Here's hoping the Birthday Curse misses you this year, and that your FSB services are enthusiastically requested!

"coiling the cables"

(Thanks to Steve.)

"...when the doctor tries to slip you the placebo."

"Suck on a bud of hops."

Anyone else feel the earthquake this morning?

I was sound asleep at 9:40-ish this morning, but it totally woke me up. Lasted about 5 seconds I guess, and I kept thinking it was a huge truck rumbling by on Marsh Road. Except it wasn't. I remember thinking, "Is this an earthquake? I thought it was supposed to feel like waves, but this just feels like deep vibrations¹" and promptly fell back to sleep.

I had completely forgotten about it until I was just listening to the news on WDEL and they mentioned it.

Hot damn! My first earthquake!

Pretty neat considering I was schlepping out to San Fran for all that time and never felt anything there.

I don't know why I'm so excited about this.


---------
¹ You're a slob. Get your mind out of the gutter. My parents read this, for heaven's sake!



music: Industrial Jazz Group: Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboy-Presidents

It's 6:50am.

At 6:30am, I finished the written portion of my book.  HELL YES! 
I clicked "Save" (though I click Save every 23 seconds) and Word crashed.  I lost the last few things I typed, which was totally no big deal.  So now I just retyped what I lost, and now I am officially officially done with the written part. Tally: 133 pages, 32,404 words.

Next: Sleep.
After that: I throw all the crap that's on top of my desk underneath my desk, and I record the video portion of it. 
After that: I do all the voiceovers.


I need to have this done by EOB tomorrow (6/30.)

No sweat.

But now... like I said... sleep.

• Had a fun time at Brian and Allison's wedding last night.  mrlich wasn't there, but I didn't feel particularly awkward attending solo.  My friends rock. 



• I knew it would be a long drive to and from the wedding (maybe 2.5 hours each way?), so I made a mix CD of tunes to keep me bopping and singing and rocking.  When I got on the road, my GPS sent me a way that looked very logical on a map, but took me through teeny farm towns on single-lane roads.  On one stretch of teeny road, I was driving about 20MPH behind a tractor with no way to get around them.  Separate Ways by Journey doesn't have the same pulse-thumping effect when you're driving 20 behind a tractor.  On the way home, I took a route that was about 30 miles out of the way and got home in 2 hours.  75MPH was more like it.  My homeward route took me past kar0na's neck of the woods, and I had seriously considered calling her at 10:30pm and saying, "Yo!  Let's get coffee!" but then my grown-up brain said, "Jill, you need to get to bed at a decent hour so you can get up at a decent hour and finish the book."  So I didn't.  (Sorry, Karen.)



• I'd forgotten how much I miss listening to Brian Dewan.  I listened to "Cut Your Hair" a few times.  "Don't Touch Me" by Brak got the multi-repeat treatment as well. 



• Last night I had very vivid dreams that Barenaked Ladies wanted me to audition to replace Steven Page.  They asked me to put together a video where I had to answer questions, and then fans would vote on whether or not they liked me.  I was the only chick auditioning, so I knew the fans would either dig that or hate that.  I was really anxious about it, because I wanted to be liked, and I knew I'd be picked apart for every little thing, and this would be on the Intartubez for all eternity.  I attribute this dream directly to me stressing out over beginning the video portion of my book tomorrow.  (My book is actually a book / DVD set.)

OK, back to the thing with the thing.

"Dude, I'm totally getting hot breakfast every day."

(as quoted by mrlich)

Hey fans and true-believers:

I'm in the final push for my book, so I'm heading underground until June 30th. During this time I ask your patience and forgiveness since my communications will be rather terse and impolite until then. Expect things like unreturned phone calls, unacknowledged emails, declined invitations for hang-time, lags in LJ response time, etc..

I know I talked to a few of you writerly types about perhaps sharing space while writing... I think I'm gonna have to reneg on that. I'm too distractable, and I'm going to want to gab with you no matter how many times we say, "OK, we're gonna stop talking now." (Insert "It's not you, it's me" speech here.)

When I do come up for air (ninja can't type for 15 hours a day, yo), it'll probably be in the form of tweets.

With that said: You can follow me directly at Twitter here. (I was gonna auto-update my LJ via LoudTwitter, but I opted against it.)

Right now my parents are saying, "What the heck is Twitter for, anyway? Why would anyone want that?"

Speaking of parents, mine totally rock.
If you know my folks, send 'em good vibes tomorrow, they've got a thing goin' on. (Yes, I'm being intentionally nebulous. It's cool.)

That is all.

Please to be searching Twitter on the string "crapnamesforsithlords."

@yagathai is farking SLAYING me... not surprising, really.

My favorites:
Darth Boyardee
Darth Gretsky
Darth JediFan1138
Darth Garfunkel (not a @yagathai creation, but dang funny)

That is all.

Here's the quick back and forth between me and the good doc this morning:

drjohn: Need a hug?

xtingu:  [clicking the link...] LOL! Is that true? Can you really hug someone in a way that'll make them poop?  Tell me, you medical professional!

drjohn: I cannot speak of the Brown Arts.

xtingu:  HAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAH!


I'm sorry, but "the Brown Arts" is the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. 

( Got some thoughts floating in my head, mostly of the mundane sort.  Posting them here to free up some RAM. )

That is all.

Told you it was mundane.

"mexican eggnog"

Who wants to play frisbee?
--

Anemia is in full effect. 

My body has simply run out of iron.  It's the usual deal: No amount of sleep refreshes me; I can't think, I forget words and stop mid-sentence, holding onto a train of thought takes TONS of concentration, my limbs weigh 98732 tons, talking on the phone takes effort, responding to emails feels insurmountable.  I actually fell asleep during a conference call today.  Bleh.

My legs are covered in large, strange bruises -- probably 7 or 8 on each leg.  I was joking about them at jeremym's wedding this weekend, but I know they're just a symptom.  I can put on an energetic, engaged game face for a couple of hours at a shot, but after that I am done done done done dot com.

Flipside used up the last of my iron stores.  No wonder why I was poopy on Flipside Sunday-- I ran myself too hard on Saturday night.  I can't believe I didn't recognize it.  (Since I was wearing contacts that weekend, my lower eyelid was red because it was slightly irked.  Now that my contacts have been out, it is flesh-colored.  [Checking your lower-inner eyelid is a quick and dirty way to see if you're low on iron.  If it's orangey-red, you're good.])

Now, I have my usual dilemma: Timing my next infusion.  If I get dosed up on iron now, I most likely won't be able to get another one before Burning Man.  (Doc likes to space them 4-6 months apart now.  Grrrr.) 

So, do I spend the rest of my summer feeling like a 800-pound ragdoll so I can be healthy for the playa, or do I get juiced up now and feel meh when I'm 4,000-ish feet in elevation and need all the iron reserves I can get?

The only choice is getting it done ASAP: I've got a book to finish by June 30, which requires the ability to think for more than 10 minutes at a time.

OK, whining done now.

Because gay is like Cats (“now and forever”), while heroin is like Twitter (fun at first, sure, but you’ll regret it one day).

-- ganked from this week's Savage Love column.

I've been keeping a mental list of what constitutes my Own Personal Hell. It started off simply as having Jack Palance, Jerry Lewis and Carol Channing as roommates, but has progressed much further since then (especially now that I've grown to appreciate these entertainers as I get older.)

I intend on updating this post as my Own Personal Hell changes over time. I will try to keep a change log. But for now, we'll start with the most current version.

=================================
Because this is hell, I cannot sleep through, get out of, or make a fun private game out of the activities below:

When I go to hell:

Attendance will be mandatory at readings of the A Night Without Armor: The poetry of Jewel (including the stuff she wrote in middle school), as read by painfully slow, 3rd grade reading-level monotone readers.

Every day there will be a seven-hour baby shower where everyone coos "Awww, that's so precious!" over every gift which is sloooowly unwrapped by the wrapping-paper-saving mom-to-be. My roommate for all eternity, Nancy Grace, will sit next to me at the baby shower and will rile the attendees into badgering me, "So when is JILL going to have a baby? They're God's little gift!" There will be colicky babies at the event, and the women will be trying to get me to hold their children so I can "see how wonderful and natural it is." They will point and laugh when I tell them I'm not comfortable holding floppy-necked newborns. When a mother does convince me to hold her baby, it will instinctively reach for my boob and then start to shriek. I will not be allowed earplugs.

I will take a 4-hour window-seat flight (normally a good thing) where the guy in front of me has the seat reclined all the way, and the girl in the middle seat next to me is all in my space... not because she is large, but because she is a situationally unaware, inconsiderate douchebag. Our legs will keep touching, she will fall asleep sprawled in my space with her shoulder, arm and leg waaay on my side of the divider thing, and her water bottle will jab me in the leg. To top this off, there will be entire rows in the back of the plane which she could have all to herself, but she just HAD to sit up front.¹

My iPod will only have bad college a cappella groups singing underpitched / out of tune renditions of songs I hate to have ruined, removing all joy I ever got out of the original. Every song that was in a minor key will end with a Picardy third.

Every evening I will be on the callbacks panel for Annie tryouts, where I must listen to 50 throaty, shouty renditions of "Tomorrow." As I say "No, thank you" to each red-wigged girl holding a stuffed dog, I will have to answer to their evil stage mother for making their precious snowflake cry. I will then be forced to ceremoniously give them each a trophy because "We're all winners."

My downtime will be spent in overcrowded malls with people with loud, lungmeaty coughs and runny noses, none of whom cover their mouths when they sneeze or hack. I will be offered a delicious Cinnabon from someone who has clearly coughed on it. Other illin' folks will want to hug me, and will ask for an explanation for my resistance.

When I am allowed outside for walks, the ground will be uneven and poorly lit, so I will be unsure of every step. I will have two mosquito bites which get rubbed by my pants, making them itch incessantly.

Any joy I get out of seeing a passing dog will be instantly negated when it starts humping my leg as a crowd of frat boys walks by.


------------
¹ Just added 5/10/09, as this is a true story

Tags: hell

I was just informed that I'm going to be teaching in Austin for the whole week prior to Flipside. I also was just informed that my beau is going hiking that weekend with his best friend, which means I have the weekend free (though I would need to be back east by Monday afternoon), which means I could theoretically go to Flipside.

It's more of a fanciful and fun daydream rather than something I'm actually considering.... especially given that I have no ticket, no camp, no tent, and no idea how it works, really. (Plus, I'm a chronic planner, and I have not planned for this.)

Realistically, a mellow weekend at home would probably do me good. Work has been kicking my arse.

Mark (aka lotusanddragon) had a friend Yoshie visiting from Japan last week. Yoshie is from Okayama and speaks English at about a 4 on a scale of 1 - 10. She was absolutely delightful to hang with, and jumped into our happy group of friends and activities with an enthusiastic smile. Woot!

Anyhoo, she arrived safely back in Okayama yesterday and sent an email to Mark that says:

Thank you.
It's difficult to express my many thanks.
I wish your happiness.
Please become more happy.

P.S.
I love your lovely friends!

How awesome is that line?

That is all.

Gotta love creepy vintage ads.

(Thanks, StumbleUpon!)