i auditioned for an improv group last week, though i haven't heard back yet.

oh.

Slightly uncomfortable silence.

Then: uh, which one?

I told them.

Another silence. well, good luck with that.

Man, improv really is the red-headed stepchild of the theater world, isn't it? I had variations on the above conversation four times last night at cocktail party. It was a fundraiser for the theater group my Twilight Zone leads Nell and Chris belong to, so it felt only right to attend. It was like a mini Zone reunion, in fact, since Dav'id (the third and final actor in my episode, not counting The Golden Throat of Dr. Hal Robins) and Reg were there as well. Though Reg wasn't in The Midnight Sun—we were both in The Silence—he was probably my episode's biggest fan; towards the end, he watched every rehearsal and performance. I'm sure it helped that there were two scantily-clad and glisteny-wet girls on stage, but eye candy only counts for so much.

Dav'id told me that the video of the final performance turned out great. The low red light didn't affect the focus or sharpness, Vash's artwork at center stage looks like "a portal to another world," and the part that made me literally bounce up and down with glee: it looks like a Coil video. That's probably the single highest compliment my silly little copyright violation (or the video thereof) could receive, because it means I nailed the mood. He even said that the technical glitch (the writer/director/sound person took so long at home futzing with her hair and makeup, by the time the vain wannabe whore reached The Dark Room, it was too late to do a soundcheck, thus she didn't discover that a certain piece of equipment wasn't turned on until that moment in the play) isn't really noticeable if you aren't aware of it ahead of time, especially because my brilliant cast improvised around it, plus the flub actually made sense in the context of the play. So, it's not so much a happy accident as an accident that could have been a whole hell of a lot unhappier. In any event, I should be getting a copy of the DVD this weekend (and Christa will be receiving hers not too long thereafter).

I briefly met the founder of the group, the actor who played the cop that got his ear sliced off in Reservoir Dogs. I've known some people who would have been engaging in some serious jean-creaming, especially while I was in film school at San Francisco State University and everyone but me was sucking Tarantino's dick. (Saw Pulp Fiction in the theater, hated it, and haven't been able to sit through it again.) Bucky once told me sardonically that up until the mid-nineties, everyone there wanted to be David Lynch. Damn. I got there a few years too late.

Among the items in the silent auction was an action figure of the actor's Reservoir Dogs character, complete with missing ear. Must be cool to have an action figure of yourself. Not a bad career goal, either. And not a doll, either, but an action figure. Yeah, there is a difference: I tend to find action figures much hotter; a box in my garage contains the various fembot action figures which graced my desk at CNET once, including Scully from the X-Files movie and Halle Berry from the first X-Men movie. There's a pattern there, not counting the X. I'd take one of those over a Barbie any day of the week. Well, except for the Morticia Addams Barbie, of course. And anything, anything is better than the extreme please-gawd-make-it-stop squick factor of the Amanda LePore doll. Ew. Ew. EW.

All semantics aside, Vash's proposed paper doll of me (part of a series including other people) will be the cutest thing ever.

3:41pm

For a myriad of reasons (absent-mindedness combined with a desire to pay off a rather pressing debt), I'm only now getting around to paying my taxes. Just in time, too, since the extension ends on October 15. I've decided to bite the forty-dollar bullet and do it online in order to assure that the payment actually goes through on time. Unfortunately, TurboTax has uncovered a rather major error in my math from when I filed the extension. Actually, it's not so much an error in math as it is missing a major element of the form, because I had to work as an independent contractor for a few months last year and as such have to file like two or three extra forms in addition to the 1040 and long story short(er), I owe a lot more than I expected to. I'm not going to say that it's a perfect week coming to a perfect end, by it's certainly an appropriate end.

Not that the week is quite over, and there are some ups to go with the downs. I had a rather nice if extremely late evening at the Power Exchange last night, and even better, Vash and I are spending tonight and tomorrow together. Tonight is going to be about homework (and she's offered to go over my taxes, being the payroll punk she is), and we're spending Saturday night in Inverness after a friend's wedding. Truthfully, I don't care exactly where we're going or why. Just away with her sounds like the perfect place to be.

9:53pm

Though here with Vash isn't such a bad place to be, either. We're at the Black Light District, and she crashed when we got home from dinner nearly an hour ago. Our homework and tax plans didn't quite work out, but that's all right. Why I haven't crashed as well is a mystery, considering that I'm operating on about four hours of sleep, a small Caramel Mocha purchased twelve hours ago, and (it would seem) a hell of a lot of inertia.

I'm going to be all right. We're going to be all right. Better, even.

Probably because I wasn't blonde yet and and didn't have my Penny Lane coat in 1998 when the album came out, I'd forgotten about my cameo in R.E.M.'s "At My Most Beautiful" video. (YouTube Link.) See, right there, at exactly two minutes in? Perfectly timed to coincide with the first instance of the word "beautiful," no less. Thanks, Michael. I owe you one.

4:24pm

Considering how garish I look much of the time, it's astonishing how much other people are able to project onto me like a blank screen.

5:01pm

I love words and language. It's always fun to learn and incorporate new words into my lexicon, be they newly coined phrases (I've finally made my piece with bling), or pre-existing words I'm discovering for the first time. Being the spelling fascist that I am, however, it always throws me off-kilter to discover alternate spellings of words. My first impulse is to assume that the word is misspelled—which, let's face it, is generally a safe assumption. Americans—nay, humans—can't spell for shit. I'm quite monolingual (aside from occasional Babelfish-powered Spanish conversations with Vash over gmail), but I'd bet the rest of the world is like that too, a wanton disregard for one's own language.

What weirds me out is coming across different spellings of words I already know. I don't mean things like the CW's peculiar spelling of "girly" in their awful recent ad campaign. (It's supposed to be with a "y", damnit, not an "ie.") I mean recently seeing the word "materiel" on the side of a van and figuring it was a misspelling, only to come across it in a book shortly thereafter. It was enough to send me scurrying to dictionary.com, only to discover the "materiel" is a valid spelling of "material." The same thing has happened with me over the years with kerb, tyre (a British usage), and manikin. That variation messed with my head the most, since I first encountered it in the California Achievement Test in high school. Not a good time to be confronted with such a thing. Makes you wonder why that horrible movie didn't use the simpler-looking spelling.

As this month's diary picture will attest, I experimented with pink hair earlier this year. I liked how it looked, but I let it fade and then get mostly bleached out when it seemed to be coincided with an increase of hey, that's a GUY! comments on the street. Better safe and all that. Last week, I noticed that it seems to not only be making a comeback on its own, but in places I didn't put it in the first place, like my bangs. (Okay, there's pink in my bangs in the above picture, but pick pick.) Not that I would object to a shift in my DNA resulting in naturally pink hair (it would confirm the alien origin theory), but a more prosaic answer has suggested itself: Vash recently re-reddened her hair, and we're nothing if not world-class nuzzlers. QED.

3:31pm

This is not me at my shiniest. Or most well-rested.

I dropped my car off at a mechanic yesterday morning, the same one who fixed it last year after its major trauma. There hasn't seemed to be anything wrong with it, but I figure regular maintenance is a good thing. When I picked up it this morning he said it's in as good a shape as it can possibly be, all things considered. Since he did very little actual work on it, he only charged me two sawbucks. Hooray for small miracles and honest mechanics.

Vash and I stayed the night at Wonderland, and I spent part of the night crying and purging, begging forgiveness for my hurting her, mourning the past, feeling unable to properly convey the depth of my love for her, trying to express myself as best as I could with my defenses down, the poor tired girl comforting me in her sleep-deprived state. Normally I wear pajamas to sleep (I keep a set at her place, in fact), but last night needed to be as close to her as I could possibly get, as though she'd go away if I my flesh wasn't touching hers. Patently absurd, she's not going anywhere (especially not from her own home in the middle of the night, for pete's sake), but I'm mildly insane right now.

Late-night crying jags have me get it out of my system before, but no such luck. I've spent a lot of today in the restroom, trying to keep it to myself, occasionally giving myself marks on my arm with my recently Jivano'd knife which look not unlike the optical soundtrack on motion picture film. The convenient thing about my makeup these days is that it looks pretty much the same whether I've been crying or not.

Why am I so unstable right now? My theory is based around the fact that this bout of hyper-emotionality started shortly after I made the decision (with my doctor's support but not exactly his encouragement) to increase my hormone dosage from four milligrams of Estradiol per day to six. Coincidence? Not damn likely. Temporary? God, I hope so. The emotional unpleasant side effects, that is, this state in which every meaningless thing feels like it has the potential to break my heart all over again. I'm going to ride them out for as long as I can, and only decrease the dose if my head and heart don't level out.

To home, to Perdita, to solitude. Until I head back out into the world again, since between the solitude and Perdita, it's difficult for me to write at home.

8:44pm

Good lord. I may not head back out into the world again tonight, not after that trip home.

Vash and I got into San Francisco around six this morning, and I took the outbound N to my mechanic, who's conveniently located a few blocks from the terminal stop that I get on at every morning. After I retrieved my car, I saw that an inbound N was about to leave, and figured if I managed to catch it, I stood a chance in hell of getting to work on time. So I parked in the first decent spot I could find, 47th and Judah, street cleaning Thursday mornings at seven, no problem, and rushed to get to the train—

—rushed so much, in fact, that I neglected to turn off the headlights which I hadn't needed to turn on in the first place. I discovered this unpleasant fact around six this evening when I unsuccessfully attempted to start the car. It had been such a grindingly difficult day as it was, I didn't overtly react, shout fuck!, anything like that. It just...figured. Par for today's course.

The problem was that the car happened to be parked directly across from a local bar I've never liked. Granted, I've never actually gone in, but there's almost always people outside smoking and hanging out, and I give them a wide berth, walking on the other side of the street. Drunk straight men make me very uncomfortable. They look at me funny, if you know what I mean. And look. Lord knows there were a few pairs of eyes following me as I got into my car in the first place. And now, I'd have to call AAA for a jump, and they'd get themselves a little show as the tall pigtailed whatsit has to be rescued. It was almost enough to make me shout fuck! Almost.

I briefly considered doing it tomorrow morning before the bar opened (which is to say, before eight), but that would be cutting it too close to street cleaning; I'd have to be out there by at least six to be safe. Uh-unnh, baby. Not going to happen. No way. Also not going to happen no way no how was actually going into the bar and asking for help. I'm sure that one of those big strong men had jumper cables in their car and could help me, but, no. I'm simply not that brave, and I wasn't for being seen that close.

So, I bit the bullet and called AAA right then and there. Up to forty-five minutes. Naturally. As I waited in the car I brushed out my pigtails and removed some of the more ostentatious makeup. You never know. The tow truck guy was fairly prompt, and did a remarkable job of not saying a word to me unless I forced it out of him.

(I have to admit, for as much as I dislike iTunes otherwise, I wish Winamp kept track of how many times you've played a particular track the way iTunes does. I'd love to know how many times I've listened to "Against All Odds.")

Though I really do need to work more on the story, and elsewhere is the best place to do it, I don't think it's going to happen. I need to shower, and I need to sleep. The latter is going to be tricky. I historically have great difficulty sleeping when I'm severely depressed—lying there in the dark with nothing to distract me from my thoughts is never pleasant. I have drugs, but not the right kind. No valium left, and pot would be a very, very bad thing. Once again, I admire the people who it actually calms down. Don't I wish.

10:31pm

The tricky thing about trying to avoid past mistakes is that you often wind up making new, unfamiliar ones. The devil you know and all.

and if i show you my dark side
will you still hold me tonight?
and if i open my heart to you
and show you my weak side
what would you do?

My increasingly buff girlfriend is participating in the Doggone Fun Run next month, a 5K which benefits Pets Are Wonderful Support and the SPCA. She's running in honor of Rage, her best friend's recently departed cat. (Said friend lives in New York, so I never got to meet Rage, sadly.) You know you want to donate.

12:09pm

No recordé lo que significa estar lastimada. Es una cosa buena. (Recordar es una cosa buena.)

11:02pm

When I got home from work today, I played "Against All Odds" a few times and then watched the first forty-five minutes or so of The Last Temptation of Christ. Seems my comfort media is pretty much the same as it was fifteen years ago.

I'm through feeling this way. I am so over it. There's no good reason, no reason at all. And, as I cannot possibly emphasize strongly enough, it is not Vash's fault. These are my own idiosyncratic emotions [are there any other kind? —ed.], and nobody else can be held accountable for them. My Vulcan side is beginning to view it all as an illness, an aberration which will (hopefully) run its course soon. Something's gone screwy upstairs—that's an extremely Vulcan phrase, I'll have you know—and whatever part of the brain which controls such things is sending out the all sensations I associate with a broken heart: that heaviness in the chest, the pressure of water behind my eyes waiting to leak if I think of the wrong thing, the need to listen to constantly listen to Phil Collins ballads from eighties movies. As you can imagine, it's getting really friggin' tedious.

Ali pinged me over gmail this evening (it was probably, like, noon last Thursday in Australia), and we chatted for a couple hours. It was really nice. Sometimes the right people emerge at the right times.

As a result, I got a late start on my Big Plan of going to a coffeehouse to work on my story. I eventually did make it to Java Beach around ten, bought a hot chocolate (a rather misguided attempt to be strong and not have a mocha), and was all productive. I had another conceptual breakthrough on the story, one which makes me feel like it might not suck. Or, at least, makes me feel like I can write the damn thing, which I've been uncertain about.

I had an audition last week, didn't I? Keeps slipping my mind. Probably a good sign. If I don't get into the group, I won't be epsecially disappointed. Of course, if I am accepted, my life will change. As much as when I got cast in Night of the Living Dead? Maybe. I don't know.

Vash and I did Folsom today. Last year, our paths crossed for less than a minute, and I felt a pull as she walked away. This time, I was always going in the right direction.

Bad Movie Night was really great tonight, much better than I was expecting given my energy level after a very long day physically and emotionally. Afterwards, Anamoly and I went back to her place and talked for a few hours, schoolnight be damned. It's always good to get another perspective on things.

It was over and done by a quarter past nine, which worked out well since it gave me a chance to work on my piece for Maddy's show next month. The story's been kicking my ass, because it's erotica, which is so not my strong suit. I've never much cared for reading it, and writing it presenting a challenge as well. Which is part of the fun, I suppose. It helps that I have a girlfriend who not only doesn't mind me drawing inspiration from our sex life, but genuinely likes me incorporating it into my work. Some people (whether in a relationship or not) get cranky about these things, which is certainly their prerogative.

When the LGBT Center closed, I took the five minute walk to the Power Exchange, and continued writing longhand. (I'd been on my undead laptop at Center.) The guy at the front door has always looked at my ID before, but this time he just said go on in, hon. Heaven help me, I think I'm a regular.

For the Friday night of Folsom weekend, it was remarkably slow. Granted, at ten o'clock on most any night there isn't much of a crowd, but even as it started to near midnight it hadn't picked up much. I guess it's on the biggest kink weekend of the year, the Power Exchange is passe. Well, more passe than usual. Which is not to say that I was uninterrupted as I wrote; a few men attempted to strike up conversations with me, including one who asked if I was "working tonight." In a display of naivete remarkable even by my standards, I parsed the question as referring to my writing, so I said yes. Duh.

Around the time I hit the inevitable roadblock in my writing, the regulars I usually hang out with arrived. I played with them for a while, mostly just the guy trying out his various floggers on my back. He can be charitably described as being very far from my meeting my aesthetic criteria, but he's really nice, and I feel quite comfortable with him. It helps that there's no pressure; the last time I was there, I wasn't especially in the mood to play, and he didn't push me at all. Also, it doesn't have to be so deadly serious. I can talk and make jokes and laugh throughout it all, and I don't get bitchslapped for being too cerebral. That counts for a lot.

I left around half past one, which seemed reasonable enough considering that I had to get up early on Saturday morning. Well, not that early. It wasn't a schoolnight, but Cindy and I had plans to go to the gym at nine. And so we did, another location of the one that wouldn't let me quit a couple months back. Well, I'll sure show them. We're hoping to start going on a regular basis together, aided by the fact that she's moved into the Sunst and we live all of five minutes from each other. In fact, tonight Vash and I are going to Cindy's place for a "thank you for helping us move" dinner. I didn't help as much as I should have, but I guess I still qualify.

sometime after midnight

I've been listening to Pet Sounds a lot lately. Draw your own conclusions.

Before the cab driver resumed his Solitaire game the other day, I asked him if there was a regulation against cab drivers taking their foot off the brake while the passenger door is open. He said that no, there isn't. I should be surprised by that, but I'm not.

At Eighth and Mission on Tuesday night, I saw a Peachy's Puffs girl complete with the candy-and-tchotchke tray pulling a wheeled suitcase and trying to hail a cab, while a group of men at the Muni stop where in full-on leer mode. The look on her face at that moment did not suggest someone who was entirely thrilled with her life.

The last of the Tim & Roma! Shows I worked on is finally online. Ironically, it's also the first one I worked on, as it was shot at the Nob Hill Theater June of last year. It's actually a really fun episode, and the Nob Hill Theater is a fascinating place. I worked the boom mic, no simple feat given all the narrow corridors and cramped spaces at the theater, but I'd daresay the sound is damned good. Oh, and my name did make it into the credits this time. It's not accompanied by a face shot like everyone else's credit, and we did shoot one. Musta gotten lost or something. (I can be glimpsed in the shower mirror briefly, and my skeleton glove makes a few appearances gripping the boom.) At least there's no tribble abuse, and my name is spelled correctly, which is the absolute least I can hope for.

Don't forget to watch vast quantities of gay porn at Sherilyn's Grindhouse. If there's any kind in particular you'd like—more hunks, twinks, African-American, Asian—lemme know and I'll hook ya up.

We'd kinda hoped to go the Museum of Modern Art, the site of our first date, but they're between exhbits right now, so Laffing Sal it is.

From my notebook last year:

9/22/05
(later)
In the screening room with Vash. Actually, she just stepped out. Don't know how long we've been in here, but we've outlasted everyone else, gone for several cycles. This is so fucking cool. Still can't tell if she's into me or not...

9/23/05
Boy, she really nailed me last night. Figured me out, I mean. She was plaing a Prokofiev CD in her car, and I said "Most of what I know about his music is--" "Film-based?" she finished. I had to laugh. "Yep," I replied. "Woody Allen used his music in Love and Death, and I'm pretty sure Tarkovsky used it too."

9/24/05
I had a damned good tuna sammich at about 7:30 last night, a veggie or two from the snack table at the Studio Z party, and then nothing until a bowl of tofu and a Seitan strip around 4pm Saturday afternoon. Oh, and I got maybe an hour of sleep, and exerted a lot of energy all night. It may be good for the soul, but it can't be good for the body, though my body felt good the majority of the night.

We went back to my place and fucked all night. Wow, it CAN happen.

9/25/05
palm tug-of-war descending into laughter, the easiest smile i've ever known, short argyle socks with cats on them, no neck-biting please (so so so sorry), scratching and biting and clawing, the perfection of blackened light, "i feel like a pillow queen," not knowing what to do for me because I wouldn't tell (why?), no orgasm until no longer new, a spectacle at studio z, realizing at the cat club that we might as well just go back to my place--her suggestion!, she wants to go home with me, the sheer trust in falling asleep so quickly, "can we walk to the ocean?", an extended moment of gentleness and affection I never wanted to end--

9/26/05
Wow. Two breakups in one year. Well, this is what I wanted, right? I guess this makes me officially alienated from that crowd; I don't expect Taos will be bleaching my hair again anytime soon. Vash seems to like me, but there's no telling where thay may go.