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Saturday, 9 February 2002 (reservations) 8:22am Then again, there are worse ways to have your name misspelled. 4:50pm Hair black now. Purty. |
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Thursday, 7 February 2002 (surrendering) 10:20am The car should be done today, in theory. They said "probably next Wednesday or Thursday," but that doesn't preclude the possibility of it not being ready until tomorrow or Monday. Or even longer. I just hope they bother to let me know; I can see waiting until next week, finally calling, and being told that I it's been ready for a few days and that I should have called sooner. You never can tell. (Kinda like walking into a store, seeing a "Check Your Bags" sign, and when you attempt to do just that being told by the very annoyed clerk that you don't have to check your bags.) (Actually, it wouldn't be too much like that, but it's happened to me a few times recently, and I swear, it's symbolic of something.) Being non-vehicular hasn't been quite as bad as I was afraid. I wouldn't want to do it permanently, but it's okay in short doses. Like, yesterday I needed to get my 'mones refilled. Since I was going to have to leave the house anyway, I decided to dispatch as many birds as possible. I took the inbound L to West Portal, hit the Library (the West Portal Branch had only put out their DVDs the day before and hadn't yet been picked clean, so I was able to score Touch of Evil, Casablanca, Dr. Strangelove and Traffic), used the ATM, got Ocean's 11 and the original Planet Of The Apes (probably to be the subject of another in-defense-of-remakes soon) on DVD at Diamond Video, hopped on the outbound L to 30th and Taraval, walked to Noriega, picked up my refill at Ace Pharmacy, did a bag's worth of shopping at Safeway, then took the outbound 71 back home. Felt rather productive, really, though I'm hoping to have the car before I have to take the movies back. That would just be annoying. (Not having done business with them since I last worked there in '95, I had to open an account with Diamond Video. I filled out the memership form and let them see my driver license and credit card, as required. According to the receipt, my name was entered into the system as Sheryln Connely. Are we sensing a pattern here?)
So Maddy went to the doctor this morning. Tuberculosis has been temporarily ruled out (as well it should be, since it
hasn't been a problem with emigrants from Kansas to California
for a long time),
but she had a throat swab fo all the same and is waiting to hear the results. Bottom line is, she's home from work
for the rest of the week.
The insurance did pay for the repairs. My rates will probably go up, but it's nice not to worry about it right now.
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Wednesday, 6 February 2002 (you owe me nothing in return) 5:30pm The cable's still out. It was supposed to be fixed today between noon and four, but it didn't happen. Why? Because the guy didn't ring our doorbell. He only rang the upper doorbell, for our neighbords (who never answered, although their car is here and I could have sworn I heard rumbling overhead). The doorbell is clearly marked with my last name, and when I talked to the company this morning I specifically mentioned that it was the lower doorbell—but apparently that information didn't make it to the right person, a person too dense to associate the name on his clipboard with the name on the doorbell and/or to consider ringing both doorbells when one doesn't answer. Urgh. The appointment has been rescheduled for sometime after 10am tomorrow, and I can only hope that a lesson will have been learned on their end. I wouldn't even mind so much if it weren't for the fact that Enterprise is on tonight, one of the few shows we watch. Then again, I'm not really liking it—I can only hope it's making people appreciates how good Voyager really was—so it evens out. In the meantime, we rented the original Ocean's 11 on DVD, which I've been curious about since reading Shawn Levy's Rat Pack Confidential. Now, I realize conventional wisdom is to canonize the original when a remake comes out, and a lot of people were up in arms about the sacrilege of daring to remake the so-called "classic," but I'm going to go out on a limb: it's not very good. The script was muddled, the direction was flat, and Sinatra's one-take-and-I'm-outta-here attitude towards filmmaking was more than a little obvious. If ever a movie was crying out to be remade with a cast and crew that gives a damn, it's this one.
Back in the real world, an unwell Madeline is going to her regular doctor tomorrow morning to have a throat swab and TB test.
Good lord, but this year is sucking.
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Tuesday, 5 February 2002 (that particular time) 9:40am There are a lot of things you don't want to happen when the car is in the shop, and your girlfriend going to the emergency room is way up on the list. This is how it started. 1:59pm The official vague theory is that she's been having sporadic nosebleeds which, for whatever reason, are running down the back of her throat. Ewwww. For now we're supposed to wait and see if it persists. And, ironically, she's home from work again. Meanwhile, the response to the show has been...well, there hasn't been any. We put up an email address at the end, but that's presuming that A) anyone made it to the end and B) felt compelled to write us about it, and apparently nobody did. It probably didn't also help that both Queen Bee TV and S*P*L*E*E*N were repeats, meaning we didn't get that lead-in audience. The "Coming Up Next" card after S*P*L*E*E*N even listed the wrong show. And if any of my readers in San Francisco watched they haven't written and told me (why, yes, that is a hint). Oh well. We enjoyed watching it, anyway.
And we finally made it onto the
online schedule and
producers page. Crave validation? Who, me?
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Monday, 4 February 2002 (precious illusions) 10:27am First, an observation: when the promotional art for a movie shows someone looking at the camera over the tops of dark glasses, it's a sign of desperation in the marketing department. They can't think of any other way to sell the movie, so the figure they'll make the characters look hip and attract people that way. If it was a good movie to begin with, they wouldn't have to resort to it. I offer here a few modest examples. By way of contrast, note that in the poster for The Matrix the glasses are being worn normally, and the original Back to the Future also avoids the curse by having the character look below the glasses, not above them, and he's not mugging at the the camera. Ah, the innocent days of movie advertising. At the studio on Saturday, we mentioned that we worried about the sound on the tape we'd already turned in. Unfortunately, it had already been put into the queue to be broadcast, and the person actually in charge of such things wasn't in. A note was left for him, and we were told that he'd call if there was any problem with the tape. Haven't heard anything yet, which means one of three thigns: he hasn't come in yet, hasn't checked it, or checked it and discovered it was fine. I'm betting on the second option; asking for help and being ignored has become a recurring theme in my life lately, particularly regarding technical stuff. Oh well. One way or another it'll be on tonight, and it'll be what it is, proper sound or not.
Even if nobody's sure how to pronounce it. It's kittypr0n, it's pronounced pretty much the way it looked (the zero
being an 'o', of course). The impulse seems to be to call it "Kitty Porn," which of course is what the title is a
play on, but that is not the title. But I have a feeling that's what it'll be called in the listings, though,
and we'll be constantly (thought politely) correcting misprounciations. What makes me so negative?
Y'see, my name rhymes with "Marilyn," but
I frequently hear it spoken as "Cheryl Lynn," even by people who've been told more than once. And as for the spelling...well,
there are more alternative spellings of it than I'd have ever guessed, even when the proper spelling has been provided
via two different kinds of official ID. So I have my doubts.
While I was there we checked the tape, and the sound seemed okay—it was there, at least. On the VCR in question there was a line at the bottom of the picture, but it was probably just bad tracking and won't show up in the broadcast. I hope. After that was taken care of, Maddy and I worked for about three hours on the second episode but didn't finish it. Just goes to prove the (aphorism? truism?) that projects expand to fill the time available. We booked another three hours for next week, and the episode doesn't have to be in until the end of the month anyway.
In the meantime, we're listed on the schedule for tonight. Spelled correctly, even.
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Sunday, 3 February 2002 (so unsexy) 9:05am We finally broke down and made an appointment to get our hair recolored next Saturday. Except for the occasional touchup on Maddy's blue bangs, it hasn't been done since late September now. My mother would be very pleased to see that my hair is brown. It may never again be as short as she likes (though I suppose she's a bit more tolerant of it with the whole gender thing factored in), but at least right now it's its natural color. Of course, she won't see me until after it's black again. I could write and tell her how it looks right now, but I suppose that would be teasing. Speaking of brown, Maddy pointed out to me that that was the color of the acid we took a while back. Burnout would probably say that it explains a lot about what happened later. (It's not poison. It's just bad acid.) Thankfully, I still believe in coincidence, mainly because we still have a couple hits left. If you're in America, you're probably aware that the Superbowl is today. That's as much as I know, anyway. I don't have the foggiest idea who's playing. All that matters to me is that the upstairs neighbors don't hold one of their parties like they do for the Academy Awards. They didn't last year, so I can only hope we'll be lucky again this year, especially since escape isn't quite so simple. We won't be watching (goes without saying, I guess), though I admit to being kinda curious about this year's slate of commercials; my computer still can't handle that kind of multimedia, though, so I guess I won't get to see the already infamous "drugs help the terrorists win" commercials by the White House. If I had it in me, I'd be bothered by the fact that two spots cost $1.6 million each in tax dollars to broadcast. But I don't, so I'm not. This is the world in which we live.
we are all just stars and we're waiting
Although I was a little worried at first, I knew The American Astronaut had Maddy hooked when
a cat figured into the plot and character arbitrarily renamed it Oscar. And, unlike the cat in Little Otik,
it survived the movie. I do find it interesting that many of the reviews I've read compare it to Rocky
Horror, when it really has much more in common with Richard Elfman's
Forbidden Zone. But nobody's
ever heard of that one, I guess.
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Saturday, 2 February 2002 (flinch) 10:19pm Y'know that feeling of being completely out of your depth, of not having the foggiest idea how to proceed, and having someone standing behind you expecting you to know what the hell to do? I got it this afternoon in a huge way in Editing Suite B at the studio. I had my notes and the handouts from the editing class, but that was quite a few weeks back and none of it was registering with me. I tried certain buttons in ways that seemed relevant, and even convinced myself that the fader bar was involved somehow, and all of this with Maddy sitting patiently next to me. Eventually I admitted that I was lost and had to pull over and ask for directions, but it took a while. Guess that's a masculine characteristic which doesn't go away too quickly, huh? We got pointed in the right direction, essentially a very gracious recap of the most basic functions on the machinery, and were back on track. Indeed, we'd built up quite a bit of momentum by the time our four hours was up. We weren't quite done, but we reserved more time for this Monday evening and should be able to finish our second episode then. The learning curve is steep, but once you get over it (and we won't know until we get back on Monday if I really have), using real editing equipment is much smoother than just two VCRs. Even if it doesn't feel quite so punk rock. Afterwards, we went to The Red Vic to see The American Astronaut. It technically came out in 2001 and we're barely into February, but I think it may be my favorite movie of the year. It's a perfectly weird and fun movie that exists in its own little world and plays by its own rules. The theater was packed and the audience was into it, even applauded at the end (due in no small part, I suppose, to the fact that writer/director/star/songwriter—did I mention it's a musical?—is from San Francisco), but I suspect the average moviegoer would hate it. But that's okay, because they'll probably never get to see it. |
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