handling it will make more work for me, because I can't even handle the amount of work I have now and it's a risk I'll have to take.
All of that is to say this: I need a vacation. I heard it from Frankenberry Sunday night, I heard it from my other boss today, and I woke up from my nap with the clear realization that they're both right and I'm trying to make it happen. The problem is, I've been consumed by work for so long that I think I've forgotten how to take a vacation.
So here's my question: If you had five uninterrupted days and a very tiny bit of cash to spend, where would you go? What would you do?
Something to contemplate for you all before I go to bed tonight:
I have a head full of stories to tell and no time to tell them, but rest assured they are simmering up there and will be out on this page soon. Until then, learn about this, read about Jen's journey to Rwanda here, and think about what you can do to change the world one girl at a time. Someone has to. If not you, who?
