Jan. 30, 2006
LA-BOUND!
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grace@graceuncensored.com
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4:26 pm
you may recall how excited i was at the prospect of dog/housesitting for jerri and brendan. but my excitement has waned considerably because it didn’t happen INSTANTLY, and i’ve had other things to focus attention on.
BUT I JUST GOT THE CALL! from jerri, who was unloading groceries from her car at her loft which is right across from the staples center. they’re going to NYC sometime at the end of february. I’M THERE! it’s a little difficult to even think of being there, hard to believe. especially on an especially grey cold and dreary january day like today.
so, the play will be over, and off i’ll go. nice. very nice. something FANTASTIC to look forward to.
if you click on the link over there on the right, the one about jerri and bren, you could see photos of their new place. i haven’t actually clicked on it yet, but i’m about to.
la la la la la.
that’s all i have to say.
not really. i wanted to write yesterday about blind melon, but i forgot by the time i was writing last night. after i watched jimmy carter on the news talking about hamas, i focused my attention on the music videos, and watched the entire song “no rain” by blind melon. if you’ve been reading this for a long time, you might recall that one of the people in one of my massage classes in LA was the wife of one of the guys in blind melon. heather thorn is her name. she’s very beautiful and i don’t know why she didn’t want to be in movies or something, but she seemed very happy working in the beauty industry. she tinted my eyelashes, as a matter of fact, which would have been scary but she was very cool and i knew she wouldn’t blind me.
she would talk about the parties she’d go to. i mean, i went to some parties in LA, but i feel that the parties she attended were probably even more extremely party-like. for example, she knew george clooney.
yeah.
anyway, i actually watched the entire video yesterday, because i’d never watched it all the way because usually my attention span isn’t that quite that long. and it was really great - if you haven’t seen it, there’s this chubby little girl in a bee costume who is tap dancing at a school thing, and people make fun of her and she runs away, and she runs all around and is rejected but finally arrives at this sunny field, and she opens the gate and there are all these men and women in yellow tutus and tights like the one she’s wearing, and they all dance around and have a great time.
it’s quite charming. it is interspersed, of course, by the obligatory shots of the guys in the band actually singing the song and playing their instruments. i liked it a lot.
here’s me, expanding my horizons, looking at things more thoroughly, and ABOUT TO GO TO LA!!!!!!!!!!
so monday is better than i’d expected it to be.
i hope yours is good. and if it isn’t, please try to do something fun to make up for it.
yesterday at the grocery store i impulsively bought a SHAPE magazine because one of the articles is 10 DAYS TO A BETTER BODY. this seemed perfect for me, because of the play opening NEXT FRIDAY. gulp. the thing is, though, i haven’t even opened the magazine yet because i’ve been busy doing other things. like buying double-stick tape at the fabric store to prevent a wardrobe malfunction. the double stick tape was seven bucks, which seems ridiculously expensive for TAPE, but hopefully then it will be extra good.
i guess i have until tomorrow to start reading the 10 days to a better body article, because i’d have to start on wednesday in order to achieve the better body by next friday.
ok, so i have a goal now. READ MAGAZINE.
i feel, though, that it’s probably just going to tell me to EAT LESS, EXERCISE MORE. and if you happened to see one of my gracetalks, i already covered this topic thoroughly.
jerri says that all the women at the apartment building where she lives are actual models. and everybody is very rich, and they all have hummers and beemers and all kinds of fancy cars. she says she steps on the elevator with these gorgeous creatures and she thinks, “why didn’t i wear my lingerie?” see, i HAVE the lingerie now! and as christine says, you can wear anything anywhere in LA and nobody cares. so there i’ll be, at the grocery store in LA, sashaying down the aisle in my bustier...
i have to work now.
ok then,
monday grace.
king kong, hamas, flying fish, jim gaffigan (in no particular order)
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grace@graceuncensored.com
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12:08 am
WHEW, where did the weekend go? yesterday, a bleary-eyed day spent rushing, rushing, rushing, all day long, wishing i had time for at least a short nap, but on the go all day long. i went to my niece’s volleyball game and they lost, but the games were really good and thrilling (would have been even more so if i’d been fully awake), and they came in second in their division, which was good.
i saw “king kong” last night, was totally apathetic about going, but it was pretty good. but TOO DAMN LONG. erica thought it was delightfully over the top. david liked it, and so did randy. don’t all guys like it? why, i wonder? something about scary islands, creepy monsters, big apes, pretty girls. and what about jack black? he was good in the role, but i kept wishing he’d have a horrible and grisly death.
i hated the part when they were on skull island and they were in some valley and these REALLY REALLY GROSS worm-slug-like things came glopping out of the glop and then out of the top of these disgusting slimy thins shot these big pink REVOLTING things that sucked onto people; one of them got adrien brody’s arm (I LOVE ADRIEN BRODY NOW), but he escaped because he was the HERO of the film, and another one sucked a guy’s head and killed him.
and also there were too many dinosaurs and long scenes of running around plus giant insects and giant bats and many many giant things and clearly all these animals got ahold of that same crate they found in gilligan’s island when they ate the radioactive vegetables and all had some certain weird attribute, like mrs. howell was really fast from eating sugar beets and gilligan could see really far because of eating carrots. maybe i’m mixed up on who had what attribute, but you get the idea. maybe it was mary ann who could see far because of the carrots, and gilligan was strong because of eating spinach.
king kong was also like a big “jurassic park” ripoff, all the giant creatures and everything. they could have shaved a half hour off the time, easy. but i guess that’s what guys like the neverending chases, which are part of any kind of guy film. chasing chasing chasing. i liked the fact that the humans were able to outrun any of the animals even though many of the animals were VERY VERY FAST. and also, when they were being chased by dinosaurs, why didn’t the people get stepped on? because they made it feel like the people were right there getting tangled up in the dinosaurs' legs, and yet nobody got squashed like a bug.
i’m just saying.
it was pretty good, though, especially since my expectations were so low. the natives on skull island certainly were unattractive and quite scary and i had to keep hitting randy in the arm because of the scariness aspect of it all.
i didn’t get any candy for the film. i really really wanted some, but now i’m coming DOWN TO THE WIRE in terms of days left to lose weight for the play. DOWN TO THE WIRE, let me just say that a few times so maybe i’ll PAY ATTENTION TO MYSELF.
i really suck at paying attention. i did make my family a lovely dinner tonight including a lemon poppy seed cake and i didn’t eat the whole thing, so that’s something. right? not the whole thing.
tonight i heard about yet another person who reads this site, or maybe they used to and they don’t any more. it’s some woman who i didn’t know existed, and because of READING THIS RIGHT HERE, she’s been telling a friend things about me, stuff that she’s decided she knows about me BASED ON WHAT I’M WRITING RIGHT NOW. she’s never met me, she doesn’t know me.
this is annoying to me. have i not written over and over again that there are only maybe two people, maybe not even that many, who really know what’s going on? but i guess if you were to just read this all the time you’d have some idea of who i am and what i’m doing. but maybe i’m just MAKING IT ALL UP!
because that’s the thing about the internet isn’t it, the ability to just make stuff up if you want to.
ok, i’m not making things up. just leaving stuff out. but if you haven’t even MET me in PERSON, please, please don’t go around telling people your opinions on what’s going on with me WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW ME AT ALL.
so, hamas won. i just found this out today, but apparently it happened a few days ago. i was listening to jimmy carter on one of those sunday morning programs while i was running FAST on the treadmill, and he was talking about how, potentially, this COULD be a good thing...but it seems a little unlikely, doesn’t it? i kept thinking about a new yorker article i read a few years ago, about people in hamas, and about how their whole thing is that they want all jewish people to be DEAD.
so it seems they’d have to come a long way to be moderate and wanting to have peace talks, when they’re starting at such a very very bad place.
but what do i know?
jim gaffigan. i wrote about him a while ago, i saw him in champaign, he’s a REALLY REALLY FUNNY comedian, and he had a special on comedy central tonight and i wish i’d written about it sooner so you could have seen it. i taped it, in case you want to borrow it. or you could look him up online and you could order a tape for yourself.
so far when i ask people if they’ve looked at any sites that i have links to, they always say they haven’t. that’s too bad.
anyway, i think that jim gaffigan is going to be on again on saturday night. i’m not entirely sure, and i’d look it up myself right now but it’s five minutes till midnight and my goal was to be asleep before 12, and i know i’m not going to succeed but at least i’d like to be close.
flying fish. amy and jim had a good time in mexico, and they went snorkeling one day and they saw flying fish. have you heard of flying fish? i hadn’t. merceds, my niece who is 14, has heard of flying fish. or at least she alleges that she has; maybe she was just making it up.
why haven’t i heard of flying fish before? i need to see some. i’m not entirely sure i want to go to mexico, though. it sounded pretty fun, but not as fun as i’d really like to have.
i think i’d like to be someplace warmer. more tropical.
there were at least five other things i wanted to talk about tonight, but time is slipping away, plus of course i’ve forgotten them.
remember - enjoy life, eat out more often.
i read that on a packet of sugar once, and it really resonated with me.
ok ok ok, i can’t believe tomorrow is MONDAY already, I WANT A VACATION!
grace not looking forward to monday morning so much.
Jan. 28, 2006
yeah, WHAT
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grace@graceuncensored.com
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3:23 am
am i doing up at 3:13 in the morning? i mean, is there any excuse at all?
nope.
anyway, tonight christine told me that the pittsburgh steelers are playing the seattle seahawks in the super bowl, which is SUNDAY FEBRUARY FIFTH, and she wants the steelers to win because...because...i can’t remember why. she was telling me this very logical reason but my mind wandered off right after we started talking about football.
she’s going to be in la for the superbowl. i’m very jealous about that. being in la.
but anyway, she also commented that whenever i write about sports at all on here, i’m always getting it all wrong. so i’m sorry about that. but at the same time i’m not - but let me just write this disclaimer. I DON’T REALLY FOLLOW SPORTS SO MUCH. I JUST WRITE WHATEVER PEOPLE TELL ME ABOUT THEM, AND SOMETIMES I PROBABLY GET THE FACTS WRONG. DON’T BE SO HUNG UP ON FACTS, FOR GOD’S SAKE. IF YOU WANT FACTS, READ THE NEWSPAPER.
not that the newspaper is always filled with the facts.
READ THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA, THEN.
is that how you speel encyclopaedia? it definitely looks wrong.
i’d look it up online but IT’S AFTER THREE IN THE MORNING AND I DEFINITELY DEFINITELY SHOULD BE SLEEPING RIGHT NOW.
you know what the real problem is here? i had an HOUR nap today (now yesterday). i never take naps that long.
it was definitely, DEFINITELY the unexpected highlight of my day.
except that now i might not sleep at all tonight (quickly becoming morning). and i have many many things to do tomorrow.
goodnight then,
really early saturday grace.
Jan. 27, 2006
one quick thing...
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grace@graceuncensored.com
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2:50 pm
i forgot to mention that i found this guy online, his name is jess winfield, he’s a writer in la and he’s working on a novel about working at disney, and he has this blog that i found and i like a lot. here’s the link:La Food Crazy
the funny thing is, in today’s posting he talks about the restaurant El Coyote. This is an old Mexican restaurant in LA that’s known for being cheap and loud and kitchy (sp?) and a lot of fun. except the last time i went there, with christine, our orders arrived...and there was a little live wormy thing on the top of an enchilada.
a LIVE little wormy thing. waving around.
we left the restaurant, and i haven’t been back.
but jess makes it sound so delicious that now i want to go back.
ok then,
friday grace.
friday, for real.
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grace@graceuncensored.com
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12:10 pm
i don’t feel so bad considering that i haven’t gotten my full eight to nine hours of sleep in about...hmm, in about a long time. maybe last weekend i achieved that, actually. and with luck i’ll do that again this weekend. sleeping, planning to sleep, wishing i could sleep more, thinking about and actually taking naps...is this all my life comes down to?
could be worse.
i was just trying to study the statistics of this website, and i noticed that i’m getting hits from some website called iggyz.com. i looked at this website today, and it’s a guy who appears to be the ultimate computer geek. let me just say ULTIMATE computer geek. here, for an example, is one sentence from his most recent posting:
“The only thing that really has me worried is the ThermalTake Typhoon heatsink” hmm. it’s funny to read a blog where i don’t understand much of what he’s talking about. he also has some photos of computer parts on the site. ULTIMATE computer geek.
i wanted to write to him to thank him for listing my website on his website, but i couldn’t find anyplace on his website to do this. so, iggy, if that’s your name, thank you, if you happen to read this. thanks.
ok, i have to do some work. nothing involving any kinds of heatsinks, typhoon or otherwise.
have a good friday, please.
ok then,
friday at noon grace.
officially, technically, it’s friday
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grace@graceuncensored.com
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1:19 am
how did it get to be 1:15 a.m.? phone calls. e-mails. after one a.m.
bad, very bad. worse and worse, every day.
at least i think i should sleep well. cause of the very very tiredness.
goodnight for real this time,
grace.
Jan. 26, 2006
the big grey elephant team
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grace@graceuncensored.com
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11:59 pm
so i actually looked at the description of the item i purchased today. it’s a 7" record, so isn’t that a 45? so what does the 45 MEAN?
i’m sure it’s very obvious.
and on the A side is “we have lost two little elephants” and on the B side is “the big grey elephant team.”
i was thinking about this after i bought the record - i’m the only one in the whole world who cares about this. it’s kind of like “winchester cathedral.” have you ever heard that song? It’s not a children’s song.
ok, wait, i just looked at the photo of my new (old) record and in the upper right hand corner it says “45 RPM.”
RPM! RPM! how FAST it goes around, you moron!
rpm.
“winchester cathedral” is by a group called the “new vaudeville band,” and the record is from the 60’s. my parents had it, and i listened to that song a lot. it disappeared many years ago, but my brother found one on ebay a while ago and my mom gave it to me, so i can listen to it whenever i want.
do you recall that i don’t know much about any music? because if i have it on, i forget to keep listening to it. i mean, i really really try to keep listening, but my mind gets caught up with other things. and then after a while i realize the music stopped long ago, or it’s on repeat and i’ve heard it two million times.
retarded, i know. i can’t help it.
but so what do i love? we have lost two little elephants. winchester cathedral. “winchester cathedral, you’re breaking me down, you stood and you watched and...my baby left town.” here’s a good idea - i should sing a few more songs and put a new one up on the site every week. how hard could it be?
because there are many songs out there.
or so they tell me.
i have exactly six minutes to make it to bed by midnight. will i succeed in this seemingly unattainble goal?
doubtful.
but at least close.
ok then, goodnight,
grace almost to friday.
OH MY GOD!
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5:05 pm
so i have about 10 minutes between massages and checked my e-mail and there was an e-mail from a friend down in s. illinois, david, who said there was a babar record on ebay. i looked at it and figured it probably wasn’t right but i bought it anyway because it was only two bucks.
and then i decided to actually look around on ebay for a minute or two, and there was another record about babar and that is DEFINITELY the record! it’s a little more, 23 dollars, but it’s definitely the one. they listed all the songs, and one is “the big grey elephant team,” which of COURSE i know also! i actually didn’t have time to look at the record itself; maybe it’s not a 45, maybe it’s a big record. doesn’t matter. “the big grey elephant team...is marching out today...they’re glorious...”something something something..."they make us shout HOORAY!"
joy all around.
arthur and celeste AND the big grey elephant team!
hmm, now i need to think about getting a RECORD PLAYER. i believe mom and dad have one.
ok then, i’m sure your day can’t be as good as mine suddenly has become, but i hope it’s at least as good as it COULD be.
and if it isn’t, there’s always tomorrow!
ok ok ok,
very excited grace.
p.s. wow
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12:23 am
january is certainly roaring by, isn’t it?
there are many thing i wanted to accomplish in january. some have been accomplished. others, not.
not YET.
one thing i thought i’d accomplish today is getting to bed by 12. it is now 12:20. so, one thing not accomplished.
oh well. there’s always tomorrow.
ok then,
gs
report from the zoo...
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12:14 am
ok, i know i’ve mentioned more than once that i’ve sort of quit watching tv. except for “sex & the city” re-runs, which are a little annoying because they took out all the nudity and swearing. but i love it just the same and almost always watch unless i’ve seen the episode too many times.
but i haven’t had the tv on more than a couple of times while house/petsitting, but tonight i felt i needed to sit down and watch tv in order to have some bonding time with the dogs.
see, when amy and jim are here, somebody either naps or watches tv or does something involving sprawling on a couch every single day, sometimes a few times a day.
but i haven’t been doing that. i’m not here so often, and when i’m here, i’m sitting at this computer or i’m sleeping. or perhaps eating.
anyway, bonding with dogs. first, i was trying to talk on the phone while sitting on the couch with three dogs, but they kept getting into snarling fights, so i finally had to hang up and yell at the dogs for a while. they didn’t really seem to care so much.
i turned on the tv and began flipping channels and was somewhat dismayed at the lack of anything at all worth watching. at all.
and then, finally, i found beavis-n-butthead.
they were watching a pia zadora music video, where she was in prison.
i can’t tell you how this made my day.
PIA ZADORA. i’d forgotten all about pia zadora. wasn’t she an actress?
and clearly, a singing legend.
the funny thing is, i bet it’d be easier to find a pia zadora record than it is to find my elusive “arthur and celeste.”
i keep giving the dogs rawhide bones and Noodle was sitting there on the couch with two bones.
they love the bones.
i can’t eat anywhere near the dogs because they sit there and stare at me taking every bite, which makes me feel self-conscious. it also makes me feel like i’m starving them, even though i just gave them some treats.
today i was sitting on the floor while Numi was attacking me and i looked over at the fish tank and thought that one of the fish was floating UPSIDE DOWN! i panicked and jumped up and scared Numi. but the fish wasn’t dead after all.
whew.
no dead animals of any kind.
the dogs are all under the computer now, gnawing on their bones.
actually, this evening suddenly all the dogs' bowls were completely empty.
it must be so difficult to do all the mothering when women are actual mothers with real, live children. i can barely manage to not starve/lose the various animals living here.
it’s funny how not lonely it is, because any room i walk into, there’s another animal. Lemar, a cat, is always lying up against the heat register in the bathroom.
every room, at least one animal.
i tried to take a nap today and there were three to four animals with me at any given time.
napping was pointless because the dogs just kept barking.
this morning i was standing in the kitchen and all of a sudden there was KNOCKING ON THE DINING ROOM DOOR. this leads to the back yard. i was really happy that i was wearing clothes. it was a guy who wanted to read the water meter. i had to take him to the basement where there’s a gate, because there are gates between almost every room in the house, and i demonstrated how he could climb over the gate but he didn’t want to do that but he DID know how to open the gate. i hadn’t mastered that, i hadn’t even thought about it.
people knocking on the back door in the morning.
i let mr. kitty out tonight, and thought “what the hell are you doing, he didn’t come back before and it was very stressful.”
but he came back in, thank god. too cold out there for him.
lots and lots of responsibility this week. i guess i’m ok with the responsibility, at least for one week at a time.
but no more than that, please.
ok then,
wednesday night grace.
Jan. 25, 2006
this sort of illustrates me, grace smith...
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grace@graceuncensored.com
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5:26 pm
...and how my life is like, on a day-to-day basis. attempting (sometimes completely in vain) to muddle through as best I can.
i was defrosting some bread in the microwave to make a sandwich. i lost the twist tie. i kept looking and looking for it as the bread defrosted. did the dogs eat it? nope, the dogs were behind their doggy prison gate in the other room. did i drop it on the floor? not there.
the timer went off on the microwave and i opened the door and it smelled really really bad. the twist tie had stuck to one of the pieces of bread, and it cooked and it was not pleasant at all. the outer paper part had fused onto the bread and the metal part was lying there, very singed. i wonder if it had been sparking like crazy? of course i hadn’t paid any attention to the defrosting process. and i did actually notice a weird smell, but by the time i found the burnt twist tie, it was too late.
i’m just saying.
ok then, i’m going to get ready for rehearsal now. wish me luck.
grace on wednesday evening.
not exactly surly, but...
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9:08 am
not fully awake yet, either. i have to go take a shower. sleepy, very sleepy. why can’t i go to sleep earlier? tonight, i promise.
i would have slept even a litlte later but there was lots of barking going on.
a couple of minutes ago Numi was desperately trying to climb up in my lap as i typed. Numi is an Italian Greyhound, not very big. but not a lap dog either. i did let him sit in my lap for a little bit, but then Noodle wanted up too, so i made both of them go away. whoops, now Numi isa back. he seems to want to do some typing...
whew.
ok then,
wednesday grace.
not SO alone in this big world...
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12:53 am
...i mean, just because i haven’t found my actual soul mate, the man who also knows the arthur and celeste song and maybe knows even more of the words than i do...
at least there are some people out there. reading what i have to say. making contact with me, even though i sort of live in a vacuum in many ways.
craig, for example, sent me many links for finding the song. one of them i’d already found myself, and i haven’t looked at the other ones yet, but craig is a very dilligent and hardworking kind of fellow, clearly. we’re going to R23 when i go to LA, and i’m very excited about that (sushi). maybe i can even convince him to go hiking with me, because in reading his blog (krinkle.net), he’s clearly also a hiker.
i don’t find so many hikers out there.
somebody else e-mailed me and told me i should look for arthur and celeste on ebay. actually, V. (Victor) told me this just tonight. I had actually thought about this, but haven’t pursued it. as of yet. because of the extreme laziness. plus the busy-ness, what with cleaning up the dog puke because Numi did of course throw up after eating the plant. wouldn’t you?
the dogs are quiet now. it is very peaceful here. why aren’t i sleeping already, is an excellent question one might ask. i can’t give you a good answer at this time. winding down from my very busy night of rehearsal.
we ran through the first act tonight, and it was pretty terrible. lots of line-memorization issues. many many issues. have i mentioned that this is going to be jim hepworth’s finest role? i laugh every time he says his lines. but we haven’t done the first act since at least last wednesday, and so of course we were a little rusty. not so great.
but it’s going to come together. yeah, it will. pretty much.
here’s one thing i forgot to mention yesterday - in taking the dogs for a walk (which is a somewhat TORTUROUS ORDEAL because the dogs are so insane and get tangled up a lot and Noodle is straining at the leash the entire time, just wanting to run like the wind), i noticed MANY MANY XMAS DECORATIONS still up. STILL UP.
it’s the END OF JANUARY, for god’s sake. TAKE DOWN THE DAMN DECORATIONS.
i don’t want to even think about xmas. it’s VERY VERY OVER. it was a little bit of a non-event for me this year, but even if it’d been the xmas to beat all xmas’s, i still DON’T WANT TO SEE ANY MORE DAMN DECORATIONS.
i’m sure i wrote about this last january, but i really, sincerely, feel that people need to be HEAVILY FINED for keeping their damn decorations up this long. not only are there all kinds of annoying garland with bows festooning doorways and windows, there are also many many lights WHICH ARE STILL LIT.
so it’s not like they forgot to take down the decorations, THEY’RE PURPOSEFULLY KEEPING THEM LIT.
my alternate idea to heavy fines is going around and tearing down the decorations, or shooting out the lights, but this would probably result in me getting arrested, which i’m not too keen on. at this time.
today when running on the treadmill at fit club WEST, i was happy to do so because there are individual TVs and so i could flip the channels the entire time. first i watched some really old donald duck cartoon which was entertaining, but i had to see what else was on. i watched a little of something about women in prison, and MAN was it depressing. so that’s why i don’t want to be arrested, because i don’t want to be in jail.
this one really old lady was in for killing her boyfriend or husband. she related the story - he’d put her head through a refrigerator door and when she woke up covered in blood, he was lying on the bed and he told her to go cook him whatever it was that he’d asked her to cook before, and if she said anything he’d give her more of the same. so she pulled her gun from under the mattress and shot him. dead.
i mean, wouldn’t you?
it was depressing.
then i watched some of “irreconcilable differences,” with ryan o'neal and shelley long and drew barrymore and sharon stone who is very very young in the movie, and i love that film. i wanted to keep running because i wanted to watch more of it. i haven’t seen it in a very long time, but it’s good. you should rent it if you haven’t seen it, or even if you have. it’s funny to see drew as a child. in a scene at a new year’s party, she drinks a bunch of champagne, and it’s kind of sad because you know the rocky path she’s going to go down as a child star with all those famous kinfolk. relatives. kinfolk is reserved for people in appalachia, isn’t it?
kinfolk, though, that word kind of resonates nicely.
kinfolk.
V. told me a woman he knows named amanda loves me. she loves my writing, anyway. that was nice to hear, being loved by random people i’ve never met. she reads this website. maybe you wouldn’t like me so much in person, amanda. you never know. sometimes i’m quite aloof. surly, even.
i’m not really aloof. and never truly surly. i aspire to aloofness, because that way people would want to try to figure me out, and they’d want to try to break through the huge aloof barrier that i put up.
i feel that i’ll never achieve aloofness.
oh well. maybe if i keep working at it. it seems like too much trouble right now.
also, this volunteer at the hospital, aileen, informed me that her son saw me at the magic kitchen restaurant the other day at lunch. i said i didn’t see him because i don’t know what he looks like. Aileen has talked about her son quite a bit to me, so i felt it rude that he didn’t introduce himself. there was an alderwoman there, and we were very excited about this because she was one of the ones to vote YES on the no-smoking ban that’s going to take effect in september. Mom went over and told her how happy we were that she did that.
ok, one more thing before i fall asleep while typing...all day today i’ve been very worried, because amy and jim have four cats. one of them is named Mr. Kitty, and he’s this enormous large great big cat who is very affectionate and loving and nice.
i let him out sometime yesterday, and this morning i realized he wasn’t in the house, and he wasn’t outside clamoring to get in, and all day long i kept calling him, and no Mr. Kitty. This was very disturbing because i’m IN CHARGE OF MAKING THE PETS STAY ALIVE, plus i wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to him because he’s a very nice cat.
i felt that something bad must have happened because he’d be HUNGRY because he’s so big and fat.
tonight when i was leaving for rehearsal, in he sauntered. what had he been doing? where was he all night and all day? did he go visit somebody who fed him hot dogs and cheddar cheese?
i don’t really know what would tempt Mr. Kitty in terms of treats, but he looks like a meat and cheese kind of fellow.
Mr. Kitty is safe now. things are good.
things are pretty darn good.
at this little moment, anyway.
but tomorrow morning, i’m sure that Surly Grace will take over, because i won’t have had enough sleep. so WATCH OUT.
ok ok ok,
tuesday (is it only TUESDAY???) night grace.
Jan. 24, 2006
THIS JUST IN!
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9:36 am
i was both surprised and delighted to find an e-mail in my inbox this morning, from a guy i don’t even know, who lives in a town in illinois i’ve never even heard of, telling me what he knows about arthur and celeste. as you may recall, i just wrote about wanting to find out about them and had heard nothing from nobody.
this guy, named steve, said he saw my show which made him want to read my website, and this is what he knows about arthur and celeste: “Arthur and Celeste were Babar the elephant’s cousins (Babar later married Celeste) and the song comes from the first book, ”The Story of Babar". I
vaguely recognized the song and I wonder if it came from a semi-animated version that I think was done on Capt. Kangaroo or another kids show from the early `60’s."
ok, so i do have to say that when i looked the song up online, to no avail, i did find that arthur and celeste were babar’s cousins. i had thought they were his parents or something.
i also find it a little disturbing that babar MARRIED celeste. his COUSIN. aren’t there very specific laws against that kind of thing?
maybe it’s different for elephants.
now, i bet i did hear that song on captain kangaroo because i watched it all the time, and maybe the record was sold because the song was so popular on the show.
but still, what about the lyrics? what about the little yellow record itself? where did it go, and where can i get another one?
these are my weighty and pressing issues this (thank god SUNNY) tuesday morning.
i’m sitting here at amy and jim’s and the two wild dogs, Numi and Noodle, were lying on the floor behind me, and i thought they were being good, chewing on their rawhide bones. but i turned around, and instead, Numi (also known as Nubi) was instead eating a PLANT. and now there are plant pieces all over the floor.
i hope it doesn’t make him throw up.
that’s all from the zoo for right now.
thanks again, steve.
ok then,
tuesday morning grace.
Jan. 22, 2006
(probably) the last time i’m going to write tonight...
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11:20 pm
in order to read a friend’s blog, i had to sign up for his blogging service. i’m sure there’s a more “correct” name for it than blogging service, but i had to sign up and it annoyed me immensely. i didn’t have to give that much information, i could have gone on and ON in all these stupid places they ask you questions about, and that was quite annoying, but i had to give my age.
so tonight i was thinking about that, annoyed that i had to tell anybody who reads the blog how old i am, i felt like my privacy was being violated.
so tonight i changed my age to 82.
that made me laugh.
i thought about making up all kinds of stuff for all that profile information they want you to give, and of putting up some ridiculous photo, but then i decided it was way way way too much trouble.
82. good enough.
(i really AM 82, in case you were wondering).
ok then,
old grace.
utterly, utterly alone in this big wide world...
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9:34 pm
if you watch the video over there on the right, the very first one called “singing” (couldn’t ANYBODY have thought of a more interesting title???), one of the songs i sing is called the “arthur and celeste song.” at least i assume that’s what the name of it is. here is how part of the song goes: “we have lost two little elephants, we are looking north and south and east and west...for two charming little elephants....named arthur and celeste.” it goes on and on but i can’t remember many of the lyrics.
so far i haven’t found one single person who also knows this song. i feel that when i meet this person, they will surely be my soul mate. or they could be my long-lost secret twin, which would really be exciting, and hopefully she lives somewhere really beautiful so i could go move there. would i get along with my twin, i wonder? we might not like each other at all. sometimes people who are very very alike don’t get along so well. too alike.
anyway, i played this little yellow 45 record over and over when i was a child. what happened to the record? gone, like the barbie dolls. when my parents moved from the house i grew up into a different house, there were boxes of barbie dolls complete with many very cool vintage barbie outfits. somehow, during the moving process THE BARBIES ALL DISAPPEARED.
did my parents have movers? because if they did, then the movers must have stolen the barbie boxes. WHY WOULD A MOVER WANT TO STEAL BARBIES?
perhaps a barbie fetish? hard to say.
perhaps the barbie boxes fell off the moving truck moving from place to place.
highly unlikely. it wasn’t a long drive.
so, “arthur and celeste.” i tried to find it online, but i had no luck. perhaps somebody out there with a lot of free time on his or her hands, who is really good at looking things up, will find the arthur and celeste song for me, and they could write and tell me where it is.
it’s been an afternoon of lots of reflection about weighty matters and so that’s why i decided it would be a very very good idea to just STOP THE REFLECTING ALREADY and instead search for arthur and celeste.
i wanted to accomplish many things this afternoon, but it didn’t all happen.
but that’s ok. the dogs are fine and the house is still standing, and that’s really all i really really had to accomplish.
the best part of my day (so far anyway and i feel it will be the best part of my day till i go to sleep) was sleeping really late. i mean, really really late. until almost ELEVEN.
unprecedented.
really FANTASTIC.
picture me saying that with a smashing british accent though. i get to say FANTASTIC a few times during the play, and it makes me want to laugh.
i feel that if anybody could find the arthur and celeste song, it would be craig. craig, if you’re still there in la, still reading this very website, i just want you to know that i’m theoretically going to be doing some dog/housesitting there in the not too distant future. and i’d really like to go to R23, if you’re interested. i recall reading on your site that you went there for the first time, and it made me really jealous because i always wanted to go there when in LA but somehow never made it.
here, a link for all of you who might want to try r23 if you go to LA: r23
it might not be your thing. i know a fellow, let’s just call him “Q" (for ”quagmire) who pretty much lives on hamburgers. oh, and cheese fries. and doughnuts. mountain dew. he doesn’t seem very familiar with fruits and vegetables. so i have an inkling that he might not be so keen on sushi. just a hunch. luckily he’s firmly entrenched here in spfld illinois, so he doesn’t have to worry about somebody trying to sneak any Unagi onto his plate.
Unagi
actually, he might like Unagi, because it’s actually grilled. i did witness him trying a “Primal Strip,” which is a “meatless jerky.” how is it possible to have meatless jerky? this was a thai primal strip, and i have to say that it looked a little weird to me. i seriously doubt i’d have tried one on my own.
not only did he try it, he actually ate the whole thing and said it was really good. I pointed out that the thai primal strip was actually good for him, it contained no lard, not questionable-origin beef parts, no vast quanties of sugar/salt/preservatives, no caffeine.
Thai Primal Strips. amy and jim are vegetarians, and they have lots of stuff in their refrigerator that’s some kind of fake meat. i bet i wrote about this before, because it fascinates me. soon all our food will merely be stuff that somebody concocts, it won’t be real anything.
the dogs are much too quiet now. i must go make sure all the furniture is still intact.
ok then,
sunday night grace.
sunday evening...
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5:34 pm
this morning i was trying to lift amy’s red mixer off the top of her refrigerator. up on top of the refrigerator is not the place that i, personally, would store such an INCREDIBLY HEAVY thing. as i was doing so, there was this little “twang” in my back, with lots of shooting pain. ouch.
so i stood on a chair in order to better maneuver it, and i thought “ok, this is my great excuse for not working out today.” but then guilt overtook me (as it has a tendency to do), and i worked out anyway, and kept stretching my back, hoping for a little relief. even when i got to the club, i kept saying to myself, ok, if it starts hurting any more, i get to STOP. but it didn’t hurt any more so i kept at it. at least now i feel very virtuous. for the moment, anyway.
i am in charge of the zoo here at amy and jim’s while they’re (theoretically) having a fabulous time in mexico. it’s only theoretical because as far as i know nobody has heard from them. but looking at the website for the place i don’t see how it’d be possible to not have a good time.
i have managed to have a bad time before at really beautiful places, but not too often. and never again!
things here at the zoo are pretty quiet right now. sometimes this can be a bad sign, and can mean that the dogs are eating something they’re not supposed to, like the couch. yesterday i let Nubie and Noodle lounge around on the couch and then i noticed that a corner of a cushion had been torn open and some stuffing was lying about. and there was also the remains of something purple and plastic on the dining room floor, but i couldn’t even figure out what this thing might have been. something delicious, no doubt.
my friend kate e-mailed me to say that she looked up “catgirls” online, and couldn’t believe the huge number of hits for it there were. maybe about a million. no, less than that. maybe thirty thousand, i don’t know. yeah, it’s big, catgirls. big and very important cinema. significant and meaningful.
i just want to hang out one day on the weekend. maybe even a couple of days in a row. just hang out and...do nothing. that’s what i want. soon.
that’s all for now, because i’m making pizza for my family and they’re all coming over in a while and i feel it’s going to be extra-good, but i do feel that i’ll probably write a lot more later because i feel (for a change) that i have lots to day.
ok, except for this one little thing i have to write now - i was saying to a friend that of course i’m not able to actually make money doing the writing, even though it’s the thing i’m best at, and my friend said “that’s because you’re doing it for FREE on your website.” hmm. that didn’t make me feel so good. she then pointed out that i’m actually PAYING for it, because of the web-hosting fees. hmm. felt even worse.
but then again, i like doing this, it makes me happy. maybe one day (hopefully before i reach 100) i’ll figure out some way to actually make money, instead of spending it, on writing. but until then, i’m pretty content with this.
maybe i need to be LESS content. maybe that’s the real problem here.
does there always have to be a problem?
a promoter, that’s what i need. sometimes when i talk to my friend Thad he starts talking about how i could do all this stuff, and it always seems really overwhelming. i mean, he has some good ideas, but they also seem like a lot of trouble.
i have to go now because i believe the dogs are trying to kill each other.
my major job as house/dogsitter is to make sure that the dogs STAY ALIVE. and that i don’t burn down the house.
ok then,
sunday evening grace.
Jan. 21, 2006
early in the evening on saturday
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5:32 pm
and i DID get to sleep late, a great great great thing. i went running through the park and felt that i wasn’t wearing quite enough clothes, at least until i was about halfway done and got warmed up. there weren’t too many people outside, because of course it is GRAY AND SHITTY as usual. at least it’s getting dark so the greyness goes away.
i had lunch with linda who’s in my cast, and we had a very nice time. i was RAVENOUS from running, and we had chinese food so i felt like i was eating something healthy. as we were leaving, we stopped to watch the guy making crab rangoon, which is one of my favorite things. it’s actually the only fried thing that i really love. the crab rangoons looked incredibly easy to make, so i think i’ll try them some time. maybe i could steam them? hmm, what would christine say about that?
she’d say ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? instead of frying, you’d STEAM something that delicious?
christine and i have known each other for a long time now, and so i have a pretty good idea of what she’s thinking. actually, she might not even like crab rangoon, but i bet she does. because she loves fried things. because she’s a texan at heart. a football-loving texan with a mom who has a distinct southern accent.
i watched half of “teenage catgirls in heat” last night. i hadn’t watched it in so long, but i still remembered many of the lines, and of course i remembered a lot about the creation of each shot. in case you don’t know, this is a movie that my ex-boyfriend scott and i made, in 1991. it’s a B-comedy, kind of silly, kind of dumb, and it kind of doesn’t make that much sense. it seemed that if you didn’t know the lines by heart, you might not understand what the characters were saying. incidentally, catgirls was bought by Troma, the distributor of B movies in NYC, and you can buy it online if you want to. i’d give you the link, but i don’t feel like it. we sold the film about - 12? years ago? maybe more, and i assume that surely it’s made a little bit of money. i mean, at least a little. i haven’t seen any of that money. it doesn’t really bother me, because it’s only money, but it doesn’t make me want to promote the film or anything.
I was watching the movie with S. (Sylvester), who laughed sometimes. i think he liked the fact that i could tell him stuff about the making of the film as we watched it. like when scott and i went to dallas to shoot a sequence with a real live tiger, and we shot it in this guy’s house who owned the tiger, and the guy had MANY MANY scars all over his arms and i’m sure over other parts of his body that i couldn’t see, because of the attacks by the tiger. so i was just a little nervous when we were shooting the tiger roaming around the house, as we stood pretty much right next to it. the thing i can’t remember is WHY did i have to stand so close to the tiger, when scott was doing the actual shooting? moral support? was i there to provide a tourniquet if the tiger bit his arm off? i’ll have to ask scott the next time i talk to him.
the best part of the movie is the opening credit sequence. it gets a little muddy and complicated after that.
that is all for the moment. i hope your weekend is sunny and fun-filled. i REALLY hope amy and jim’s weekend is that, because right now they’re in SUNNY AND WARM mexico, at a place called the adventura spa palace resort. i will give you the link, so you can look at the photos and get really really jealous: Adventura Spa Palace!
ok then,
saturday grace.
Jan. 20, 2006
friday friday friday friday friday
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11:36 am
and it’s grey and dismal and cold but i don’t care at all.
rehearsal last night was very intense. well, it was intense for others, anyway. we worked on the crazy second act where the entire set is rotated front to back and you see the action of the players doing the play from backstage. and while there’s stuff going on onstage (which is played toward the back of the theater), there’s all kinds of stuff going on behind the scenes, all of it in pantomime.
mostly i don’t have to do much in the second act. not so much running around like a crazy person, which is what others have to do quite a bit. and it’s hard to try to memorize just action as opposed to dialogue, so people were getting really frustrated. the thing about rehearsals is that we start at 6:30 and they last till 9:30, but sometimes the time seems to go really really really slowly.
i’m going to the new magic kitchen for lunch today. it’s where the old romanesque was, among other things. i’m looking forward to it a lot. you should try it sometime, because it’s delicious. i haven’t been to the old magic kitchen in about a million years, but i did like going there. you can bring your own alcohol to the old one (the new one has a liquor license), and i remember having to wait for about four days to get a table, which meant that most people were pretty drunk by the time they were seated. it was kind of a crazy place, and might still be for all i know.
the new magic kitchen seems a lot cleaner and more tidy and organized. also more brightly lit, never a good thing. it’s almost too sterile, as opposed to the frantic drunken dirty old one.
but the food, delicious.
my chief plan for the afternoon is to have a nap, before massages and rehearsal and staying up late.
i’m looking forward to sleeping late tomorrow morning.
ok then,
friday grace.
Jan. 19, 2006
things FOUND
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5:17 pm
i lost this cable that plugs my camcorder into the VCR, and i was going to buy a new one but i decided I HAVE THE POWER TO FIND IT, but i doubted that this would actually come to pass. because i’m good at losing things, but only mediocre at finding them.
it was sitting right there next to the TV.
this was a delightful unexpected surprise on an otherwise dreary thursday. weather-wise dreariness that is, my mood has been pretty ok. but i do have to say there’s way too much sadness everywhere. i asked a woman waiting at the hospital how she was doing, and she said “i’m scared.” i had a few encounters like this today, not people being scared, but just...sadness. lots and lots of sadness at every turn.
i wish i could make everybody feel better.
i did make a few people feel better, and that was really nice. but overall, it’s not that people are being unnecessarily sad, they have legitimate reasons for feeling anxious and stressed out and all of that.
massage, everybody need a massage. it’ll make you feel better.
i’ve had a little free time last this afternoon, and i took a half hour nap. i wish i could have napped longer, but that seems to be my napping-maximum.
tomorrow, FRIDAY. which is going to be mighty fine, i believe.
ok then,
early evening grace.
Jan. 18, 2006
ok, one more quick thing...
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2:49 pm
today i went bustier-shopping (for the play). i also went yesterday and hated everything i tried on.
but today i went to bergner’s and they had a bunch of bustiers that looked cute. and they were half-off, but then they were 60% off the half-off. i bought three, because they looked so good. 20 bucks, three bustiers. i told the women at my work about them and they all wanted to see them so i had to show them and they were fascinated and then i described what the play is about and they laughed and they’re coming to opening night. and then i showed amy and her client, and they, too, liked them but amy thought i was going to be wearing a skirt or something with the bustier and i told her i’m not. the client, a woman in her 60’s, maybe, thought this was quite amusing.
so you know the only way you’ll see one of these bustiers is if you come to the play. because i’m not putting any photos of me wearing them up here. just so you know. BUSTIER-FREE.
i have to work now.
ok then,
g.s.
wednesday afternoon
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2:38 pm
cold. brrr. but at least we have some sun.
so the big news in spfld is that bars and restaurants are going to be SMOKE-FREE! this is amazing. it won’t happen till september, but at least they passed the measure. because i’ve been going to some bars recently and i hate the fact that i leave and reek of smoke. my leather jacket still smells like smoke, and i went to a bar a week ago.
also on the news they had a guy from the henson robinson zoo with the hawk, Mani, that that cretin had abducted, but then he was finally found.
the interviewer, i can’t remember her name, was talking to the zoo guy and Mani was perched on his glove. Mani didn’t really look that thrilled to be on TV. sometimes i see people on those little interview segments, and they appear to be scared out of their minds that they’re on tv. mani didn’t seem scared, just bored. like he really wanted a nice rat or something for a snack.
this afternoon randy called to make sure i was alive. now that’s he checking the blog all the time, he seems to think that if i haven’t written in several hours, surely i’ve perished.
i’m just fine, thank you. i just didn’t have much to say. except last night i had three delicious pieces of chocolate after rehearsal. because i was STARVING. rehearsing takes a lot of energy. i wore a pair of heels for part of the rehearsal and was relieved that i didn’t fall at all. but there’s a flurry of running up and down the stairs for part of it, so it’s good to practice in the heels. the assistant director, susan, said they were FMH shoes. i had never heard this expression, FMH. i guess i’m not going to tell you what this stands for. i’m sure you can figure it out. i said to her BUT I REALLY WEAR THESE SHOES. i actually have two pair, black and copper, and i wore the copper ones two years in a row on new year’s eve. and i wore the black ones this new year’s eve.
the shoes aren’t even outrageous or anything. they’re nothing like the five inch white slutty sandals i wore to the wedding reception in beverly hills along with my pink slip dress when all of the other wedding guests wore black. that’s the pinnacle of wearing everything completely inappropriate, and hopefully i won’t ever match this poor attire choice ever again.
i think i forgot to mention this weird thing i saw on tv the other day. it’s this spray flavoring that you spray on food. the weirdest one was bacon spray. they sprayed the bacon spray on a hamburger, and the people who tried it claimed that it really tasted like bacon. the show was “the view,” and the women were devouring the hamburger coated with bacon spray. they were probably devouring it because they normally never ever get to eat since they’re actresses, and this was a chance to sneak some actual food.
except it was covered with bacon SPRAY. don’t you agree that part of the enjoyment of eating something is the way it feels? yes, i know this is true. bacon, for example, is CRUNCHY.
bacon spray. kind of retarded in my opinion. there was also chocolate spray as well as a few others. it seemed rather willy wonka-ish to me; do you remember the piece of gum that violet beauregard chewed which turned her into a blueberry? the gum tasted like an entire multi-course meal, finishing with blueberry pie. i assume you’ve seen willy wonka already, but if you haven’t, you really should. i actually think the new one is better than the old one.
but anyway i bet that’s where the spray-food people got the idea.
my online class started yesterday but nothing has actually happened yet. i keep checking online to see if there’s anything posted about the class but so far, nothing. this is fine with me because my enthusiasm for class has waned a little because there are a bunch of other things i’m either doing or would like to do. i did get some of the books i ordered for class yesterday, so that’s good. i ordered them all on half.com, and they were less than half the price i would have paid for them used at the campus bookstore.
saving money like crazy.
ok then, zooming through the week,
wednesday grace.
Jan. 17, 2006
neck transplant
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1:17 pm
ok, maybe that would be a little too radical. at this time.
a good neck massage, that’s what i need.
even an OK neck massage. if you happen to see me today, i’ll give you a dollar if you massage my neck.
and actually i could tell you just how to massage it.
because a neck transplant would probably be too time-consuming, and what if the new neck didn’t work out?
the bad thing wasn’t going to sleep at two. it was waking up at 6:30, wide awake, lying there saying to myself I SHOULD DO SOMETHING NOW. BUT NO, I SHOULD ACTUALLY GO BACK TO SLEEP.
ok then, slightly delirious with lack of sleep, but it’s not so bad.
tuesday grace.
monday night (technically already TUESDAY)
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1:05 am
i was going to be in bed, lights out, 45 minutes ago.
didn’t happen.
i was going to title this entry “therapists, theater and pasta.” but then i didn’t. i’m entering into the weird frame of mind that starts in when i’m seriously tired. i’m not going to burst into tears from fatigue or anything because i am actually lying in bed as i type, and i know i can just shut the computer at any time, which is comforting.
i didn’t break drop or lose anything today. well, i’m sure i dropped a bunch of things, but nothing that actually broke.
i got a lot done. and also not so much.
the lengthiest conversations i had today were with therapists. i’m not going to a therapist, you understand (but i do truly believe that everybody would be much better off and the world would be a much better place if we all went to therapists on a regular basis), but i suddenly have some friends who are therapists.
it’s funny, having conversations with them. because when i start going on and on about things, as i always do because i have little self-censoring capabilities when i’m talking to people, they say things that are just so...therapy-like. and this is nice, and interesting. i like the therapist perspective because they are quickly able to have very definite and intelligent-sounding opinions on things.
that’s not to say that christine doesn’t also have this ability. and also randy. randy, actually, has been especially good to talk to lately because i’ll go to his house and TELL HIM EVERYTHING AND WITH A GREAT DEAL OF VEHEMENCE, and he always knows just what to say to make me stop acting like a lunatic.
a lot of what he does is point out obvious things to me.
i like talking to my friend kurt about stuff, except that frequently he just starts talking about generalities in that guyspeak kind of way. last week i believe it was, or it must have been the week before, or even three weeks ago? but anyway i called him and was quite upset and he started going on and on about his various guy-theories, which were sort of...strident. i think it’s because he just enjoyed saying all this stuff, plus he’d been drinking quite a bit.
but after a while he finally said, “could you just be overreacting to the situation?” and i said, yes.
which in retrospect i believe i was.
see, i feel i’m not making that much sense anymore. i haven’t been drinking or anything, but i should definitely be asleep right now. i have many things to do tomorrow, including rehearsal tomorrow night.
rehearsal was interesting tonight. we did act two, which is the really difficult one, and we hadn’t done it since last tuesday or wednesday, and WAY WAY WAY too much time had passed, so of course we couldn’t remember all the blocking and everybody, i mean everybody, was frustrated and mad, to varying degrees.
i might have been the least mad person, actually. i don’t have to do as much as others in the play during the second act, and it was just kind of interesting to see how everybody handled things, which wasn’t so great. but also not so bad, considering that the night seemed to last about 14 hours. also, i was too tired to be mad, because although i felt i had boundless energy earlier in the day after running, by tonight i was sleepy and just wanted to go home and go to sleep.
that was three hours ago.
after rehearsal i was STARVING TO DEATH. i hadn’t eaten a lot all day, plus all that exercising, the problem is that i’m not hungry before rehearsal, at six o'clock. so i was COMPLETELY RAVENOUS when we were through, which is not good, and i went to randy’s because i knew he had made pasta, and so i ate mountains of it. mountains.
at least a small mountain.
it was quite delicious.
plus i ate at least three of his whiskey-filled chocolates that i’d given him for xmas. i gave him an assortment of alcohol-filled chocolates, but i’d already eaten most of the other ones, so i had to resort to whiskey. which isn’t so bad when it’s surrounded by chocolate. otherwise i don’t care for whiskey.
when i went running today i was thinking about millions and millions of things, but i kept saying to myself “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SHUT UP AND ENJOY THE NICE WEATHER?”
i’m not a very good listener.
tomorrow is my first day of class for this sememster. i’m only taking one class, Contemporary American Novel, and it’s mostly online, and i have to remember to actually go online and look at the class tomorrow. i feel absolutely no enthusiasm about taking a class right now, because i want to focus on the play and on my business and on doing another gracetalk. but hopefully when it starts i’ll get enthusiastic. but i don’t know about taking a class that’s mostly online.
and now i sleep. i hope you made it through monday. if you got the day off, i hope you lounged around and did nothing. because that sounds really good, at least in theory.
ok then,
very early tuesday morning grace.
Jan. 15, 2006
p.s. pudding and paying attention
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11:03 pm
tonight, because i wanted a big slab of chocolate cake, i decided to make some sugar free fat free instant chocolate pudding. which is actually quite tasty, despite all of christine’s very loud and vehement protestations that anything sugar free fat free is CRAP. it’s especially good with cool whip.
so i emptied the package into a bowl and added two cups of milk, and started stirring.
it takes two minutes for it to turn into pudding.
i stirred some more.
and kept stirring.
and it wasn’t getting thick.
did i accidentally add too much milk? sometimes when i make french bread, i’m talking to somebody or otherwise get distracted, which can be bad because there are supposed to be seven cups of flour and all of a sudden i have no idea how many cups i’ve added to the mixing bowl.
but i felt that i measured out the two cups of milk quite accurately.
perhaps the pudding was defective? they forgot to add the guar gum, or whatever the hell it is that makes the pudding instantly chocolately thick.
last night at the art opening mercedes got a diet coke, except she said it tasted TERRIBLE. i tried it, and she was right. it was flat and had no taste at all. we went and got another one, and it, too, was terrible. i then totally dropped the ball, good-aunt-wise, and told her there was nothing more to do.
at least i didn’t encourage her to switch to wine. so maybe i’m not the WORST aunt in the world.
but so after i kept stirring the stupid chocolate pudding for about five minutes, and it’s only supposed to take two, a LIGHTBULB suddenly went off in my brain.
THIS WAS NOT INSTANT PUDDING AT ALL. THE BOX WAS CLEARLY MARKED “COOK-N-SERVE.”
do you wonder how i make it through the day? because sometimes i do. if i’m not losing/dropping/breaking things, i’m not paying attention to anything at all.
so that’s my goal for tomorrow - pay more attention. all day long.
whew, it makes me tired just thinking about it. maybe i’ll try to pay attention at least a few hours, in order to ease into it.
and i can’t make any promises about the losing/dropping/breaking, because it’s too much an ingrained part of me. it’s bound to happen. but at least i’m used to it.
goodnight.
gracefully grace.
sunday night...
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10:30 pm
...and i was really looking forward to relaxing, finally, and watching some of the movie “noises off.” but now i’m starting to think i’m going to run out of time tonight.
if i’d done more yesterday, this wouldn’t be happening right now.
if i’d done ANYTHING yesterday, i’d have some free time right now.
i’d like that.
right now i’m on hold with my website host, because i have to pay them. this is for my OTHER website. because i have two.
very, very technological.
it’s going to be FIFTY SEVEN DEGREES tomorrow, i heard. i’m going to go running, for maybe an hour.
maybe not that long. because then i’d be really tired at rehearsal tomorrow night.
tomorrow, a holiday for many. not me. no holidays.
vacations, yes. holidays, no.
anyway, here are some photos from the limo ride last night. i guess everybody on the planet has been in a limo except for me. my niece mercedes has been in a limo THREE TIMES already. and she’s only 14. this is mercedes, seasoned limo traveller, and randy, who has also ridden around in limos plenty of times:
this is my favorite photo, because dad and jim and david look like they ride around in limos all the time, and david is clearly trying to avoid the paparazzi:
this, too, i like because amy and mom are pretending to be like patsy and edina from “absolutely fabulous.” which is a tv show, in case you didn’t know. a really funny one, by the way:
and here’s me and randy. this is shortly after we found out that i’d broken a champagne glass. i didn’t actually break it in the limo; i broke it at my parents' house after washing out some glasses. why did we have to bring our own glasses anyway? but i wrapped them and put them in a bag and it sounded like one broke but i didn’t think it did, but it did.
i also broke another glass after getting back to my parents' house.
two in one night. not bad.
and this is just my legs, on the ride home. i don’t know how i managed to find room to stretch out, because it was kind of cramped in the limo. there were eight of us, and the guy had claimed that we could have had 10 people, but i think the other two would have had to sit on somebody’s lap.
ok then, i hope your weekend was good, and that you get the day off tomorrow,
sunday night grace.
sunday morning...
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10:15 am
...and once again i’m in bed. i haven’t spent the entire weekend in bed, it only feels that way.
but i’m about to jump out of bed and accomplish the things that i cleverly managed to avoid yesterday.
but first, a few photos.
here’s one from first night:
and here’s the complete outfit (and i promise this is the LAST photo of these tiger pants, because i can’t envision wearing them for any other events):
last night we went to the opening of the Praire Art Alliance show featuring some of my dad’s work. i like his abstract paintings the best. here’s a photo of one of his paintings. i believe it’s called “three divas.”
if you want to view the show, it’s going to be up for two months. at the Hoogland Center for the Arts.
the opening was fun. we surprised dad by renting a limo to drive us to the arts center. it was randy’s idea. we’d hoped dad would open the door to leave the house and there would be the limo, but i think this was too much to hope for. at least he didn’t know about the surprise till the limo got to the house, but dad said he was in his bedroom and could hear a chug chug chug and knew it didn’t sound like a vehicle any of us drive.
here’s mom and dad:
i have some photos from inside the limousine, but i’ll put them up later after i’ve accomplished a few things today.
i don’t know why i forgot to take photos at the actual event, but i think Amy managed to do so. i was busy having wine and cheese. when we first got there, i sliced a piece of smoked gouda and promptly dropped it on the floor, then i tried to unobtrusively kick it under the table, but it instead stuck to the bottom of my shoe. amy said that was “instant bad karma” because i’d tried to do something bad and immediately was punished for it.
dad chose to hang paintings from different periods in his life, including a couple i’d never even seen. there’s a painting of me as a child, and one of mom that he did a long time ago. plus there are three oil paintings that are highly detailed, fanciful scenes. these have hung in their house forever, and they remind me of my childhood. i think i’ll go back to the hoogland and take some photos of the paintings.
after the opening we went to norb andy’s for dinner which was quite nice because we got to sit at a round table. when you’re in a group of people you should always be able to sit at a round table, because then everybody can talk to each other. when i was at norb andy’s for dinner the night before with the cast of my play, we were at a long table, so i didn’t get to talk to anybody at either end.
finally, I’m about to bustle around like crazy, even though it looks bleak and cold outside right now...
ok then,
sunday morning grace.
Jan. 14, 2006
so far a very very lazy saturday...
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11:42 am
i know it’s lazy thus far cause i’m writing from bed, and it will be noon before i know it.
i do have a bunch of stuff to get done this weekened.
but can’t they wait till tomorrow?
probably not.
G. (Grover) informed me that i’m not allowed to say it’s spring, because this creates disasterous results.
i do have to say that yesterday was, indeed, utterly miserable, weather-wise, with the slushy rainy snow and the coldness and last night the wind was bitter and sharp.
but i can’t say that i CREATED this weather.
that’s all i’m saying.
yesterday i didn’t have any free time after; i was very busy working, which is a very good thing, income-wise. i had to rush around just a little too much because i didn’t plan for all the massages, but it all worked out. all was good.
before we went to the opening of “best little whorehouse in texas” at the hoogland center, the cast of my play went to norb andy’s for dinner. it was pretty delicious, even though i didn’t get a horseshoe and almost everybody else got one. i did steal a few random cheese-covered fries when people weren’t looking. it was fun to not have rehearsal, nice to have friday off. no more fridays off from now on.
my initial reaction to the show was a serious sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, seeing the women up on the stage in their lingerie. it hit me like a ton of bricks that in a month i’m going to be up there dressed a lot like that, except most of them had little sheer robes covering their undergarments.
it took much of the first act to get over this. i know i’m being ridiculous, and it’s not like i was FORCED to take this part, and i know it’s going to be both fun and funny.
but still, seeing the women made me want to just give up food altogether till the show opens.
my dad was in this show the last time they did it at the theater centre, about 10 or so years ago. i didn’t get to see him in it because i was living someplace else, but now i think that’s an incredibly lame excuse and i wish i’d have seen him. i know he was fantastic.
i was in this show, too, even more years ago, in summer stock. this might have been the last play of the summer, and i remember that it was fun playing a whore, plus i was dying my hair blonde myself back then, except this guy in the company helped me one night after lots of alcohol and it ended up almost platinum, and he then revealed that he had a thing for platinum blondes.
but the show took place several weeks after my ultra-blonding and my hair had grown out a whole lot, so i really did look like a cheap whore, with about an inch or so of dark roots and then the almost white hair.
nice.
nice and trashy, that is.
in the production last night lori ann fahnders played the lead, miss mona. boy, she has a great voice. i kept thinking, if i had a voice even close to as good as hers i’d be out using it someplace. someplace BIG. where they pay you the big bucks to entertain.
after the show i played boggle with G. (Gavin) and he beat me. BUT JUST BARELY. ok, not that just barely. but he didn’t slaughter me, like randy has been doing the past few times. last night i felt like i was able to find more words than i’d been doing lately. maybe i just need to practice a lot.
because i really can’t have these boys beating me all the time. it’s just not right.
ok, here’s me, whirling into action...
saturday grace.
Jan. 13, 2006
RETRACTIONS GALORE, PLUS MANY APOLOGIES
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12:08 am
patrick quickly informed me of the REAL THING HE SAID, not the version that i remembered.
this is verbatim, taken from his actual e-mail: "for the record, it was Ed who said it was some rock musician and I guessed maybe Lenny Kravitz. This is relevant because I do know who Keith Urban is
and that he is a country musician and he is awful. That just isn’t a mistake I would make  "
so i’m sorry about defaming patrick’s name. ruining his reputation. writing slanderous slander and libelous libel.
because he’s obviously NOT a poser. he knows about the music.
as does randy.
randy, who unfortunately kicked my ass in boggle tonight. i was pretty annoyed, but at least at the end he beat me by only two points.
i have to practice more.
i have some free time tomorrow afternoon; i was going to work out and work on my lines, but maybe i’ll just practice some boggle. i bet you can find it online. online boggle.
today it was spring, but it’s supposed to get cold again tomorrow which is a bitter disappointment.
but things could be worse.
things could definitely be worse.
the only thing at the moment is that i was going to DEFINITELY go to sleep early tonight, and it’s already after midnight. early would have been 11.
oh well.
things. could be worse.
ok then,
friday already grace
Jan. 12, 2006
IMPORTANT CELEBRITY CORRECTIONS:
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9:35 pm
Randy told me all the TRUE FACTS about all the celebrity excitement i just wrote about. here are THE FACTS:
1. Nicole Kidman is NOT engaged to a ROCK musician (i’m afraid this makes patrick wrong, which is somewhat disappointing because he led me to believe that he knows all about most of music). randy informed me that Nicole is engaged to KEITH URBAN, who is well-known longtime COUNTRY singer.
go figure. he has a big song on the charts right now called “you’ll think of me,” a COUNTRY song. but now it has crossed over to pop.
this is all from randy.
who knows about all celebrities everywhere.
2. angelina jolie DID lenny kravitz. and they DID DATE.
hmm. what did they talk about? did he take her back to his place and play the guitar for her? do you think he’d have played “Arthur and Celeste,” one of my favorite songs from childhood that nobody but me has ever heard of or ever seemed to listen to?
i’m guessing not.
3. Nicole Kidman met Lenny Kravitz at a concert and they dated. for a while.
ok then,
just keeping you up to date (even though you probably knew all of this MONTHS ago) grace.
AN IMPORTANT VIDEO PROCLAMATION
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9:23 pm
becase kurt was kind enough to edit my videos and send them to christine, and because christine put the videos up, there are now THREE new videos. finally, i’m sorry about that, i’m going to start making them regularly pretty soon.
but anyway, the first video, “singing” seems to the be most popular.
the funny thing about it is, when i thought up the idea it seemed really funny, and when i was doing it, it seemed humorous, but now...it kinda makes me cringe.
except for the very ending, which is brilliant, and randy thought it up.
anyway, three new videos.
ok then,
almost imminently friday grace
angelina brad and nicole...
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9:21 pm
after rehearsal tonight, we were walking out and ed mentioned the fact that angellina jolie is pregnant. and a few jokes were made, and i said “what?” ANGELINA JOLIE IS PREGNANT.
at first i thought it weird that i’d managed to miss this earth-shattering news.
but then i thought, i guess i just don’t care if angelina jolie is pregnant. i mean, i’m happy for her and brad and all and i’m sure their child will be completely perfect-looking plus sensitive and deep and meaningful and will have a purposeful, rich life and might possibly save the world looking stunning while doing so.
and i hope the pregnancy goes well, and i’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing plenty of photos of angelia and her stomach (and i would bet good money that her stomach will expand in size, although not by much because she is an actress).
ok, and also, nicole kidman is engaged. ed thought she was married to a musician, and patrick seemed to know the guy is a ROCK musician (as opposed to a guy who plays the accordian? or the xylophone? In a polka band?).
but not lenny kravitz.
BUT IT COULD HAVE BEEN LENNY KRAVITZ. because they dated. lenny and nicole, not lenny and angelina. i wonder if angelina and lenny have met? did they date? what do movie stars talk about on dates? did angelina go to one of his concerts? is that how lenny and nicole met?
so anyway, i need to know this stuff, right? because how am i supposed to write about things if i don’t know FASCINATING NEWS SUCH AS THIS.
thad gave me a lecture a while ago about the need for me to start PAYING MORE ATTENTION TO THE WORLD AROUND ME.
this is a lecture he’s given me before.
i’m a very slow learner. or maybe just lazy.
yeah, that’s probably it.
lazy.
ok then,
approaching friday grace
Jan. 10, 2006
everything changes.
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10:36 pm
jerri wrote to me and said they would LOVE LOVE LOVE for me to come and house/dog sit. i was thinking about it just now, and realized i’ve become a really really good dogsitter because of my vast experience housesitting for amy and jim’s three dogs (two of them completely insane and the other one very needy) and four cats.
it’s fun, but it’s a little like living at the zoo.
i, personally, have never lived in an actual zoo.
so anyway, i don’t know exactly how or when, but sometime in the not too distant future i’m going to be TWENTY MINUTES FROM THE BEACH! i can’t even begin to describe how great this feels.
and i’m just going to HANG OUT THERE IN DOWNTOWN LA.
wow. walk to the museum. amazing.
there are usually only about four people walking around in downtown la at any time. well, not during the weekdays, but like any big city, downtown dies after people go home from work.
i’ll have a big dog to protect me. brooklyn.
and brooklyn...doesn’t realize how lucky she is (she? are you positive about her being a she?), because i’m such a VERY QUALIFIED dogsitter.
back to la.
i thought nothing could top yesterday in terms of volume and breadth of sheer surprise. not to mention spanning the whole entire day.
today. did.
la. beach. sushi. sunshine.
i don’t have a lot of friends back in la. not so many.
a few old boyfriends.
hmm, there’s always the dog to hang out with.
brooklyn.
ok then,
grace,LA in my very near future.
meat and meetings and things that start with "m."
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2:50 pm
i sashayed into the office (although i would never EVER think of the place where i give massages as an office because that implies sitting down at a desk shuffling pieces of paper around which i’m firmly opposed to) this afternoon at about two o'clock, and the other women who i share space with were all sitting there.
having a meeting.
“oh, you forgot?” they said to me.
i didn’t forget. i never heard about it.
oh yeah you did. first tuesday of every month. one o'clock.
i never heard about it. nope. uh uh. no meetings. would have written it down. because of course i don’t actually remember if i heard about it or not, but if i had, i’d have written it down.
i have to say i’m glad i never heard about it, because i was having an extended lunch with my friend kurt. we ate at the lonestar steakhouse because it sounded good, and i got a BURGER. i really wanted a burger and thought i shouldn’t have one, but then i did. they let me order it medium rare, which i was excited about.
it wasn’t actually medium rare, it was more medium to medium well. but it was still pretty darn good.
i only ate half.
plus a sweet potato. it’s a fine country we live in, because at some places you can get a sweet potato at lunch.
i could have gotten vegetables and been truly healthy and would probably have a lot more energy right now.
but i didn’t.
no regrets.
nothing matters, no regrets. i think that’s a good philosophy to have about life. if you feel you MUST have the philosophy. which maybe i’m opposed to anyway. just BEING, that’s an even simpler philosophy.
anyway, kurt and i had a good time. i’d gone over to his house because he was going to put my new videos here on this site. but then his computer would not let us log in. this was a bitter disappointment to me because i thought that this video thing was FINALLY going to happen.
i called christine, and then kurt e-mailed the videos to her.
now SHE’S in charge of putting the videos on my site.
the problem with having friends who help me do things is that i have to keep bugging them about them. i would be so very happy if i didn’t have to bug them about anything ever (except the things they need to be bugged about), and if i wasn’t so incredibly lazy i’d figure out how to do everything all by myself.
lazy. probably not gonna change anytime soon.
also, i don’t have room on my computer for the videos. plus it’s fun to collaborate with kurt on the editing.
anyway, thanks christine for your continued cheerfulness at helping me.
i had many interesting things to discuss with kurt. first i discussed things with christine, because i have to do something to occupy my time while driving around.
christine and kurt provide a good, balanced perspective on life.
not that randy doesn’t provide a GBP on life as well. he called me today and was glad to hear from me because he’d thought i’d died, because now that he FINALLY FINALLY has a computer, he reads this all the time, and was concerned that i hadn’t written last night nor this morning. he naturally figured i’d been murdered.
he’s also concerned that i sometimes go running around the lake. he believe there are busloads of freaked out lunatics lurking all around the lake, ready to swoop in and molest lone women joggers. but i’m RUNNING, i told him. i could just RUN AWAY.
it’s funny when somebody mentions some concern that hadn’t even occurred to me because i’m the one who consistently does an excellent job of concocting concerns that aren’t even there.
it’s taken a lot of practice to hone this useful skill.
jerri and brendan are moving back to LA. they’re renting a loft in downtown LA. downtown LA is not my #1 favorite place in LA, but i just want you to know, jerri, if you happen to get time to read this in between all the huge amount of running around you’re doing what with the packing and moving and everything, that i would be DELIGHTED to come out there and house-dogsit for you sometimes when you go away.
and there i’d be, close enough to the ocean. i mean, i’d just have to zoom right down the 10 freeway to the end, and there i’d be. at the beach. aah, paradise. plus it would be kind of fun to be right in the heart of downtown. i could go to the fabulous new Disney Hall, which i only went inside of before leaving la, plus i’d be so incredibly close to both little tokyo and la’s version of chinatown, and the interesting bars and restaurants would be within walking distance. and i hear they’re right across from staples center, which would be awesome if i had any desire at all to go to a game of any kind. or a car show. i’ve been to both games AND car shows there at the staples center, and they were kind of fun.
for games and car shows.
housesitter, i’m there. i’d even clean for you. because i’m really an excellent cleaner.
that is all for now.
ok then,
tuesday grace.
one muscle at a time...
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1:23 am
i’m trying to kill myself, but very very slowly...
one muscle at a time.
if you manage to damage all your muscles, would you die?
i wrote a few days ago about hurting my neck because of that one machine. it was like a squats machine.
very very bad for the neck.
so today i decided to do basic lunges, nothing fancy, very simple, no weights. because the trainer guy who knows everything said to use no weights or light weights and lots and lots of repetitions.
sounded good.
lots of weight can be awfully...heavy.
so i did some lunges, and then i did some more, and it was ok, as far as any of those monotonously incredibly boring kind of exercises can possiblly be...
and then i torqued my leg a little and heard/felt this weird sort of tearing/ripping sound in my upper thigh.
ouch. i stopped for a minute, but then it seemed ok, so i did some more.
i was ok all night, but then i sat around for a while and when i got up...ouch.
let me say it again.
ouch.
so in my quest to get into PERFECT SHAPE for this play, instead i’m going to be crippled/maimed/unable to even walk.
if i’m not careful.
i try to be careful. i really do.
i mean, really.
but for example, tonight i was at G.’s (geo’s) house, and i spilled wine all over the carpet. i actually kicked the wine bottle. but what was the wine doing on the floor anyway? isn’t that just an accident waiting to happen? not my fault.
ok, it probably was. all my fault. but at least it was white wine.
G. showed me lots of photos, including some photos of his honeymoon. he went to florida. i believe they hit all the major theme parks down there. it did look like fun, i’d have to admit. but G. got married pretty darn young. pretty darn.
when i was younger, i thought i’d want to honeymoon at disneyworld. and actually stay in one of those disney hotels, which pretty much seemed like paradise, at least from the descriptions and photos.
paradise.
i mean, breakfast with disney characters, what could be more romantic for a honeymoon?
but then i went to more places in the world. saw more stuff. experienced more things. and decided that maybe disneyworld was not, after all, the best place in the world to honeymoon.
and now i’m thinking, well...does it really need to be a honeymoon, anyway? yeah, the notion of marriage sounds kind of good in theory - theoretically there’s somebody to take care of at least part of the stuff, right? - but couldn’t a nice trip with someone you care about be good enough? without all the messy baggage that comes with marriage?
i’m just saying.
to tell the truth, even though i really really want to go to an island somewhere, one of those exotic places with white sand beaches and houses that sit actually over the water - i’d be perfectly happy to go back to disney world.
at this point in time, of course, any place where the sun is shining would be good.
lack of sunshine. not beneficial to one’s health.
ok, it’s approaching one thirty in the morning, i have no excuse to still be awake.
so perhaps i sleep now.
ok then,
sleepy grace.
Jan. 09, 2006
monday morning...
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8:37 am
so last night i wrote that i was pretty sure today would be a regular monday.
so far it has been anything but. anything but.
weird. just don’t know what to think right now.
plus i’m not fully awake. although i have to say that last night i managed to NOT wake up for a two-hour stretch. this was refreshing.
it’s because i’m feeling calmer in general, i believe.
at least i feel quite calm right at the moment. but perhaps it’s just the fact that i’m nowhere near being fully awake.
it’s times like these that i sort of envy all you coffee drinkers out there. it would be nice (but only in theory) to have a warm cup of coffee which would help me feel actually like i’m awake.
but see, i don’t know if i’ve told you my coffee theory. besides the fact that i’m super-sensitive to caffeine, i have always resisted coffee because i hate the addiction aspect of it. the only thing i’m really addicted to in my life is food, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to give that up altogether. but so i hate the fact that when people don’t get their coffee they’re all surly and sullen and sleepy and get headaches. i don’t need a dependency like that.
and also, what if i was stranded on a desert island, with no coffee? i’d be surly/sullen/sleepy/headachy all the time.
so you see why i want no part of it.
it does make me feel a little left out, i’ll have to say. amy and jim and their fancy kinds of coffee beans that they roast themselves, people who have the ritual of going and getting some special kind of coffee at starbucks every morning, just the whole camaradie-aspect of coffee.
but then again, it’s the same thing with beer. not being part of the beer-loving club makes me an outsider there. no deep discussions for me about the merits of different kinds of exotic and delicious beers, while gulping down many large mugs of it in some bar somewhere.
ok really, this is also true for sports. everybody seems to be talking football now and to me they might as well be saying BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, like the noise that adults make in charlie brown cartoons.
so i’m starting to see a definite pattern here. clearly, clearly, i feel like an outsider because I AM ONE. i don’t belong to any of the subgroupings which make up society.
none of them.
if i could start to like coffee/beer/sports, at least ONE of them, and i can’t think of one single person i’ve ever met who doesn’t at least like one, well then, my life would be more fulfilling, i’d have more friends, more true comrades in this struggle we call life.
but i do have to say that in the choice between coffee/beer/sports and NO c/b/s, i’m going to have to stick with the former. i’ll continue to make my way through the wilderness all alone. but it’s not so bad, i’ve been doing it this long and i only get lost occasionally.
and when the next big world crisis occurs and coffee production suddenly ceases and the breweries are shut down and sports teams all quit playing and go hide somewhere on a remote island...well, there has to be SOMEBODY who is unaffected by all of this to take charge.
me.
whew, suddenly that feels like an enormous responsibility. i’m definitely going to have a nap today in order to rest up for it.
ok then,
monday grace, full of thought.
the tone of the weekend...
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12:16 am
i have to say it was a little...weird. kind of a weird start yesterday morning, and some general kinds of oddness throughout the day, followed by a pretty darn nice time, then more strangeness.
i’m sorry that’s all i can say about the weirdness aspect at this time. just that it was.
i’m sure tomorrow will be perfectly regular. ordinary monday.
this movie tonight, it was shot in LA and the people lived in these great houses with huge windowns overlooking lots of greenery and the light is so great there and it makes me miss la.
so anyway, today my parents, my brother david, my friend randy and i were eating at the hen house. we went there because that’s the only place dad would go.
dad is a little picky when it comes to things. in general. and also food. and places where he’ll go eat it. my dad cannot be dragged anywhere.
i’d hoped to go to the cracker barrel because they have grits there. i like grits.
anyway, this guy walks into the restaurant and david says to dad, “hey, there’s that guy...Chedister.” i spun around to look as he slid into a booth.
he looked over and i really wanted to go over and talk to him. i kept looking at him, and then he was looking over some more and of COURSE i didn’t go over there.
but here’s the thing: my cat is named Winston. Winston CHEDISTER, to be exact. because when i was trying to think of a name for him, dad and david were talking about this guy chedister, and i was entranced by the name. it’s just so fun to say. chedister.
of course, naturally, that made me want to go over to this guy and say, “hi, i just want you to know that my cat is named after you. his middle name, that is. winston chedister.”
so you see why i didn’t.
and then after we ate i walked outside and it was so freakishly warm that i forgot all about chedister, my cat’s middle-namesake.
monday tomorrow. won’t be so bad.
ok then,
grace after midnight.
Jan. 08, 2006
and also...
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10:09 pm
i’m watching a movie now, but i’ve lost interest.
my attention span is shrinking rapidly, i believe.
or maybe it’s not, it’s hard to remember that far back.
this morning i ran for a while but i initially thought it was much warmer than it actually was and it was quite windy and i wish i’d have had a hat on or at least some ear warmers of some kind. i even know where a pair is.
but it wasn’t so bad. sunshine and all.
it was FIFTY SIX today. so what’s not to like about the day?
not that i was actually outside for much of it.
randy and i walked through a park at the lake and he wondered for quite some time about why anybody would voluntarily want to fish. i kept trying to tell him that maybe they just like hanging out, not really doing much of anything, just...hanging out...maybe shutting their brains off for a while.
perhaps i should take up fishing.
except i really wouldn’t want to get near worms or anything like that at all.
but see, it’s perfectly accepted to say “i like to fish,” but if you say “i like to hang out on the shore by the lake, or maybe in a nice boat, and just...hang out...” then people would think you were a shiftless lazy bum.
which i’m not.
not that i wouldn’t like to.
be one.
ok then,
sunday night grace.
HE’S THE ONE.
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9:20 pm
this is an exerpt from a birthday card i sent randy a few years ago. we can’t figure out when it was sent, and therefore we’re quite mystified as to “he’s the one” might actually be. it was certainly when i was living in la.
i mean, what was wrong with me? that’s all i’m saying. i cannot for the life of me remember who this guy was. i mean, clearly, none of them was the one. thank god. gee, i’d be divorced by now, wouldn’t I? “he’s the one,” was i out of my MIND?
yeah.
here’s one problem with even thinking about contemplating being in a relationship at any time in your life at all: becoming a moron. a complete and total idiot. what little bit of common sense you may posess goes flying out the window. poof.
gone.
i thought this was just me, but it’s not. other people get like this too. what exactly are you supposed to do? go live in a cave?
i don’t really know where any actual caves are.
i wouldn’t care much for living in a cave.
too
dark.
now, a nice warm sunny island somewhere tropical and fantastic, i’d like that a lot. People, who needs them?
today randy and i took down all of his xmas decorations in one and a half hours. we were FAST. i was glad for the stuff to be gone, because although he has some amazing and fun decorations all over the place, but i’m so over xmas. i believe this was the most non-christmasy xmas i’ve ever had.
just my mood.
i’m here at randy’s right now as a matter of fact, typing on his very nice new computer. he coming in about ever three minutes and asks “are you still writing?” i kept telling him he was making me nervous, but he didn’t seem to care.
sunday night. not a bad sunday night at all.
especially for a sunday night.
ok then,
grace with absolutely no intentions of any kind, I promise(or at least none i’d be willing to admit to at this particular juncture).
not THAT heavy...
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12:35 am
tonight, G. (Geronimo) said to me, “you’re not THAT heavy.”
hmm. i had to laugh, because weeping would not have been appropriate. actually, i know he didn’t mean it to sound like THAT, not like “you don’t sweat much for a fat girl,” but that’s how it came out.
i told him it was the nicest thing he’d ever said to me.
i got an e-mail from heather, who i was friends with when i was young. i don’t have a lot of those kinds of friends, for some reason. but it’s nice to at least have a couple.
weekend, already half over. i’m going to do many healthful and productive things tomorrow including working out, cleaning, maybe making a nice dinner for the family.
or maybe i’ll just loll in bed and get up late and have a doughnut.
or two.
because i’ve been really really dilligent about eating less/exercising more the past...gee, i think it’s already been at least TWO days, and it feels like eternity.
goodnight then.
extremely early sunday morning grace.
Jan. 07, 2006
neck transplant
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9:31 am
yesterday at the gym i talked to this very nice fellow who works there. i pointed at the back of my thighs and said “i need to fix these.” he showed me a weight machine that appeared it was going to be the answer to all my problems. it’s this machine where you have these big weight things on your shoulders, and you squat up and down and i only did about 10 or 15 of them, just to try it out, but i knew it was going to be great.
last night my neck was hurting a little, but this morning, i know that the only cure will be a neck transplant. i had no idea at the time how much pressure there was on my neck. no more of those exercises.
oh well. at least it was a good idea in theory.
the SUN HAS APPEARED this morning, which is certainly a novelty. if i was going to go running today, i’d go running, but i feel that maybe i won’t. run.
i’m glad it’s saturday, all day. followed by sunday.
ok then,
saturday grace.
good logic from christine
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12:49 am
first of all - tonight christine was expressing great outrage over “coke zero.” she said “if there’s an artificial sweeter, i can taste it, and it tastes like CRAP.”
please, if you know what’s good for you, don’t try to get christine to drink a coke zero.
it’s just a gimmick anyway.
but now here’s the good logic from christine...you should have your friends be in charge of you.
maybe she just meant that MY friends should be in charge of ME. (pretty much meaning that she would be somebody who was vital to making my decisions for me).
or maybe she meant HER friends should be in charge of her.
whatever she meant, i think it’s a very sound and practical idea.
over the years, my best friends have given me advice which i’ve almost always not listened to.
but then they’ve ALWAYS BEEN RIGHT.
ALWAYS.
so it makes perfect sense that they should be put in charge of me.
but then again...
i was at floyd’s thirst parlor tonight. TOO SMOKEY.
smoke is very bad.
it was exciting, though, because i was with people from the play, and eventually pam seemed to want to pick a fight. she was eyeing this big guy with a UT hat on. she didn’t believe he really went to UT, but was wearing the hat because they WON. (the football game. involving another team. with much running, but mostly many many ads and men piling on top of each other).
but i thought it would be highly entertaining to see her take on this very large fellow.
didn’t happen.
oh well.
there’s always next time.
rehearsal was kind of hard tonight. i was a little too tired going in, and had to run up and down the stairs many times. i’m kind of afraid of this. no, pretty darn afraid. at least there’s a railing.
but see, i know i’ve said this before, but i CRASH INTO THINGS FOR NO REASON. so the likelihood of hurting myself when actually doing something a little tricky is pretty...likely.
on the way home i felt i had many more things to tell you tonight, but i guess that’s all for right now. very late.
ok then,
graceful grace.
Jan. 06, 2006
friday morning
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11:29 am
last night in the midddle of the night i felt slightly down (and it’s a miracle that i could possibly be just SLIGHTLY DOWN in the middle of the night) because i was checking out this website that’s wildly popular. it’s just a woman writing stuff every day. but she has ads on her website and that’s how she earns a really good living. so i thought about how i’m primarily writing this for christine and mom (and finally now randy), and just a few other people.
but so that’s why this morning was so funny. i got in the elevator at the hospital and it was supposed to go up, but instead it went down. i was annoyed (but only slightly, becuase i wasn’t yet awake enough to be more than slightly anything), and it went all the way to the bottom floor. two people got on, looked like a father and (grown) daughter, and the man said to me “i read you every day.” being not quite awake i was startled, and thought maybe he’d read the column that i used to have in the paper, and so he hadn’t really been reading every day.
i said “oh, my blog?” and he said “i read you on the internet, every day.” his daughter looked shocked and said to him “you DO?” and he said, “yes, she used to write for the IT but they told her nobody was interested in reading anymore which isn’t true, and she’s also a comedian and had a one-woman show but i missed it.”
i was bowled over. he didn’t have time to say any more because we all got off the elevator, but this was such an unexpected nice thing to hear. so it’s NOT just christine, mom and randy...it’s also this guy from the elevator.
thanks, elevator man. you made my friday.
people i care about are suffering from seasonal affective disorder. how about this idea - the city buys HUGE HUGE lights for that and installs them all over the place, in restaurants and bars and the library and bowling alleys and other places people go, so everybody can just cheer up.
since the sun isn’t going to return.
and it’s a bummer when everybody around me is so sad.
because i’m feeling unaccountably chipper for such a gloomy gloomy day.
ok then,
friday grace.
cordless
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4:49 am
i woke up about a half hour ago and decided that instead of lying in bed, thoughts-a-racin', i’d get up and get things done.
first, i decided to make a tape of my show, because linda keeps asking to see it. i started searching for the right kind of cord for plugging the camera to the vcr. i looked at the jack on the camera, and i figured out what the cord must look like.
i have managed to collect a nice little array of cords. but i couldn’t find one that i thought might work. so then i even found the camera manual and the picture of the cord, and it was the one i’d thought.
but where is it? i started looking behind things and decided that’s a little too scary for the middle of the night. way way way too many things behind things.
so i finally gave up, but i know that cord must be somewhere, and eventually it will make itself known to me.
and also, i did at least attempt something productive, which distracted me from the thoughts in my head that i knew were going to make it impossible to get back to sleep.
i checked my e-mail and got a nice long one from J. (jeb), and spent some time writing back to him.
and now i’m starving. because i’ve started to panic a little about wearing underwear on stage, and have begun not eating everything in the world.
but a nice bit of bread with some really good cheese and maybe a good glass of red wine sure would be good right now.
fortunately i have none of those things around here. not in my bedroom anyway, and it’s definitely too far to get out of bed and scrounge around for food in the kitchen at this hour.
now that i’ve made some progress on things, perhaps some more sleeping will be in order.
you never know.
the other thing i thought about doing tonight was figuring out my taxes. at least starting this process, because i have to guess about how much i’ll owe because i’m self-employed. figuring out my own taxes, even though they’re not THAT complicated, is sort of gratifying because i’m so rotten at anything even remotely math-related. but it’s sort of challenging trying to figure out all the complicated self-employment stuff, and now that i’ve been doing it a few years i’ve gotten pretty good at it.
so maybe that can be my project tomorrow night.
i’m still thinking, though, about some kind of money-making thing for the middle of the night. how about a job stuffing envelopes, the kind they advertise in the paper where you can make thousands of dollars a month in your own home? hmm, maybe i’ll look into that.
but not right now. lights out.
ok then,
productive grace.
Jan. 05, 2006
practice practice practice
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11:07 pm
lots of rehearsal tonight. we got to do it on the stage for quite a while which was good because we could walk around on the stage. we have to go up and down the very very steep stairs and it was good to practice doing this.
there are large amounts of time when i’m just standing there onstage. standing around. i’ve been trying to think of different ways to stand, different things i could do. the great thing about “you can’t take it with you” is that every moment i was on stage i was doing bad ballet. it was easy and fun.
but this is more challenging. bad ballet would not be appropriate. i have to think of more subtle things to do. standing around primping. fluffing my hair. just trying to create the illusion of being very very sexy and HOT is challenging in and of itself.
i like a challenge. my mom was always worried when i was growing up that i was not being challenged enough.
i wonder if she’d think the challenge of trying to appear S & H is enough challenge for me.
i’m sure she’ll tell me. because she reads this. yesterday she told me that she knew what i was doing because she read graceuncensored. that’s what christine says to me sometimes, although if she’d answer her phone more she’d know exactly what i’m doing.
because the thing about the writing, as i’ve written so many times before, is that we’re just scratching the surface here. grace CENSORED. in order to find out that real deal, you’d have to ask me and i probably wouldn’t tell you anyway.
that’s not entirely true. i do express quite a few things, but there are many many other things which will remain unsaid. unwritten.
let’s just say that right now at this one little tiny moment in time but i realize it could change in a heartbeat, things are going pretty well.
on “sex & the city” tonight, carrie and mr. big are bowling. in my show i talked about not liking sports involving balls of any kind, but i didn’t mention bowling. the thing about bowling, however, is that even though it does involve a ball, it’s not a ball that somebody is throwing at me or expecting me to throw to them. i’m really, really bad at bowling, but i still like it because it’s fun. not that i play it very often, or really at all lately, but i do kind of like it.
one time i tried to roll the ball and instead of going forward down the lane it somehow managed to actually roll backward, out towards the carpeted area of the bowling alley. i do not know how i accomplished this, but it figures. sports, not my thing. grace in name only.
badminton, i’m pretty good at badminton. but terrible at table tennis.
FRIDAY tomorrow, i’m looking forward to that quite a bit. i have a couple of nice plans. or at least the one.
ok then,
almost friday grace.
slipping along through the day...
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4:44 pm
hmm. i’m considering getting some sort of night job where i’d get up at two a.m. and i’d be up working for a few hours. i could get a lot done, and then i’d fall asleep, at least in theory.
my basic goal for the day today was to finally get back to the gym, and after taking a nap for about an hour, i did that. mission accomplished.
the key is to set really really small goals, ones that are almost impossible NOT to achieve.
i walked on the stairmaster to nowhere for a while and instead of reading, i just wasn’t in the mood to read for some reason, i watched tv. i watched some music videos and i watched part of “how to be a millionaire” and a little bit of dr. phil. i suppose he has lots of good advice, but his show mostly seemed to be telling the HORRIBLE STORIES of the lives of these people, and then re-telling them, and talking about how it would be good to try to help them, and in between just commercial after commercial after commercial and i felt that the whole show should have really only taken about 15 minutes, tops. i missed the dramatic conclusion to the story of the woman whose father thought she was posessed when she was nine years old and so he did an exorcism on her and that pretty much wrecked the rest of her life, and she’s not that old now.
so dr. phil just kept saying to her “you’d like me to tell you what your problem is, and you’d like me to give you some suggestions for changing your life, right?” and the woman would agree, and then there would be yet ANOTHER commercial.
tv. c'mon.
dr. phil also said something about how he injured his knee and so he would favor it and try to protect it (was this guy a football player? i feel that he might have been), and his doctor told him that if he kept protecting the knee he’d just injure it again. he needed to just GO OUT THERE AND PLAY, throw himself into the game, and it’d work out.
i assume it worked out; i didn’t see dr. phil standing up at all; perhaps he can’t walk at all.
but i felt that this would probably be good advice for the living of the life. just going out there and playing.
gee whiz, so very deep and profound for a gloomy thursday afternoon. i read in the paper that we’re not supposed to have ANY MORE REALLY BAD WEATHER, which was great to hear. not that i necessarily believe what i read, but i like to hope that that’s so, that the bitter cold and TOO MUCH SNOW we had in december is the end of the bad weather. it’s just dark out today, though, and it keeps spitting snow/rain and it’s not a lot of fun to walk around in.
so luckily i’m about to give a massage in my room with no windows and i can pretend that it’s warm and lovely outside.
friday, coming right up.
ok then,
2006 grace.
4:27 a.m.
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4:41 am
yes, i would prefer to be sleeping right now but since i’ve been awake so long, i thought i’d tell you this one thing. before my show on new year’s eve i was sitting in the women’s dressing room at the arts center. i’d gotten there early and was dressed and ready to go really early because i usually am early for things because i hate to be late. i wasn’t going on till eight, and i must have been ready by seven, including tiger pants, big blonde hair and false eyelashes. you’ve seen the photo of the tiger pants. i have a photo of the whole outfit, but i’m not about to get out of bed right now to put it on my computer.
but anyway, muni was going to perform at nine o'clock, so i figured the muni people wouldn’t show up till it was almost time for me to go on.
but fairly early, a girl appeared with her mother. the girl was probably in high school, pretty, long hair, sparkly flats that i liked a lot. the mother seemed like the quintessential stage mother. they sat and talked a lot and i didn’t even listen to what they were saying because i was trying to FOCUS on my own stuff. i did hear them talk about auditions for “chicago” (this summer at muni) and that seemed slightly premature to me.
but like i said, i mostly didn’t listen.
but at one point the mother said to me “are you going to dance?”
i told her no, i do comedy.
the absurdity of her question didn’t fully register with me, i mean i thought about it for a minute but i wasn’t paying much attention to them.
but tonight i was lying here thinking about that and i had to laugh - what kind of dance did she think i’d be performing in the tiger pants? did she think i was going to do an exotic dance? a tap dance? some ballet? modern dance? belly dancing?
nobody’s ever going to look at me and mistake me for a dancer. although i am a good tap dancer, even though i haven’t done it in quite a few years, but i’m sure i can remember the tap moves and i’m actually thinking about taking lessons again if i can find some.
but what was she thinking?
what kind of dancer?
during the show i did mention the bad ballet i did last year in “you can’t take it with you,” and i demonstrated some of my bad ballet moves, which i’m good at. but i’m sure that’s not the kind of dancing she was thinking of.
after the show the mother passed me in the hall and told me i did a good job. i thanked her. i thought it was nice of her to say anything since i’m sure she was very very focused on her lovely daughter.
maybe next new year’s eve i’ll do some dancing.
goodnight,
grace right before sunrise.
victory!
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12:01 am
for the texas longhorns, that is.
tonight randy and i rented the final six episodes of sex & the city and watched them and they were fabulous, even though i’d seen them all at least once before.
and then we watched the end of the football game, usc vs texas, and apparently it was the ROSE BOWL, except G. (george) assured me earlier today that the rose bowl already happened. but i’m pretty sure this was the ROSE BOWL, because their shirts said ROSE BOWL on them.
anyway, it was pretty thrilling...well, thrilling for football anyway. and at the very last SECOND practically, texas (the longhorns) won.
my friend scott mcdonald who lives in west hollywood and i haven’t talked to him in way way way too long, he’s a RABID usc fan; he went to usc and he goes to the games and maybe he was there tonight. i’m certain he’s gnashing his teeth right now. and probably yelling at somebody. and also spitting.
however, i did live in texas for four...six? i can’t exactly recall how many years, but that’s where the longhorns reside. but i’m pretty sure - at least 100% sure - that my old boyfriend scott who still live there didn’t watch the game.
but like i said, QUITE thrilling.
if that’s the kind of thing you like.
i have many goals for tomorrow, mostly just getting my very very lazy body out of bed and working out for a good long time. plus massages, rehearsal, etc.
ok then. midnight. time to sleep.
2006 grace
Jan. 04, 2006
have you noticed
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11:27 am
that it’s wednesday already? how did that happen so quickly?
holiday on monday.
i thought i read somewhere that eventually the country would have four day work-weeks. why hasn’t that happened; why, in fact, are people (most people anyway) working more and more and more instead of less and less?
this doesn’t apply to me of course because i do my own thing.
doesn’t pay as well as the 60 hour a week jobs, but then again i don’t have quite as much stress.
not a lot of stress.
some would say NO stress. but i can always find some.
self-induced stress. which can be worse in a way because when most people are stressed out they can say THAT DAMN JOB, or THAT DAMN BOSS or THAT DAMN HUSBAND/WIFE/KIDS or something like that.
me, it’s just THAT DAMN...me.
you’d think that being very self-aware would at least get you halfway to being a really sane and rational person. but that’s not necessarily so.
i’m having a slight problem with waking up fully this morning. perhaps some caffeine is in order. maybe even something as radical as a diet coke.
but i don’t want to get crazy with the caffeine.
by the way, we’re not having any sun at all here until NEXT year. so that’ll be 2007. just so you don’t get your hopes up about the possibility of sunlight in the immediate future.
ok then,
wednesday grace.
the nice thing about three a.m....
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3:42 am
is that it’s so quiet and peaceful now.
not a sound anywhere, except for the sound of my fake waves gently lapping the electronic shore.
where would i be without a sound machine?
if it was summer, i could get up right now and take a walk, and it would be very quiet and peaceful and still and lovely...
oh yeah. except for the barking dog.
the barking dog is the reason i’m awake right now. well, the barking dog was the reason i woke up at two. and the inability to fall asleep again is the reason i’m still awake.
the barking dog has stopped barking, at least. at last.
the waves continue to lap.
people have been asking me if i really met jay leno, and if he really is a bastard.
yes, and yes.
well, that’s just my opinion of course. the thing is that he left me a really sweet-sounding message on my voicemail. i had arranged to interview him after he did standup down in hermosa beach (the place i’m going to go when i’m really old), but when i got to the club to see his act, i didn’t press anybody to make sure he knew i was there because by that point i was quite sure he wasn’t interested in talking to me.
but he was, and that’s why he left the nice message.
so i waited another week, went to the club again, and he did meet me...but he just met me to yell at me, to ask where i’d been the week before. he was all sprawled out on his chair in the green room, which was really tiny and filled with an enormous table on which was the remains of jay’s dinner. he was also distracted by a football game on tv. this was at the end of january, so it was one of those VERY VERY IMPORTANT AND CRICITAL TO LIFE AS WE KNOW IT football games...uh, i can’t remember what it’s called. all i know for sure is it’s not the rose bowl, because they just had that (unless it’s tomorrow?).
anyway, mr. leno was just kind of rude and pompous to me and i felt really stupid talking to him.
but this was great fodder for a couple of columns i wrote about the experience. and then i described it in even greater detail at “gracetalk #2.”
sometimes i wonder what would have happened if i’d been more assertive in trying to get him to talk to me that first week. well, he’d definitely have talked to me, and he probably would have been nice. but then, would the niceness have been the way he really is, or was his rudeness more his true personality?
so yeah, jay leno IS my arch-enemy now. it’s a little frustrating having an arch-enemy who doesn’t even remember my existence, much less know he’s my arch-enemy. the only way i can express my anger is to yell at the tv when his show is on, but i don’t yell anyway, so i just quietly turn off the TV. silent protest.
we don’t have rehearsal tonight, which was an unexpected surprise. some people in the cast are very excited about this because they get to watch a VERY IMPORTANT AND CRITICAL TO LIFE AS WE KNOW IT football game. the somebodys against somebody else. and man it’s gonna be BIG. and QUITE EXCITING.
i, personally, am not going to be able to watch football. because i don’t care to.
ok, here’s one thing about the show i just did - i said that one thing i don’t like is sports that involve a ball of any kind, including (but not limited to) football, baseball, basketball, softball, soccer, tennis and golf.
i went on to talk about the fact that i don’t like these things because i cannot PLAY them. i can’t catch, and i can’t throw.
but right after i made that statement, somebody told me that people were BOOING me.
BOOING?! i’m annoyed by this. i didn’t hear the booing. if i had heard the booing, i’d have been mad. i mean, i’m just EXPRESSING MY OPINION.
i didn’t say anything like FOOTBALL IS INCREDIBLY BORING BECAUSE ALL THEY APPEAR TO DO IS RUN A LITTLE BIT AND THEN STOP PLAYING AND THERE ARE A BUNCH OF ADS AND IT LASTS ALMOST UNTIL THE END OF TIME AND IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE WHAT’S GOING ON ANYWAY AND THE FOOTBALL PLAYERS CERTAINLY DO SEEM TO SPEND A LOT OF TIME GRABBING EACH OTHER’S ASSES.
i also didn’t even begin to talk about GOING TO A SOCCER MATCH IN LA WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO BE A VERY WARM PLACE BUT I WASN’T WEARING ENOUGH CLOTHES AND IT WAS QUITE CHILLY AND I WAS SURE I WAS GOING TO FREEZE TO DEATH AND THE WIND WAS WHIPPING FIERCELY THROUGH THE STANDS AND WE WERE SITTING TOO FAR AWAY TO SEE WHAT WAS GOING ON ANYWAY EXCEPT TO BE ANNOYED BY THE REALLY REALLY DRUNK FANS SCREAMING ALL OVER THE PLACE.
so i guess this is all the yelling i ever do. CAPITALIZING things. no yelling in real life reality, just capitalizing things right here.
but even then, usually i’m just capitalizing for EMPHASIS, not because i’m mad.
i guess i usually don’t find too much to be mad about.
the barking dog, i do have to admit, was disturbing. because here it is, almost two hours later, and i’m still wide awake. more and more wide awake, i might as well go running...except for the darkness/cold.
jay leno, arch-enemy. sports, perfectly fine if that’s what you enjoy but please don’t BOO me for god’s sake just because i don’t happen to have a sports obsession.
ok.
g.
tonight, i ’d really hoped....
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grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
12:16 am
i would go to sleep early. this was the focus, earlier in the evening. aha, a chance to get to sleep early, to sleep all through the night, to wake up refreshed and ready to go run on the treadmill to nowhere....
but it was not to be. things happened, people were involved, and now it’s late and i’m not yet in bed. i’m near my bed at least, so i can go to bed in one second if i really want to.
this was a big night for randy. his computer was struck by lightning a few years ago, and he didn’t get a new one till just now. and then they hooked up the internet, and now he’s all set. i keep telling him i write about him all the time on here, and now he’ll be able to see for himself.
i forgot to tell you my favorite xmas present (that i got; my favorite ones to give were of course the printers i bought amy and jim and dad). attached to one of the gifts randy gave me was a little sticker of a bunny. below the bunny it read “boys lie and kind of stink.”
i was delighted with this sticker, i mean, really delighted. i thought about sticking it onto my t-shirt with some tape. i haven’t done that yet (i lost the tape but i’m certain it’s around here someplace), but i do keep it on my bed (i consider the other half of my bed to be storage space, although i hate that i do this and am trying to get rid of the stuff on my bed, but new stuff keeps appearing and i feel like i have absolutely no control over it), so i can look at it when i wake up in the morning.
i mean, yeah, it’s not the MOST optimistic view of men. and it’s not like i think ALL boys lie and kind of stink.
some of them smell just fine.
but, it’s just that...the sticker is kind of heartening, in an i realize pretty weird way. it makes me feel, ok, things will most certainly continue to be completely fucked up no matter what i do or who i’m with - but it’s ok, i’ll survive.
i mean, i’ve survived this long haven’t i? sometimes not entirely sure how. sometimes i feel like it’s some sort of Super Challenge that i’ve unwittingly gotten myself entangled with. some impenetratable labyrinth that i will most certainly never get out of. trapped in a bad reality show.
so i shouldn’t even try. i should just sit back and realize this is the ride i’m going to be on, this is the way it goes for me, i should try to find something good about it.
kind of like a roller coaster. i don’t care for roller coasters. besides being much, much too scary, they also make my back and neck even more messed up, and they’re not in such great shape to begin with. but i remember going on Space Mountain with my old boyfriend scott (i’ve never had such a good time at an amusement park with anybody, and i hope that scott and i can continue to go to amusement parks for as long as we both shall live) at Disneyland, and trying to enjoy the ride despite the fact that i was quite sure i was going to die plus i knew i’d never be able to walk again.
mostly i just shut my eyes and hummed and tried to imagine i was someplace else entirely.
i have to say this made the times the roller coaster go upside-down a whole lot more palatable.
one time i was in las vegas with a boyfriend and i suddenly found myself in line for the roller coaster at the New York Hotel and Casino. Let me just say this - THIS IS A HORRIFYING ROLLER COASTER. we had to stand in line for approximately all of time (it was BROKEN, and i should have taken this as a golden opportunity to get the hell out of there), and then when we finally got on the thing, we were going along and i looked up ahead of me. i saw a really really really long climb...and then the drop. oh my god. i was completely panicked, COMPLETELY PANICKED, and i knew there was absolutely no way i was going to get out of this alive.
so i shut my eyes tight. and hummed.
this roller coaster also had a few upside-down loops.
oh god.
eyes shut. humming.
i lived through it. this wasn’t the very final roller coaster i was on, though. that was a few months later, same boyfriend, this time this wooden roller coaster at magic mountain. magic mountain? i don’t think that’s the name of the LA theme park. but this, too, was a chilling experience, and i was sure i was going to die imminently, and this man kept assuring me i would NOT die, that the roller coaster was safer than driving down the highway.
i did survive, but a couple of days later somebody was KILLED. ON THAT VERY SAME ROLLER COASTER.
ok, i can’t remember this precisely, perhaps they were only injured. but i think they were killed. THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ME.
no more roller coasters.
and, way way way back a few thousand words ago, i believe i was attempting an analogy. trying to enjoy the ride. believing in some kind of theme or something here? some kind of purpose to it all?
nope, don’t buy it.
however, at this one little moment (and my view could change radically in the next minute or so, based on absolutely nothing), i’m trying to think of going with the flow.
enjoying the ride.
or at least sticking my fingers in my ears and humming, driving away all the bad stuff. the problem with me, grace smith (ok, just one of the problems, i’m just warning you so please don’t ever try to say i didn’t warn you), trying to just chill and enjoy the ride is that sometimes the ride just doesn’t seem worth it. too painful. too fraught with peril, with pain, with death.
better to just avoid the roller coaster at all costs?
and now, i sleep.
ok then,
deep and profound january grace.
Jan. 03, 2006
first tuesday of the year
[
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grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
12:17 pm
and things are pretty good now. kind of groggy, but doing well. so far.
i really have three resolutions, i’ve decided. and you know what? I’VE ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED TWO OF THEM! well, at least i’m on my way to accomplishing them. this is a good feeling. gee whiz, now there’s only the one more thing to accomplish, and then i can just COAST through the rest of the year.
except knowing me i’ll suddenly feel that there are other goals, other stuff to do, things i want to try.
but at least nothing else has the pressure of being a resolution.
a friend who went to the show told me how “little” i seem to her, but i looked LARGER on stage. i said, huh, i didn’t really want to hear that. i told her i looked VOLUPTUOUS, not large, and of course she agreed since she’d made the huge gaffe of telling me i looked LARGER.
do you remember in the movie popeye, olive oil sang that song about bluto, all the words i can remember are “he’s large...” that was an odd but good movie, if i recall, except it’s been about 80 years since i’ve seen it.
i guess i don’t have much to tell you of any consequence right now. except that i do think it’s a good idea to write down the lists of things you like and things you don’t like, so you’ll remember them, and spend more time doing stuff you like and avoiding stuff you hate.
just this morning, i completely avoided getting up too early, which is at the top of my list of things i don’t like.
i TOLD you 2006 was going to be a good year.
ok then,
tuesday grace.
the first monday of the year...
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grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
1:24 am
OK, technically it’s already tuesday. 1:15 a.m. to be exact, and i really really should be asleep now. i mean, really.
but i’m not and i don’t care. i had a day full of some good things.
when i woke up it was sunny and i thought about running, but sleeping almost completely eluded me last night, so instead i lolled around most of the livelong day. lolling around, i never do that so much, and i have to say it was a refreshing change. lolling without being sick.
tonight at rehearsal we saw our set, because it’s the same one they’re using for “best litle whorehouse in texas.” i think this was ed smith’s idea, and it’s brilliant. except the people building the set read the blueprint in a different kind of way and so the stairs are a foot and a half higher than they were supposed to be.
these are some seriously long and steep stairs. i’ll have to run up and down them quite a bit, but i probably won’t fall and kill myself.
but poor P. (Prestidigitator)- he has to fall down the stairs. more than once. when i saw those stairs, i thought, how is he going to do this without killing himself?
i’m sure they’ll help him. somebody will know how to fall down these VERY STEEP AND LONG STAIRS without lots of bodily injury.
but maybe we should have an understudy, just in case.
first monday of the year.
ok then,
new year grace
Jan. 02, 2006
at the end of the first day of the year....
[
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grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
1:40 am
so i was sitting in this movie tonight ("rumor has it" with jennifer aniston and kevin costner, and it was pretty good), i suddenly thought about a new year’s day long long ago...
my very first boyfriend, chris, who i thought i was going to marry and live happily ever after with in an actual house with a white picket fence, had a new year’s eve party my freshman year of college.
we served alcoholic punch. it might have been made with rum, or perhaps vodka.
i was in charge of mixing the punch.
i was mixing the punch before the party started, and i kept tasting it to see if it was ok.
by the time the party started, i was drunk.
as the evening went on i got more and more drunk.
i was wearing this shimmery silver dress with a slip under it that kept slipping down. i’d run into another room to hoist up the slip...but at the evening wore on and i got more and more drunk, i gave up running into another room and would just hoist the slip up wherever i happened to be.
i believe this is the night i buried a photo of chris’s ex-girlfriend.
on more than one occasion i’ve had boyfriends who had perfect in every way ex-girlfriends who they didn’t seem to be over and seemed to worship still.
chris had a photo of his old girlfriend in his bedroom. why didn’t i ever ask him to take it down? i just don’t know. but i didn’t. but it bothered me, this totally perfect girl. so when i got drunk on new year’s eve, i buried the photo in the snow.
i’ve always had a problem attempting to be aggressive, and this is about as aggressive as i’ve ever gotten.
also at this party, there was this perfect couple at the party. ralph and angie. they had dated all through high school i think, and both were very smart and she was a cheerleader and very very cute and adorable.
but at some point in the evening, ralph kissed me. and although this was a very long time ago, i’m pretty sure he kept following me around trying to kiss me throughout the evening.
this was bewildering to me, because they were a PERFECT COUPLE, so why on earth would he be kissing anybody else? and especially, why would he be kissing ME of all people? angie was PERFECT. and i certainly wasn’t.
i wonder if they got married and lived happily ever after. and if he still chases other women around at new year’s parties.
anyway, my point was going to be that on the day after this wild new year’s eve, on new year’s day chris went back to college and i went to a movie with my family and i have a pretty vivid memory of being at the movie being very very hungover.
not a great way to start the new year.
today, not hungover, but very tired. i finally perked up about 10 o'clock, and i actually beat randy at boggle.
the family all started watching a show about coffee which bored me to tears, so i escaped.
2006, i’m still pretty sure it’s going to be pretty darn good.
and now, sleep.
goodnight.
january grace.
Jan. 01, 2006
IMPORTANT ROSE BOWL PARADE ANNOUNCEMENT:
[
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grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
4:38 pm
So today there was quite a bit of discussion about the rose bowl parade - was it on, did we miss it? christine said it wasn’t going to be on till tomorrow, jim said he thought it was yesterday, then i believe he said he’d heard on CNN this morning that it was today, but i can’t exactly recall what he said because i was so sleepy, pre-nap.
so i just looked it up online, and it is, indeed tomorrow. i’m happy about this because I LOVE PARADES. here’s what i found on the web site, which i thought was kind of interesting:
“The Tournament of Roses is a tradition full of traditions, one of which is our “Never on Sunday” policy. In 1893, officials decided to move the parade to Monday, January 2 to avoid frightening horses tethered outside local churches and thus interfering with worship services. As a result of this reverent gesture, speculation abounds as to the rare instances of rainfall on New Year’s Day (only nine times in Rose Parade history), prompting some to ask the Tournament about its special pact with a “friend upstairs.” Also as a result of this tradition, other collegiate bowl organizations have instituted similar procedures. The upcoming Rose Parade is on Monday, January 2, 2006 in observance of the Never on Sunday tradition.”
so there you have it. i like that phrase, “a tradition full of traditions.” anyway, i’m going to be watching. that’s one thing i regret, never going to the parade when i lived in LA. i was actually there on new year’s a few years, and i don’t know exactly why i didn’t go. i guess i never found anybody as enthusiastic as me about going. it just seems it would be so beautiful and the floats would smell so great.
one year i did convince a boyfriend to go the the place where they lined up the floats the day after the parade, but when we got there the place was a crazy crazy mob scene and we’d have had to wait for hours to see them, and he was not happy AT ALL about going to see them anyway, so i missed my chance.
oh well.
someday, i’ll see that parade.
just like i’m going to go back to macy’s thanksgiving parade, which i came really close to doing this year with thad. next year? or not really, it would actually be THIS year.
maybe.
you just never know.
ok, NOW i go do the very important and critical very long fake hair washing.
grace
the VERY FIRST DAY of the year...
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grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
4:27 pm
...and i just woke up from a nap. i napped for about an hour, except much of the time i wasn’t really, truly sleeping, i was lying here with my eyes closed, thinking about things.
i do have to say i was certainly wildly ambitious at two a.m. last night, imagining that i was going to leap out of bed and go running and do a lot of stuff.
one thing i wonder is, just what was that stuff i was planning on doing? because right at the moment i can’t think of one pressing thing to do. i mean, not at all.
napping was good. i kind of wanted to continue with the nap, but i figured i can’t nap all day long. i mean, i could, but then you know, no sleep at all tonight.
instead of waking up in the middle of the night, i woke up at seven since i’d been up so late. i laid there for a couple of hours. no bad thoughts at all.
i still have the hair extensions in my hair. amy was going to take them out today, but then she suggested i try washing my hair with the extensions in, just to see what happens. i don’t have a great feeling about this idea, but i’ll try it anyway. the extensions do look pretty good, but not quite right with my sweats and my favorite t-shirt that used to be jim’s that has a picture of underdog on it.
i sort of feel that it would be kind of cool to have the extensions all the time, except that sleeping in them wasn’t so great. they’re glued to my hair in three bands around my head, and it felt like wearing a hat with hard ridges in it. not so comfortable for the sleeping.
but i guess one has to suffer for beauty, right?
NO.
so that’s the stuff i have to do today; i have to wash my hair. i believe i will successfully complete this difficult task.
after that...perhaps a movie. maybe a snack. i guess if i really thought about it, there are probably things i could be doing. productive-type things.
but i sorta feel that being very unproductive on the very first day of the year might be a very very good thing. because if i were to suddenly leap about, running hither and yon, accomplishing all kinds of stuff (if i could ever think of what the stuff might be), well then, i’d have so much to live up to the rest of the year.
much better, in my opinion, to start out gradually. being patient, waiting for all the goodness that is surely in store for me in 2006 to unfold. calmly and rationally and with ease.
ok, now that the show is over, i can tell you some of the stuff i discussed. i ran down a list of things i covered in other shows, including losing on the 100,000 pyramid and going to a very very fancy wedding reception in beverly hills where all the other wedding guests wore black and i wore a short pink slipdress. there’s the photo of the dress just a few entries back.
the only problem with running quickly through these different things is that i didn’t have time to tell the whole stories. i didn’t want to talk about the same things, i wanted to talk about new things, but some of those stories were pretty funny. i didn’t mention, for example, that the groom of the wedding reception was the son of one of the owners of hewlett packard. i can’t recall if it was hewlett or packard, but this is why it was such an extraordinarily lavish deal, with so much fanciness that i know i’ll never see anything quite that fancy again.
i also didn’t mention that the boyfriend who took me to this party didn’t bother to tell me that a pink slip dress wouldn’t be appropriate for the event, and that i was thinking maybe he wanted people to think he was dating a hooker.
because that’s definitely what i looked like, up against the sea of people in their formal black black BLACK outfits.
my basic premise last night was that instead of new year’s resolutions, you should have two lists - a list of things you like, and things you don’t like, and then you should focus on doing more stuff you like and less you dislike. this gave me an opportunity to discuss things i like and don’t like.
but i had to leave a of stuff off both lists. maybe i’ll tell you some of those sometime.
now really, even though i said no new year’s resolutions, i actually do have one. i had one, but then i decided i have two. so i have two of them. if i thought about it, i probably have other things that i’m determined to accomplish, probably at least one or two, maybe a half dozen. but the two main things are what i’ll be focusing on.
and with that, i must now wash my hair.
starting the new year off with much much vim and vigor...
ok then,
grace easing into 2006.
happy new year!
[
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grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
2:15 am
it’s two hours and five minutes into the new year, and already i have a good feeling about it.
but on the other hand, gee whiz, it’s 2:05 a.m.! i should be sleeping. but i even have a good feeling about that; i feel incredibly lucid (but the lucidity might be a figment of my imagination), but at the same time i’m certain i’ll fall asleep once i stop all this crazy typing.
i’m sitting here in bed with my very very long hair. i feel kind of sleazy. but women do have long hair. but just not me. i could get permanent hair extensions if i wanted them, but i think they would bug me. but i think the temporary ones look quite good. but also they might be a bit painful to sleep on.
so, the show. wowie. the place was packed. i mean, packed. people were standing. lots of them. a few people left during the show, but the vast, vast majority stayed for the while thing. really good.
and i think it went well. they laughed in some places that i haven’t heard laughter before.
good. it’s good.
my only complaint is that when i started out, i was thinking “ok this is it. the last time you do this.” and it kind of bummed me out because of all the work i put into it, and then it was over.
but it definitely makes me feel motivated to do another one, and not to wait for another year and a half. i’d like to do another one in a few months. i feel i could actually find the motivation to look for a sponsor, some entity that would foot the bill for the advertising and the space rental.
can i do it? hard to say. you never know.
i’m just glad it went so well tonight.
it was also great to see so many friends in the audience. i couldn’t look at them a lot, because it’d have been too distracting, but it was just nice to know they were there.
i’m happy.
here’s a funny thing about new year’s eve - many many people get drunk and stay out late. and so then, how do they start a FRESH, BRAND NEW YEAR?
hungover.
isn’t that a totally, totally shitty way to start the new year?
wouldn’t it be better to start it feeling all gung-ho and chipper and ready to do a bunch of stuff? that’s just the way i feel, at the moment, anyway - i feel like i’m going to want to go running in the morning, and i’m going to want to GET STUFF DONE.
but on the other hand, i still have lots of fake hair glued onto my hair, and i feel it would be a little weird going running with it. but maybe it would be warmer. insulation from more hair.
i just realized i’m about to pass out.
i hope your new year’s eve was good.
and more importantly, i hope your new year is FANTASTIC.
ok then,
2006 grace (going to be a fabulous year).
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