The boots I ordered arrived today, sooner than I'd expected. Unfortunately, I don't think they'll survive what I'm likely to put them through, so I get to ship them back to the UK. Oh well. It was worth a shot.

9:35pm

Wanna know what I hate about being told Don't Put This In Your Blog, aside from the fact that this page isn't a goddamned blog? It's that it's almost always mundane, gossipy shit about other people, the kind of stuff I don't talk about anyway. Now, if I was (for example) dating a woman significantly younger than myself that'd be worth mentioning, but I'm not, and what do my loyal readers care about someone else? Sheesh.

10:03pm

I went by The Dark Room last night. As soon as she saw me, Erin said You Look Tired. I guess it shows.

Maybe the secret of becoming a star really is knowing how to behave like one.

While I was there, I decided to try Bed Bath & Beyond for black bedsheets for the living room walls. Target doesn't carry them, K-Mart no longer exists, and I refuse to travel to Wal-Mart, where I must sadly confess to having gotten the original set. I'm rather embarrassed that the place hadn't occurred to me before.

They had them, and I was standing in the checkout line, a preteen boy and girl ahead of me in line with their mother keep stealing glances at me. Brief stares, anyway. I tried staring back at the girl, but it only really works with people who are aware that staring is considered rude; evidently this is not a lesson the mother had imparted. Before long, I heard the boy whispering to the girl in a voice which clearly wasn't as whispery as he'd thought, That's A Man. The girl replied, quiet enough for me not to hear. Evidently she was uncertain, because her brother nodded his head and said Yeah, That's A Man.

Surely accustomed to tuning out the majority of her progeny's conversations, the mother paid no mind. I felt trapped and helpless. What the hell could I do? Fix them with my best glower? Yeah, that's a swell way to seem feminine. Tell them no, i'm not, or more accurately, it's none of your business? I put on a little foundation this morning, but otherwise, I was barefaced. This is how I look. There's only so much I can do about it.

It feels like there's been a lot of that lately. A couple of the guys from the Programming department came by my desk yesterday afternoon to ask if it was possible that we could get the date of production for every movie we offer. I replied that while anything's possible, and we wish we could, the probability of it is close to nil. One of them laughed and said what sounded like I Knew He Was Going To Say That! I could be wrong. But that's what my body heard and reacted to.

The guy at Big O Tire called me "sir" when he hung up the phone.

I'm using a temp computer at work. Excel and Word never functioned properly on my reguarl computer, so it's being nuked from orbit. Unfortuantely, I was unaware that Oulook Express downloads mail to the hard drive rather than keeping it on the server. Ergo, I've lost all my work email.

Please don't take a picture.

5:13pm

Repent, kids! This is your god now!

Or maybe this. Yeah, much more likely. We're made in its image, right? Isn't that how the stupid little fairy tale goes?

5:57pm

it doesn't always have to end in tears. sometimes just ending is enough.

sometime after midnight

For those who are concerned about such things, my hoofing this evening was without incident. As was the majority of my time at the party, but that's pretty much what I was expecting.

Good lord, I'm becoming more like my mother all the time. Oh well. Our recent differences in opinion aside (and how I should live my life is something we haven't agreed about in many a moon), there are worse people to take after.

I'm getting to use the parking space this week, but starting next week, I either try my luck out in the jungle, or I start taking the train for real. Wheee.

When I have money to burn, I want to get blue contact lenses. Just to see what I'd look like as a full-on Aryan. On a more affordable level, I'm going to be taking up Taos on her long-standing offer to tweeze my brows. I've never been crazy about them, and now that the hair above them is light, they feel even heavier to me. (Seeing the occasional picture like this doesn't help much, either, since I'm very suggestible.) It raises a question which I've pondered for years: how much can I do to my appearance and still look like me? Will I recognize myself as a blue-eyed blonde with shaped eyebrows?

Yes, I think I will. Other people may find it off-putting, may not think it's how I should be, but that's okay. I'm long past feeling the need to live my life according to other peoples' expectations. I'm a selfish slut, remember? Downright slatternish. The choices I make are my own. If someone else thinks I've made the wrong one, that's their problem, even if they're right. It was my wrong decision to make.

By the way, after two months, I think it's safe to say that I'm not getting back together with Maddy. It was safe to say after two days, but a lot of people didn't want to accept it. Guess what? Time's up. Accept it. I am not going to "come to my senses." It's really fucking insulting that anyone would even suggest such a thing. Coming to my senses what realizing that being in the relationship was tearing me up. Got that? I was not happy. I may not be pure sunshine now, and in fact I've been in a lot more pain than I tend to make obvious due to a long history of not being comfortable expressing such things, but I'm better than I was because I no longer feel trapped. Yes, it was a trap I got myself into by marrying her not once but twice (as she often reminds me, in addition to the fact that we were together six years and that she's thirty-four years old), but right or wrong, I've extricated myself from the situation, and I'm better off for it.

She's a great person and we hope to always be good friends, but we are not going to be a couple. Even if we do ever get intimate—who knows? sex with her might be fun again someday—we sure as hell won't be monogamous. Period dot.

And don't fucking pray for me. I believe in neither prayer nor miracles nor whatever invisible man in the sky you happen to think is pulling your strings, okay? I think a miracle would be your invisible man getting hit by an invisible truck and dying.

In three words: get the hell over it.

Thank you, drive through.

Being a real employee doesn't make the anxiety go away, not entirely. They can always change their mind. I don't think that's going to happen, but it doesn't make me feel any less nervous about an impending meeting. Several of us were given a list of studios to call to request their 2257 documents, and the boss doesn't considering leaving a message to be enough. The problem is, there's only so much one can do on this end. If they don't answer their phone, what else am I supposed to do? Get them to speak to me through sheer force of will? Doesn't work like that. So, I'm expecting to be cranked at, along with a few other people as well. So not looking forward to it.

Later, I went The Dark Room for the second season of The Twilight Zone plays, and the latest Uphill Both Ways show. Twilight Zone made me a little sad. I made the conscious decision not to direct an episode this time around, and though I put my name on the list of available actors, nobody cast me. I haven't been in a play since Zippy last year, though I fully admit I haven't been keeping as close an eye on casting calls as I should be. I miss being on stage. I do know I'm not going to be in the next two plays at The Dark Room, since they're already cast, and I wasn't even approached. Guess they know I'm not right for them. I'm a regular at Bad Movie Night, though. That's something. And I have plenty of gigs over the next few months, so I'm not truly stagnating. It just feels like it.

The application deadline for AIRspace at the Jon Sims Center is in a couple weeks. I don't think I'm going to make it.

11:11pm

In spite of having rented and copied it earlier this week, I never actually got a chance to watch Joy Sticks all the way through until Bad Movie Night this evening. Man oh man, is it a bad movie. Really, really bad. Makes me glad that Maddy and I went to see Born Into Brothels this afternoon at the Red Vic. Evens things out a bit.