Tuesday, December 30, 2003

10:52 PM - the circus is in town...

apples to apples

Whoa. Alert to anyone who lives in the Bay Area: go see les 7 doigts de la main at the Palace of Fine Arts. You have until January 3... This is easily the best circus show I've ever seen. Easily.

On another note-- I did 4 pullups today. I've only ever done 4 once in my life, which was about a month before I hurt my shoulder and needed surgery. I feel like I am officially back... like I have the same strength that I had before I got hurt. Still wanna get stronger, though.

Go see 7 doigts!!!

Historical Note: It's interesting, now that I've lived in Brattleboro for a year (2006), to contrast what Elsie, Bill and Serenity did with Nimble Arts with what Gypsy and Shana did in 7 doigts. They were all from San Francisco and all in Cirque du Soleil's Saltimbanco together, and all stopped at about the same time.

Monday, December 29, 2003

2:45 PM - where has that turkey been?!?!?!

Quinoa-Stuffed Acorn Squash

I'm officially back in town.

I spent a week in West Chester, Pennsylvania for Christmas... that's where my family is and it's the town where I say I "grew up," even though the truth is a bit more complex. It was nice to see everyone again, even nicer because my opporutinies to visit my family are rare. So yay.

One story from my time there, mostly because I want to write about it...

I've been vegetarian for about 8 years. My family's reaction to it has gone from my Dad dragging me to a sports bar and forcing me to order meat (which I didn't eat when it arrived) to uncomfortable comments to a gradual, uneasy kind of tolerance. The gluttonous corpse-fest that is "Christmas dinner" has always been a tough point for me... the whole house smells like charred flesh and it's kind of awkward when it seems like I'm not participating when we're all supposed to be eating and having some important/rare/special time together. Never mind that I eat most holiday foods, just not the meat.

This year I decided I would make a yummy Quinoa Stuffed Squash from a cookbook my brother gave me.... Oddly enough, after I made that decision my Mom actually called me to ask if I wanted to make anything special and vegetarian. See, we are making progress, and I'm grateful and enthusiastic about that. Anyway, we worked things out so that I could have some oven time for the squash.... fast forward to Christmas Eve. People are preparing the turkey, and suddenly they discover that there's a hard spot. It turns out that half of the turkey had been rotten, as though it had gotten stabbed by a bacteria-infested piece of machinery. I dunno-- I didn't actually look at the thing. They threw the turkey away but it was too late: all of the turkey-carrying stores had closed.

I experienced a secret, hopeful, glorious moment in which I imagined myself saving Christmas with Quinoa Stuffed Squash. Just once, my vegetarianism would come to the rescue and my family would get to participate in doing things my way.... rather than making me feel like a freak. They had other ideas. My sister's boyfriend got a ham from his parents, and my family found a large chicken somewhere in a freezer in the basement. Looks like meat's back on the menu.

For a while, I was really disappointed. I couldn't figure out why, and it even felt selfish. In the end, I feel like the battleground of vegetarianism might be a metaphor for their acceptance of me being gay... something that's caused a lot of fighting in the past and which my family seems generally unwilling to talk about. I think I was hoping, in some representative way, that participating in eating squash might have meant that one day they wouldn't be so freaked out by me. My brother and sister both invite their longterm gf/bf over to eat with us, and it hurts that it seems like someone I dated and cared about probably would not get the same welcome.

I guess one of the advantages of being single is that your boyfriend never has to watch your family scramble around looking for carcasses while the yummy squash you made gets (mostly) ignored.

Historical Note: This was one of my favorite blog posts ever. Between this post and the one just before it, there's a lot of insight into my 2003 life. The title was added much later so that it would fit the new format of the blog.

Tuesday, December 23, 2003

8:52 PM - the wind up...

anticipation

I'm at my parents' house, visiting the fam for a week during the holidays. It's nice to see everyone and tiring at the same time, too. I know for a fact I'm never moving back to the town where I went to high school. I tried to get hazelnuts in the most forward-thinking grocery store in town (for those of you from Ithaca, Wegmans has come to Pennsylvania), and some woman in the store says something to the effect that they are "rare" or "exotic".... and of course my family thinks the acorn squash are weird. I can't wait to see what people think of the quinoa. I guess all vegetarian things are just "weird" here. Sheesh.

Finished my shopping and prepared a nifty surprise for my little brother. Don't tell.

So... here's a question for all you HTML gurus (guru-i!). If you're on a PC, you'll notice that on this page, the images are a slightly different color than the background, meaning that there is some discoloration which is kinda annoying around the edges of the images. The background color and the image color are exactly the same, in hex, according to photoshop. Neither my beautiful Mac nor my stinky UNIX/Solaris/Netscape machine at work show this problem... I've only seen it so far in Internet Explorer on PC's. Even Internet Explorer on the Mac's gets this one right... it seems to me that two things that are the same color should look like the same color. Any advice, anyone???

Happy Holidays to all, no matter what you celebrate, how you choose to celebrate, or who you're celebrating with. And if you're not celebrating anything at all at the moment... well... you can still have of my wishes for happiness anyways. Can't be any fairer than that.

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

2:19 PM - time for another historical note

flattery that got me nowhere

ooooh I didn't mention this in my last post... but the guy who does my hair, Kennedy, who also happens to be a singer and drag performer, wants be to be in a music video for a song he's doing! I got all blushy when he asked me to do it. heh. Someone teach me to dance? AJ???

Historical Note: The video was never mentioned again.

1:55 PM - I just saw Return of the King.

read all about it

Did that happen in the book?!?

That's the question I found myself asking over and over again as, this morning just after midnight, I saw the final Lord of the Rings movie. I mean... I read this thing in 7th grade and my grasp on it was admittedly pretty loose. I kept getting Sauron and Saruman confused (and I much preferred Wormtongue as a villain; you can't forget a name like Wormtongue) and all of the armies and maps and peoples and whatnot were a bit overwhelming. Let's also not forget that each character has at least 4 interchangable names, so it's no wonder I had trouble without a cheat sheet.

I will say that Peter Jackson's version makes an excellent cheat sheet.

In any case, Return of the King was pretty unfamiliar territory, especially for a book that I have supposedly read. Well, at least I remember the end pretty well.

Besides wishing things would stay true to the book, I'm also a stickler for realism.... I mean... somewhere someone invented a special effects technology to "attach" a live actor to a CG-creature. It looks awful in Star Wars, Episode 2 when Anakin does it to impress Amidala and it looks unrealistic in LotR 1 when Legolas jumps onto a bucking cave troll. Unfortunately, someone is still using that technology to stick Legolas onto horses and oliphaunts... although thankfully someone upgraded their software so it's not quite as bad. I guess, being a trapeze artist, I am sensitive to realistic human movement. I much prefer the subtle or simple special effects (LotR 1: "Bilbo Baggins! Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks...") and I think they're more effective than ones that end up looking like plastic after only a year or two.

For the most part, though, the movie was good. Good enough that I'll probably want to own the whole complete extended set. Everything is so pretty (and strangely, just like in the Matrix movies, my favorite color is white... like the beautiful city of Minas Tirith or Legolas' outfit at the end). There's a lot of blood, and I'm sure the extended edition will frame things and explain them a bit more thoroughly, but it's worth seeing in the theater. Especially if you happen to like elves.

Finally... and again this is mostly speculation, because I don't remember the books all that well... but finally, it's interesting to see how modern views about gender have changed things in the movies. I read the Tolkien biography and it was super interesting. One thing that is very apparent is that in Tolkien's life, he mostly associated with men. His students, his colleagues, in fact almost everyone in his life was a man. He only really dated one woman, married her, and his relationship with her was very separate from his social and professional lives. It's important to point this out because (I feel) it's important to understand some of the characters as they were originally intended. Tolkien has stated that there was no intention of homosexuality in his books, and in Tolkien's lifetime, close male friendships were much less "suspect". I feel that today, because we are a bit hypersensitive to homosexuality, it seems "obvious" in places where it originally may not have been intended. Frodo and Sam, Merry and Pippin, (and in the book, the bond that forms between Legolas and Gimli), all seem pretty blatantly gay, but more a reflection of modern interpretation than the original intent of the author. I wonder if Peter Jackson had thought about this stuff at all... and if he had, I wonder how much of his interpretation pushed the movie version in one way or the other.

On a similar note, PJ did a lot to flesh out Tolkien's female characters, who play even smaller roles in the book. Without re-reading the books, it seems like kick-ass-babe-Eowen is influenced almost as much by Xena as by Tolkien... then again, this gives me a reason to re-read the trilogy.

Ok then. Some of us are supposed to be working. Leave us a comment, precious, so I can pet the screen with my hand and say, "it came to me.... my own...."

Thursday, December 11, 2003

11:35 AM - this one is interesting in retrospect...

foreshadowing

This is a new post. I am doing this partially to see what happens when I have more than one post. Please bear with me!

I just got back from Brattleboro, Vermont, where I did a 5-day trapeze intensive with Elsie and Serenity Smith. The whole experience was fantastic. This was my first time back on a trapeze after my surgery last year, so I was pretty emotional. Some of what we did was really painful, too, but it's what I have to go through to stretch out my scar tissue and make it more functional again. Luckily, each time I stretched or hung from my arms, things were successively less painful. That's really good, because the first time, the pain was just downright nasty.

We made a video while I was there... It was great to finally have some good video of myself on a trapeze, although I was a little disappointed that I wasn't doing harder or more beautiful stuff... I guess I'm always going to be self-critical in that way. The final video turned out great; hopefully I can post little bits of it on this web page.

Brattleboro is a great small town. Things seemed very liberal in general-- they even had their own organic food co-op and one night a month is "gallery walk," where everything is open late and the works of local artists are on display. It was a huge social event, and very fun. I liked the community atomosphere in Brattleboro, too... and the snow was pretty!

Ok I'm going to stop now and see how the formatting on this thing works.

(update) trying to add comments, at AJ's request. (update again... I think it works!!)

Historical Note: I just found this entry while I was re-formatting the older entries in Blogger to match the newer entries. This one is particularly interesting when compared with, for example, August 2006.

10:16 AM - Hey everyone, look at me!

egad!

Ok, so this is a test posting to see how this Blogger thing actually works. I hope it's easy to use. I need to write a lot of text because I want to see how scrolling and all that actually works... Hrm. I originally wanted to post a blog so people could learn about my trapeze work and my shoulder injury... I was hoping to get some positive feedback about my injury and my shoulder recovery. Since then I have recovered quite a bit, so there isn't nearly as much that could go into a journal to make a good story.

I'd like to end with a link: discofish