GRABBINGSAND

over the next two weeks, expect postings and updates to be sporadic or nonexistant. as we pull into the last two weeks of rehearsal, i doubt i will be thinking of too much else, and i somehow doubt anyone else wants to read about how much more work needs to be done on this scene in that act with this character and on and on (and on and on.) regardless, normalcy should resume come mother’s day.

mindspring has always been so good to me for so long.
so why must their dsl service be so unstable?

further noted: the survey at belief.net tells me i am an “old fashioned seeker.” what about you?

so i went back to speakout to re-take their religion selector survey. then i took it again. and the second answer was just as strange as the first. it seems that i am in line with the beliefs of a theravada buddhist, while the first results told me i was a mahayana buddhist. also on the list were neo-pagan, unitatian universalist and liberal quaker. hmm. go take it, then tell me what it thinks you are.

first kozmo, and now webvan. but you know, i tried to use webvan on many occasions. i made my list, was ready to check out, then something would come up. or i would look at the available times for delivery and just shake my head. i mean, why should i have to speed home from work to meet my shipment of milk and bread when i can just as easily motor down north ave to the kroger at 1am?

i have been a tori amos fan since way back in the day (a.k.a. 1991), and each new album gets my hope up for another little earthquakes or under the pink. i have been a neil gaiman fan since a couple of years after he started writing sandman for dc comics (a.k.a. 1990), and each new book gets my hope up for another good omens or neverwhere.
tori has a new album coming out soon, neil has a new book coming out soon. neil heard tori’s new album, and posted his thoughts about it to inkwell.vue. reproduced here:

#992 of 1008: Neil Gaiman (neilgaiman) Mon 23 Apr ‘01 (01:19 PM)
Okay. I’ve heard the twelve tracks of STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS. I’ll post something coherent later.
For now, let me just say that whatever you’re expecting, it’s not what you expect; whatever you’re imagining, it’s not what you imagine.
And I *knew* what to expect — and it wasn’t what I expected.
And yes, it’s astonishing, and powerful, and scary, and cool. And if I’m good, maybe tonight I’ll get to hear it again.
Neil
(And yes, if anyone wants to repost this anywhere, feel free — I’d hate to see people arguing over paraphases of what I might have said.)
#998 of 1008: Neil Gaiman (neilgaiman) Mon 23 Apr ‘01 (06:21 PM)
More on Strange Little Girls.
Sat up with Marcel, listening to the b-sides (all lovely, and in each case I could see why it wasn’t an album track — although one of them might be a single in its own right), and then he played me four or five of the album tracks again.
It got better. And I was blown away the first time.
I don’t really want to say anything specific and tangible about this album, because it’s not my place to talk about it — it’s Tori’s and she’ll talk about it when the time’s right. And you’ll hear it then, too.
But I will say that it feels in many ways like her first album as a grown-up — as a mother, maybe; and that it’s both her most accessible album (there’s one track which made me think of nothing so much as a great lost track from Little Earthquakes) and also — especially in the sequence of the last four or five songs, her most painful.
There are a couple of songs that are real singles. There’s one song that will be a basement remix before you can say ’stains’ . And there’s one mammorth of a song that isn’t yet finished, but even in the unfinished version it ’s audacious and wild. She does things with her voice I’ve not heard before. And the arrangements and musicianship are astonishing.
And, as I said before, it’s not what you expect - *whatever* you expect.

So what do you expect?

from the fate’s-funny-ain’t-it? department:
i’m listening to the drones on my alarm clock radio this morning, and they are going on and on about gadgets and electronics. well, its not long until they run out of their own ideas and open up the phones to the teeming screaming meemies, which brings on this first caller from a company i met a few months back.
back in november, i (like so many of my friends) was once again downsized and sent along my merry way with a “good luck” and a shallow pocket of severance. during the course of my re-employment quest, i attended a job fair at the galleria and handed my resume to this company. a start-up, though not necessarily a dot com, they claimed that their product would drop magically from the sky in the spring of 2001 and revolutionize home entertainment. not a bad idea, it seemed, and when i interviewed with them some time later, it looked like a pretty cool toy, something to sit in the stack with your dvd-player and surround sound receiver. the price was steep, around five hundred, but that was supposed to be a “launch price” - kind of like cd-players were initially prohibitively priced in the 80s, and the price would come down after the sharper image set had bought enough to start a kind of buzz. regardless, they didn’t hire me, though they really liked my resume. i was bummed, i’ll admit it.
so this guy calls in this morning, and he starts waxing in a marketing fashion about that same product. and its still not out, it hasn’t revolutionized anything. they don’t expect it to see daylight until september, and even then the thing will be selling for over $900. one of the drones reduced the product to a “jukebox” which annoyed the caller. i just started smiling and kept smiling until i got to work.
you can’t always get (the job) you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get (the job) you need.

Found something. A bit of (my) history.
I started using my Mindspring tilde webspace in 1997, thinking I was going to call it “The Den” (today I am not sure why really). So I found the first page I ever made, bad HTML and all. Times New Roman, black text on white, horrible homemade graphics. I will spare you the icons and share with you this annoyingly verbose introduction (be warned, pontification and ponderosity ahead):
Decisions and mistakes are equally hard to make, yet both provide some kind of lesson. So I have decided to actually test the sturdiness of my electronic soapbox. No, I will not be railling (much) against the political juggernaut barrelling down upon our children’s future, nor will I pick up (too many) banners of revolution to brandish madly in its wake. What I will do is speak my mind and share some ideas — that seems to be the point of this mighty Internet anyway.
But just what ideas? Well, we will start here at the center where I am most comfortable. Music. Six years of piano lessons brought me little keyboarding ability. Three years of guitar left me with a beautiful acoustic instrument. Less than a year with a suffering garage band gave me a fleeting taste of high school notoriety. But a life spent in a home of music, attending a church of music, coming from a family of music cannot leave a person unaffected. Music. We will start there. Or rather, here.
What else… what else… what else to throw at you? To my left sits this dust-laden tome. The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy written by three sad men led by a sadder man all upset about the sad state of education and the sad children that grow up so very sad these days. Basically, in their opinion all this generation needs is a return to the classics and the manner in which they were taught back when Television was Golden and War was Ice Cold… With that in mind, with the presumptuous idea that there really are bits of knowledge one needs to fend off ignorance like a social vitamin, here are my Keys to Cultural Awareness.
you never really appreciate what time has to offer you until you actually see the physical and mental evidence of change. wow.