note to self

best not to post while ill and cranky.

maybe i should just be grateful I am still capable of emotionally overdramatic?

I just don't know what to do with myself

There's many things I've wanted in life. I've gotten some. Most have fallen through. But in life, like baseball, even a .333 batting average is pretty darn good. Everything comes at you fast.

I don't feel like I've had much focus on what I wanted. And I look back on the past few years, and the one thing I've wanted--well I think I was still too diffuse to get it. Not focused enough.

Or maybe that would not have helped. I"m not a superhero; a crisis on this earth is about as much as I can handle, and that poorly.

Still, it saddens me that knowing the opportunity is lost is what makes me realize the important bits. It wasn't the status or the rules or the noise. It was the person. Their presence in your life. And there's the loss.

You're not going to ever have enough time with a person you value. Maybe with one moment, if you could stretch that moment forever, but they change. You change. and each moment would take an infinity to explore. You don't get that. And if you did, would you even value it? It's the loss that makes you realize the value.

My grandma wanted to be a singer, more than anything. When I realized I would never be a performer, I asked her:
"What do you do, Grandma? What do you do when you can't have the one thing you want?"

She told me:
"You just keep going."

Skills I Really Don't Need: Authorware

I've spent some time recently figuring out Authorware.

Yay me?

This Post Could Use More Intellectual Organization

A friend on Facebook posted a link to this article which got me thinking: http://oshotimes.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/the-hypocrisy-of-make-up/

I come from a theatrical background--but my best friend and most of my family are hippies, so I've generally gotten both sides of this argument. Still, the article seems to set out the anti-makeup position pretty succinctly.

A couple of things to start, however:
- Women are still overly judged on their looks - makeup or no. In fact the current focus on minimal makeup, minimal garments, in my opinion has only contributed to increases in anorexia and self-abuse, as to receive respect women must no longer rely on externals (girdles, makeup) but must make harsh internal changes (diet that brings them to dangerously low levels of body fat, plastic surgery). Makeup can be liberation (see also punks and goths). I pity men that it is unacceptable for them to use. (Aside: for much of the 20th century, running a beauty parlor was one of the few self-sustaining jobs women could easily hold--and often the only creative one.) Makeup is a democratically-available form of artistic expression, available to women who are generally denied outlets for creative expression.

- I believe the poster confuses "beauty" with "prettyness." Beauty challenges. Beauty is mutable, changeable and challenges. Pretty does not challenge, pretty is small and attainable and non-threatening and plastic. There is a reason that the poem goes "Beauty is Truth; Truth, Beauty" and not "Pretty is truth." That statement feels ridiculous doesn't it? Although I appreciated the parallels with Vonnegut (if I remember correctly, in the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent pretty women needed to be handicapped by wearing bad makeup).

- The whole argument about shaving is self-justification about the author's preferences. Sorry, by rights of the rest of the arguments, shaving does not get a pass.

- To someone who knows makeup, the woman in the picture is obviously wearing it.

As well she should be! Transferring a 3d image (real life) into a 2D photograph changes what you look like. To really see how she appears in real life, she needs to wear makeup so the depths and shallows of shading appear in the photograph as they would in reality.

So:

I do not wear makeup to be pretty. I am pretty without makeup. I know this.

Makeup is my war paint, with which I mark the transition into the challenges of the day from my private time alone.

Makeup is my art, with which I demonstrate the truth of my internal state on my external being.

Makeup is clothing for my face, a mask that reveals like in Greek Theater. I did not mind wearing non-waterproof mascara to the funeral; the streaks only highlighted on my body the grief I felt.

The purpose of art is to reveal truth through falsehood. Makeup is a creative act. Just as a sand painting cannot match the painted desert, makeup often cannot match the beauty of what is--

--but if artifice cannot lead to truth and beauty, what is the purpose of art?

I wear makeup for the same reasons I sing, I write, I act: because there are some truths that cannot be revealed by what we see.

I Bring the Eyeliner

I never was, well, musical. Pretty voice but I never enjoyed singing.

My delivery was either cold or completely overemotional and lost. Singing was nerve-wracking. Choral stuff sometimes--I cried through most of the performance of Brahms’ Requiem.

Years of piano lessons, years of playing French Horn and I was just awful. I dated a bunch of musicians, but I always described myself as a “music appreciator.” Or a “really good audience.”

Microphones were worse. All of my years doing readings, I would push the mike out of the way and declaim in the same loud voice my much-quieter sister used to use to get me into trouble when we were kids, until my parents caught on.

So when my coworkers were having what more or less amounted to band night at a local bar, my first thought was that they wouldn’t get me near it.

I pretty much swore it, just until the moment Bob said to me, “Hey, you sing, right? Why don’t you sing with us? We’re just throwing a band together.”

And to my surprise, I heard myself saying “Yeah, sure, why not?”

Week before the show I was horribly flu-ly ill. Missed rehearsal--couldn’t have sung even if I had been able to get out of bed. I did an awful job of promoting it--was afraid to tell anyone until i knew if I’d be able to sing at all.

So: afraid of the mike, worried I won’t even make it through the song without coughing, hopped up on Advil Cold & Sinus. I played tambourine through most of the set--joking that i was only there cause being on stage gave me the best seat in the house. “Singing? I bring the eyeliner!”

Finally it was time for me to sing Coin-Operated Boy outside of my car. Without Amanda Palmer. In front of coworkers. Surprising numbers of them. With a BAND. A band I had never rehearsed with.

I have never had so much fun in my life. The feedback didn’t throw me--I just moved positions until it was fixed. The dropped bridge phrase? no problem. Hell, I even remembered all the words. In order!

What I miss most about not dating musicians is not having music in the house. Took me a long time to realize I could make my own.

Sick. and memory.

My mother told me once, when I was in my early 20s, that when she was a little girl, her grandmother (whom she adored) would give her baloney sandwiches and tea when she was sick. She told me that when she has a cold, she--my vegetarian, health-food particular mother--craves the memory of those baloney/white bread/yellow mustard sandwiches.

Ever since then, I have wanted to eat baloney sandwiches when I'm sick.

I'm sick now. My sandwich--nitrate-free turkey baloney from Whole Foods, arugula, French camembert and Maille mustard--is not quite the same as hers. But I've always thought of it as a better memory of my great-grandma.

I remember her house being close and small and stuffy, and I was usually carsick when we got there. My grandpa's youngest brother had Down's and I was never quite sure how to deal with quiet, kind Vinnie with his odd face, round belly and plaid work shirts. I know stories about her--she was deeply loved by her children and even her daughter-in-law, my grandma. My mother has said that most of the happiest memories of her childhood were at her grandma's house.

Except the baloney part? It never happened. It really is a baloney story.

I brought it up to my mother a year or two ago and she said, "I don't remember that. That wasn't me. It's a lovely story, but she never gave me that."

Memory, to me, is an organic process. As long as our memories are alive, so are the people we have lost. And for something to be alive, it must change.

So I still eat baloney when I am sick, because although the facts may be wrong, I know that my great-grandma would have taken care of--did take care of--my mother when she was sick or ill or lonely.

And just as the sandwich data changes from wonder bread to ezekiel bread but remains in essence the same: baloney, bread, mustard--what remains is that memory of a bond, of love.

But I wonder: who the hell told me that story?

Obligatory iPad and Flash post.

Now that I've gotten to play with an iPad a bit more, I understand a bit more why someone would be interested. I still don't want one.

I admit that I'm completely in love with my iPhone, so perhaps I'm jaded or there's a sense of been-there, done that. Still, I was on the iPhone for less than five minutes before I wanted one.

I'm an MacHead. I admit it. And I've never been a fan of Flash--I'm on record more than once complaining about it, loudly, since 1999ish--but web surfing on my phone without Flash-ability has definitely been an annoyance. But it's my PHONE. This is not a deal-breaker.

Something like the iPad bothers me more.

My friend Emre told me that you can make a ton of money reselling iPhones in Turkey, because there's such a huge demand for them. He has a friend who funds his vacations that way: buys five iPhones, sells them for the equivalent of $1K apiece while he's there, and he's covered his trip and then some.

The reason they're in demand is that 3G is the only way to access ALL the Internet--that is without government censorship.

What would they give for a 3G iPad, true Internet access in a screen larger than a deck of cards? Except it's not the entire Internet. There's no Flash.

Sure, Apple is right that they aren't required to provide access to the entire Internet. And people are right to question Adobe elevating Flash to a position alongside html, CSS, js and other web standards.

But Flash is a bit of a de facto standard, if not de jure. And whether censorship is corporate or governmental, to me, it's just wrong. We can tart it 

So yeah, maybe I'll buy an iPad--when it supports the Plugin I Hate Most in the World. Because I may disagree entirely with your web architecture, but I will fight for your right to use it. 

Somehow, that's just not the catchy ending I had wanted.