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Isn't it amazing how fast time goes when you have a deadline?
I was so tired last night that I slept right through my alarm. &^$#*@^$$! I've only got a rehearsal today, but I also have to put my house in a little better order-- Cello Chick is visiting from PA tomorrow and my bathroom is scary.
Anther rehearsal with the kids and hubby tonight and then more house cleaning. Y'all entertain yourselves until I can get around to the YouTube RoundUp tomorrow.
I love the flute. It's hands-down my favorite instrument to play in shows, tied with its tiny brother, the piccolo. As much as I practice, though, I'll never be as cool as Greg Pattillo:
Now I know Ian Anderson has been doing alt-flute stuff on screen and recording for a while, but this guy is great. He's also got a performance duo called The National Debt-- fun stuff that. I've been watching these gems for a while now and can't get enough:
Once again, it has been confirmed that the Best Buy guys are crooks in big-box clothing. Now, I shouldn't complain, because I do my share of shopping there, but my bad experiences have far outweighed my good ones so I don't feel too guilty. The scoop in this article?
Under pressure from state investigators, Best Buy is now confirming my reporting that its stores have a secret intranet site that has been used to block some consumers from getting cheaper prices advertised on BestBuy.com.
Bastards.
Thanks to Dr. Mudslide for the heads-up.
There's just no two ways about it.
I. HATE. HOSPITALS.
Not in the normal, I-hope-I-never-have-to-stay-in-one way, but with an intense creeping horror and a strong OCD sort of go-out-of-my-way-to-avoid-them sort of violent aversion. As you might expect, every time I've been to one has been a pretty intensely unpleasant experience. Let's see... moving backwards:
So here I sit in the ER again, waiting for doctors, waiting for nurses, waiting for relief, waiting for emancipation. Because no matter how much it makes me jump out of my skin, no one should have to sit in the hospital alone, and I love my friend. Think happy thoughts for her, okay?
Ahhh, the ER waiting room, or the ER room you're waiting in. (And here I was, worrying about not having posted a Thirtylist in a while.) Finding ways to pass the time is essential-- here are a few I've tried tonight (or other people here have):
1. Go outside and check your phone messages.
2. Walk around the ER.
3. Go out to the waiting room for a Diet Coke.
4. Go out to the entryway for newspaper.
5. Kick the nurse's ass for not giving your friend her pain meds.
6. Sit and think about your bed.
7. Sit and think about how tomorrow's going to blow.
8. Write a new blog entry on your notepad.
9. Kick the nurse's ass for not listening when your friend says she can't roll over by herself.
10. Go outside and check your home phone messages.
11. Watch Battlestar Galactica on your iPod. (wishin')
12. Listen to Audible books on your iPod. (reality)
13. Get snacks from the waiting room machines.
14. Plan your garden for the year on your notepad.
15. Walk up and down the hallway of the ER.
16. Try to take a nap in your uncomfortable chair.
17. Walk outside around the building hoping the guy in the next room stops retching by the time you come back. (Poor guy)
18. Talk to your friend's mom and try to get the nurse to listen to her for your friend's history.
19. Kick the doctor's ass for not making sure she got her pain meds.
20. Joke with inordinately hot X-ray tech walking by.
21. Clean out your purse.
22. Organize your purse.
23. Fall asleep in your uncomfortable chair.
24. Fall over onto floor. (Just call me grace.)
25. Hold your friend's hand when she wakes up because the pain meds aren't working.
26. Bring your friend water.
27. Try to get the nurse to bring your friend a blanket.
28. Talk to the lady next door whose husband has stopped retching and is now sleeping.
29. Go and get coffee for you and the lady next door.
30. Go find the doctor and make sure your friend gets some more pain meds.
The list is getting longer, but that's enough marking time for me. Hope my friend improves here a bit, I'm ready to beat the living shit out of this nurse. Think good thoughts for her (my friend that is... this nurse needs an attitude adjustment, so she can kiss my ass)!
So, today the great cosmic forces were looking out for me. Apparently all that time sitting in the ER waiting room built up at least a little good karma.
I thought I had a matinee show today, so after leaving early this morning to pick up The Muse's mom at the airport, I schlepped up to the theater for the show.
Only when I got there, there were only three cars in the parking lot. "Whaaa???" I thought, getting a little peeved. I had the forethought to toss my horns in the backseat when I left this morning so I could go straight to work from dropping off MuseMom, so I was all prepared to play a little Yankee Doodle Dandy. I have to admit though, I was pretty happy at the cancellation and proceeded directly to Nordstrom for some moisturizer after hopping inside the theater to get my paycheck.
Good thing there was no show. My horns, as I realized when I walked in the door of my house from the mall, were still sitting on their stands. IN MY STUDIO. AT HOME.
Sometimes I get brutal reminders of the blonde in SassyBlonde, no?
Seriously--
Whiskey.
Tango.
Foxtrot.
My head is on fire at the moment. Apparently, for my thirtieth birthday the universe has decided to give me an overactive immune system-- I'm now allergic to every shampoo you can think of and almost as many make-up products.
I've spent the last three weeks trying to recover from various stages of lizard-face from trying new skincare regimens in order not to have every pore on my face (I mean this literally, unfortunately) erupt in the most painful breakouts I've ever experienced.
Lizard-face is not, by the way, a joke. If you felt an iguana's back and then felt my face right now, they would in fact feel remarkably similar. Or rather, I should say, identical to the skin of an orange. That is so incredibly disgusting.
And now my head has decided to get in on the act-- my entire scalp is broken out in tiny little super-painful zits. For fuck's sake, I only used my husband's generic organic grapefruit scented shampoo once.
Sexy. Very sexy. I am so not getting laid anytime soon.
So, most of you know that I'm addicted to my iPod, particulary on the long drives to and from the theaters. Lately I've been attracted to the genre of Young Adult Fiction, into which Audible lumps a whole lot of fairly complex "young adult" sci-fi and fantasy, most of which makes Harry Potter look a little thin on the detail and thought process. (Not to disparage the HP books-- I love them more than the average bear and am salivating more than most people over July 21st.) I love stuff in the Young Adults genre on Audible because it's usually complex enough to have a really good story but not so dense as to defeat the purpose of keeping me awake on the ride home (for that, see Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke).
I have to spare a minute to give y'all a heads-up about a book series I've just discovered (it predates HP by about 15 years-- yeah, I'm behind) --by the fantastic author Diane Duane: The Young Wizards series. I swear, the second book, Deep Wizardry, is one of the best books I've ever read. And to my delight and surprise, at the end of the audio recording of the next book, High Wizardry, was a really fantastic interview with the author.
Can I just tell you, I LOVE this woman-- I love the way she thinks about writing, about religion, about the secret lives of inanimate objects... incredible. Go out and find these books as soon as possible.
Seriously. I'm cut off-- apparently can't drive home from work without stopping at McDonalds, and that totally grosses me out.
Nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty. No more burgers. I swear. Just thinking about it makes me want to worship the porcelain god. *Urp*
I would love to be productive right now. Especially since it's 1:40 in the morning. But that's not gonna happen, and apparently neither is sleep, so here's something to give you more of a clue about me I guess (italicized ones are the ones I've done. the starred ones? NEVER EVER gonna happen. Never you mind why.)
Tag, you're it.
Courtesy of Kelly.
From the comments over at finslippy today:
The little bee is a busy soul
He has no time for birth control
And that is why
In times like these
There are so many sons of bees.
Hoot! Go check out finslippy's take on poetry.
... corned beef is not the dish for celebrating St. Patrick's Day. As much as I may like the dish, I hate having to rant about it every year, so now I will simply refer you to EuropeanCuisines.com, whose explanation is much more cogent and much less vitriolic than my own have been. Discuss amongst yourselves.
Courtesy of Diane Duane at Out of Ambit.
A big WHAZZZZZZAP to my bassoonist friend who informed me yesterday that he's now caught up on my blog. I looked at him quizzically and said "The whole THING?"
He grinned and said "Yup."
That, my friend, is devotion. Over four years of mindless drivel and ranting, and he read it all. Damn I love this man... now I just have to come up with a codename for him that's as snazzy as he is. Hmmmm...
That's right guys, don't forget-- ZeFrank ends The Show tomorrow-- make sure you go and get your Meaningless Products today!!!! If you don't know what I'm talking about, visit his page and and get caught up.
In particular, I think everyone needs to listen to Ray. And don't forget a project close to my heart, the Ugly Myspace project.
We loves us some ZeFrank.
Disclaimer: Just so you know, these are usually NOT WORK SAFE.
Tha being said, this is some of the funniest shit I've some across in a while. Lev Yilmaz does animation by drawing on the reverse side of a piece of paper in front of the camera, and his running narration is hilarious.
See also:
In my entire life, I have only once had to pull off the road when listening to the radio because something I hear so upsets me or pisses me off that it affects my driving. (That would be on 9-11 when the first tower fell.)
Until yesterday. On yesterday's Kojo Nnamdi Show, one of the wonderful NPR shows from DC's own WAMU, it was once again time for the DC Politics Hour with Kojo and Jonetta, as in Jonetta Rose Barras. At about forty-two minutes into the broadcast, Barras derails into a pretty spectacularly bad diatribe about the bill that D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson introduced this week, which would require restaurants with 10 or more locations to provide their customers with nutritional information on the food they serve. (Discussion begins at about 39:20)
After she blithely asked the host if she could be "crude" for a moment, this is the "discussion" that followed:
(Barras:)"I mean these people that, if you have to be concerned that much about what you're eating, don't go out. It's like smoking-- if you're worried about getting smoke in your hair and on your clothes and everything, don't go! Stay home! Prepare your meal at home! Don't make everybody suffer because you need somebody to carry you around... a little..."(Nnamdi:)(laughing) "I said you couldn't be crude..."
(Mendelson:) "How are you suffering by having this information, and if you don't want it, don't pay attention to it. But some people want it-- and it's a guessing game right now...--"
(Barras:) "But I think it's not the point of the government. I think the government shouldn't be in my plate, or even in my restaurant, expecially since you don't want to be with the school lunch menu..."
(Nnamdi:) "I'm assuming that when you go to the supermarket you do pick up the box to see how many calories, how many grams of fat, et cetera on the products you buy..."
(Barras:) "I certainly know generally what that is..."
(Nnamdi:) "Why should this be any diefferent?"
(Barras:) "Because now you're in a restaurant where food is being prepared for you, and if you are worried about fats, trans fats, saturated fats, all of the fats ... cook it at home."
(Nnamdi:) "See, that's why Jonetta's not in the restaurant business."
I have no problems with Barras expressing her political views. I have no problems with her providing the strident opposition she's known for on the issues we're all vested in in the DC area.
What I do have a problem with is that she derailed into a rant that in essence says that people like me are a gross imposition on the public at large. I have news for you Ms. Barras: PEOPLE LIKE ME ARE THE PUBLIC AT LARGE.
Since she's worried that people like diabetics and people who have to watch their fat grams are going to ruin her time out at whatever restaurant she happens to be frequenting, I'd like to share a few statistics with her:
The American Diabetes Association cites that 9.6% of the American population over the age of 20 has diabetes. This instance is markedly higher in the African American population, averaging 13.3 percent.
In terms of watching fat grams and salt intake, one of the main recommendations for people with heart disease or stroke considerations like elevated cholesterol and blood pressure, we turn to statistics from the American Heart Association: approximately 35 percent of the American population suffers from high cholesterol, which can lead to heart disease. Approximately 33 percent of the American population has high blood pressure, which can lead to heart disease and stroke.
These diseases are only the tip of the iceberg. Many more Americans deal with many other diseases that necessitate the access to this information.
If Ms. Barras is trying to make a point by hyperbole, I'd like to fire back a volley or two in the same manner. Already we're talking about at the very least, one in ten people who need the information she's ranting about in order to manage their disease. These are people who, in her opinion, should refrain from business or pleasure in public at restaurants. People who should not get to spend time with friends and family and support the businesses of the District.
What would happen if even one tenth of the population stayed home as she said? Considering that the National Restaurant Association estimates that the restaurants in DC generated over 2 billion dollars in revenue in 2006, that's at least 200 million dollars lost to the restaurant industry right there in one year. Not to mention that their families will be staying home with them. More losses. 30 percent? 667 million per year. Sounds ridiculous right?
Not as ridiculous as someone who is supposed to be as well-educated and professional as Ms. Barras making asinine statements like the ones above on a publicly funded National Public Radio program.
Ms. Barras should have a llittle more empathy for the amount of work it takes to control these problems. Infinitely more work than she can imagine I would guess. Counting carbs, counting calories, counting fat grams, counting salt intake: it's a full-time job. If that process gets sabotaged, people could die. It's that simple. (This is unfortunately NOT hyperbole.) Why not make it a little easier to manage-- it will relieve some if the pressure on healthcare in the long run and provide business that pays into the DC coffers.
The proposal under fire, by the way, has as a provision that it applies to resraurants with ten or more locations. These types of restaurants generally already provide nutritional information to their clients as a service, so this wouldn't inconvenience anyone unnecessarily.
Shame on you, Jonetta Rose Barras, for opening your mouth without thinking. Or even more shame on you for thinking and then opening your mouth. It may be your opinion, but in my mind it's you who needs to stay home if you can't operate on a higher level than a two-year-old crybaby. Stick to the issues, and leave hyperbolic vitriol out of it.
I complain about my job a lot. If you've spent any amount of time around me, it's a dead certainty that you've heard me rant about it at some point. It's not that I don't like it-- in fact, exactly the opposite is true. I may not like working with them sometimes, but I love the people I work with (people from the South know that ever so subtle distinction we make in not liking someone but loving them anyway). I love my boss-- she's brassy and talented and a generally fabulous bird. And most of the time I love the music and the shows.
However, sometimes the place has the capacity to drive me completely bat-shit. There's drama of course (no, not just that kind... I know, it's a theater... of course there's that kind of drama-- I mean the high school who-did-what-to-whom variety), but that's not new. That's been going on the whole time I've been there.
The newest issue, over the course of the last year or so, has been the never-ending parade of new conductors. Now, for most musicians this isn't a new or overly troubling phenomenon. We're used to having to cater to and insta-learn all the foibles and idiosyncracies of whatever person happens to be sitting in the driver's seat. There's always something about each conductor you deal with-- strange beat patterns, weird cues, odd grooming habits, and the ever-present God complex. All that, we can handle, provided the musical experience is largely intact. Usually that means we can just laugh off the other stuff.
Lately though, we seem to have had a crop of some of the biggest misfits I've ever worked with parading through the pit. We still laugh at them, but some of the edge has come off of the fun.
Titty, the first of the true freaks to show up, was a case in screwball comedy. He afforded us some of the biggest laughs while also inspiring the loudest howls of indignation. His first show, the performance almost crashed and burned eighteen times from his sheer incompetence. Fifty people demanded their money back. I thought the cast was going to have a full-out mutiny. Even with that, we had a lot of memorable laughs at his expense. His cues looked, according to hubby, exactly like when the monkeys at the zoo hurl turds at the people outside their cages. He was so utterly uncoordinated that one night he was cuing us so hard in the colla voce sections that his head snapped forward and hit his stand light (*crack!*-- think Elaine from Seinfled, and no that's not an exaggeration). I thought our trumpet player that night, Zinger, was going to shit himself laughing.
The next clown to troop in was His Honor. He's not super old, but he doesn't hear so well. This creates problems for the cast in that he can't follow them, so shit goes South real quick when it goes. For us it's a bit of a different problem-- his amp kind of generally increased in volume until some point at which a sounds effect occurred or it got so loud that it would scare the shit out of the drummer, and there would be stuff flying all over the place. One night it scared him so bad that he knocked the gong off its hook and it rolled down the stairs. You can imagine.
The Head Bobber was next. Her cuing was ambiguous at best and she bobbed her head when she played. Now, normally we would just make a Stevie Wonder comment and move on, but the problem with the head bobbing was that it had absolutely nothing to do with the beat of the music or cuing. This becomes even more important because in our pit, conductors do so from the piano, playing while directing the orchestra. You get the idea. Thoroughly Modern Millie all of the sudden started becoming Post-Modern Serial Millie. The Bobber is a little nervy, so it wasn't hard for her to have moments just like His Honor gave the drummer, so she'd get lost and have to catch up with us. Every time she'd jump either Jesus (another trumpeter) or Zinger would completely break out and lose his shit laughing.
Now we have a lady I'll affectionately call OCD Chick. (Not just her condition, but her call sign.) This woman micromanages more than any human being I have EVER. MET. She's constantly reminding us of everys single little thing in all the books. With little yellow post-it notes. Written in red pen. Hubby has started calling his part "Franken-book". Unfortunately there's nothing funny about this one. She's like a mother robot dictating to her little automatons. The only problem is that's not what we are. We're to be quiet through the entire show, no talking, no laughing, no monkeyshines-- after all we're five years old. Apparently we have no artistic integrity or we're suffering from a severe and dyslexic version of STiML, because we can't be trusted to remember anything. But she's very nice. Nice like taht old Southern lady that lives down the street who never really says anything bad about anyone, but you can hear it in every word she says. The worst part about OCDC is the way the show suffers under her care. It's dead. It's boring. It's engineered, and it never works.
That was never more evident than tonight when our old conductor and our supervisor came in to play. It's funny how when great skill is right in front of you it's often so hard to notice-- why? Because Cool D makes it so easy. All of the sudden the songs came alive the way we've never heard in this show. No complainingafter he started... it became something we could reconcile ourselves to, if not fall in love with. All of us had been moaning about how much we HATE this music, but tonight for once we finally could relax into the music and follow its flow.
Flow. It's an organic word, and rightly so. Truly good conductors understand innately the concept of flow. It's not something that can be forced or created-- it springs into existence from the delicate weave of all the strands of musical and theatrical creation coming together in exactly the right way. Like a cat's cradle, if you pull it the wrong way or too strongly, it collapses. It's about nuance, not necessarily about structure. Cool D knows just when to finesse something here, change a keyboard patch there, and all of the sudden the music becomes a living thing that draws all of us out of our shells and makes us do more than we otherwise would. After one particular number, we all exhaled audibly in sighs and the trombone player laughed, "I could get used to this,"
I never realized how much I missed it until I didn't have it. We used to have a cast of conductors that were all like that. How spoiled and blessed we were, how immersed in our happy toodling and oblivious to the luck we had. Even after he and the other guys basically left, we really didn't get it. Then he came back tonight, and I found tears welling up in my eyes after the best number.
I miss it. The flow. I want it back, but right now there's no chance. Hope springs eternal though, and if I get nights like tonight as a reprieve I think I can survive until that happens.
I just burned the crap out of my dinner, but it was completely worth it.
One of my guilty pleasures when I've had a long work week is staying up late and watching nature documentaries like Deep Blue on the Discovery Channel. Yeah, I'm a geek. I know.
Well, tonight was the debut of the new miniseries Planet Earth. Again, yes, I'm a geek-- I've been excited about this all week.
I managed to survive the Month of Hell (that ended today!!!!!) since I got back from China, and I was watching the "Mountains" episode while making myself a celebratory dinner. I managed to look up just in time to see the first shot of the snow leopard, and the next thing I knew my dinner was burning at the commercial break. I stood there the whole segment holding my breath and watching... yeah, anyway, if you haven't seen the Planet Earth series, go set your DVR ASAP.
In honor of my zany brother-in-law and the fact that this week will be largely spent away from the computer and outside digging in the dirt so the bees can come back, I give you Thirty Interesting Facts About Bees. Enjoy!
I really can understand why some creatures eat their young. Honestly.
I've spent the better part of this week recording and editing one of my students' recital projects for a class at school. I can honestly tell you after this long slog that no one should ever have their high school music prowess recorded for posterity.
First of all, it's a veritable certainty that the freak-out factor is going to make you sound like at least a fraction of an ass. Apparently when the mic goes on we revert to some caveman-like state of being where a large portion of whatever refinement we've been striving for goes right out the window. Zip, boom, bonjour.
Second, seriously-- is anyone ever going to seriously listen to this shit? Good Lord, I hope not. I recently dug up a few recordings of me playing back then (you have to remember, I'm twelve years removed from this at this point) and I REALLY needed a beer after hearing all of that. I think it may be something better left alone.
Sure, I know it's necessary, it's for a grade or an audition spot or whatever, but for the love, who needs that kind of mental and emotional flagellation?
Now I know the horrors that my music teacher went through trying to listen to all of us while recording our audition tapes. I know how far this or that kid has come since starting with me, but the judges of this tape have nothing to compare her to except Jeanne Baxstresser. So I sit there wanting to tear my hair out when she loses her composure and craps all over her performance. Again. Take 37 please. This time, count. Don't sneeze in the rests. Stop sighing when you miss something. It's F-sharp, not F-natural. Breathe. It'll be okay.
Praise the Lord and pass the beer, it's over for now. I just hope she gets an A. I don't get paid enough for this.
This page contains all entries posted to SassyBlonde in March 2007. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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