9.30.04. 11.37pm.
no good deed.
as astute readers have noticed, i have not updated in awhile. you may have surmised, and if so you have surmised correctly, that a lot has been going on. theater, come and gone. flatmates, come and gone. love, come and... um... relocated. i've climbed high in the air in the middle of the night out under the stars and done battle with ancient lighting equipment. had a family reunion and met an awesome six-year-old cousin. went to my first baseball game in like a decade. saw the indigo girls live for the first time. went camping in yosemite for the first time. designed lights for like four shows, to my complete surprise. fed some cats. made some new friends. got excused from jury duty for "extreme financial hardship." oh, yeah, and atoned for my sins. happy yom kippur.
i visited my mom's classes the other day, for the first time since i was like nine. it was really great. she is, we once again confirm, very good at this whole special ed preschool thing. and yes, i am now in an almost serious way starting to consider going back to school in early childhood education. it keeps seeming like a better and better idea. i'm kind of tentative about actually, you know, looking into it. but still...
my parents had their 30th anniversary. how neat is that? and even neater, from my perspective, was that zach and i took them out for a really nice dinner (at cafe cacao, the restaurant attached to the scharffenberger factory - or as aunt judy calls it, schadenfreude - where everyone should go because it's real yummy). and they tried to insist on not letting us pay, and we out-insisted them! it was awesome. perhaps better than the gondola ride we bought for them a few years ago, which they didn't take for like a year.
got some new roomies. we got sick of the old ones and sold them to the gypsies. the search for new ones was... tiring. posted on craigslist, and saw thirty people in five days. some of them, you could tell before they got in the door that they wouldn't work out. like the 40 year old hillbilly guy who brought his hawaiian uncle who played my guitar loudly and badly. or the guy who subsequently tried to sell sandra drugs. on the other hand, there were some people who we loved who decided to live elsewhere, and they're all poopheads. except johanna, we still like her. new friend! and finally we got sandra and mimi, who are both real neat. sandra's croatian, by way of st. louis. she's got a blog. which she updates more than i do. (i rarely update sandra's blog.) mimi is british, by way of hong kong. now she spends all day writing (and all night at the bossa nova). (no, seriously, she goes to the bossa nova on saturdays. did you know there was still bossa nova?) they are both lovely people. hooray!
sam and kerry, it seems, bought a house. the nutballs. they want everyone to move to portland. they can be very persuasive. they called the other night (before buying the house) to talk to me and blodgett. "we've had enough!" said kerry. "we're putting our foot down. it's time for you to move to portland."
"what, now?" i asked.
"yes, now."
"we can't now, we have someone over for dinner."
"okay, then tomorrow," kerry said, compromising. i laughed.
"i don't think you appreciate just how serious we are about this," sam said, very seriously.
"it's not that i don't think you're serious," i said. "it's just that this is... well, kind of abrupt, don't you think?"
"oh," said sam, "it only seems abrupt to you because we didn't do all the touchy feely talking about it crap that other people do." i laughed again. "listen," he said, "you don't want to be dragged kicking and screaming behind the jetta all the way to portland, do you?"
i said i wouldn't kick the entire way. they let me off the hook (or at least, off the phone) with a promise to visit very soon. i suspect that when i visit, they will attempt to prevent departure.
kerry called back twenty minutes later to inform us that lila had been convinced, and that she was moving in a few weeks. i called lila, who informed me that kerry's interpretation of their conversation was somewhat optimistic. "i told them," said lila, "that you and i had recently discussed moving to portland in 2008. they were nonplussed." i suspected that lila was misusing the word nonplussed, but i didn't think mentioning it would do any good. (i was correct on both counts.) lila said that when kerry called, and said that she and sam had something to tell her, and that they were putting her on speakerphone, she thought they were getting married. they're definately giving becky and skip a run for their money in the "college friends most likely to get married first" contest.
i called kerry back and told her she was a big liar, but i liked her anyway. she laughed, as she is wont to do at the drop of a hat. why is that an expression? do people drop hats a lot? or is hat-dropping a signal of some kind is some culture? speaking of hats, i've recently started wearing one of those newsboy cap things, which i got for free. it's still nominally being worn on a trial what-do-i-think-of-this-hat basis, but preliminary polling indicates a largely positive response among likely voters.
i think that's it for now, team. i make no promises, or even guesses, about the frequency of future updates. and i don't even want to think about the last time i uploaded new photos... heavens. but rest assured, things are mostly a-okay here in the land of radical politics and mild weather. peace be unto you, and your kith.