tavie.com

I'm having a spell of insomnia and came in to watch some mindless tv. Stopped on a movie I'd never heard of on the Lifetime Movie Network, a ridiculous film called Dreams for an Insomniac, starring a badly miscast Ione Skye as a truly unsympathetic main character and the Wrong Astin Brother as her love interest, and suddenly I hear some familiar chords and there's an Aimee song! "You're With Stupid Now", to be exact. I'm always pleasantly surprised when that happens.

This movie sucks though. I'm only watching it because sometimes movies and tv shows about insomniacs make me sleepy. But Ione Skye is really bad at playing an insomniac. Plus she has ugly lipstick on throughout the film.

But what do you want from the Lifetime Movie Network.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 4:30 AM | shower me with attention

Wait, he's being funny.

Okay then.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:09 AM | shower me with attention

Is that Seth Gree--

YES IT IS!!!

Why is he in Josie and the Pussycats?

WHY WHY WHY???

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:08 AM | shower me with attention

Friday, May 09, 2003

The kittens are here! The kittens are here! Right now they're curled up on my bed together. I left the room with the tv on and when I came back, there they were, on my bed, sleepy-eyed.

And so cute. But that's sort of an unnecessary statement, as kittens are, by nature, cute. So I won't say how these may well be the cutest kittens in the whole wide world.

They're black with white feet and bellies. One is a boy, one is a girl. Boy has a white-and-pink nose, and is the runt of the litter. (I chose him.) Girl is slightly larger, all-black face (including nose!) and white chin. Round blue eyes. They are tiny. Seven weeks Monday. (Not supposed to leave Mama til eight weeks but lady HAD to get rid of them as soon as possible. Still three in the litter left, so if anyone in the area is looking to adopt a kitten...)

The names aren't completely set in stone yet, but they're, to use a pottery term, leather-hard. The girl is definitely Maya. My sister's choice. I got to choose the name of the other one, and was all set to go with Hawkeye, ("Benjamin Franklin 'Hawkeye' Pierce Phillips", to be exact) but the rest of my family objected. They wanted names that matched. So my mom suggested Inca. Maya and Inca. I wasn't thrilled at first, but the name has grown on me. I wanted to throw in one final bid for Francesca and Bruno, but it's not gonna happen. And, anyway, I've always wanted a dog so I'm going to save Hawkeye for when I can finally have a dog.

And, anyway, I can call him Inca-dinka-doo.

So far, not a single person I've spoken to has liked the name, but he really does look like an Inca, and the rest of my family all pushed for it.

So I guess it's Maya and Inca.

Mayhaps someone will come over soon with a camera... I've been videotaping them like crazy, because one thing I always regretted with my Lily and my Rosie was that we never got them on tape. But no cables to get video on computer. Poop.

Inca groomed his sister the whole subway ride home. Lick, lick, lick. It was unbelievably-- my god-- squeal. Squealies. Squealment.

My parents get home from their cruise tomorrow. I can't wait 'til they meet the babies.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:47 PM | shower me with attention

Why didn't anyone tell me I lisp?

I got out the video camera and taped an introductory monologue of myself pre-kittens as a way of postponing my research proposal (which I have STARTED! And I have written the RESEARCH QUESTION section!) and then I watched it and... hey, I lisp.

That thuckth.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 5:41 PM | shower me with attention

In my dreams, I can speak in a perfect Australian accent.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:33 AM | shower me with attention

Thursday, May 08, 2003

Tomorrow we're getting two new kittens.

I'm the only person home (parents get back Saturday, Kirsten works tomorrow) so I'm going to meet the kitten-lady in Midtown and get the kittens and bring them here.

Our apartment is in no way a safe environment for kittens right now (see earlier rants about the warehouse/garbage dump-like state of my living quarters), but I spent most of last night and tonight making the room my sister and I share inhabitable for kittens. It's clean, it's as safe as it can be, and there's enough floorspace for them to play. They'll only be allowed out under strictest supervision until the rest of my family pitches in and helps me get this place safe for them, which I suspect will be a gradual process taking place over the next week or so. Until then, they live in our room. That's my law. That's the Law of Tavie.

That said, I am very excited.

I've also been thinking about Lily and Rosie all day. I know they know I love them and I'm not replacing them. They can't be replaced. I'm just adding, not replacing. Adding. It's addition. It's math.

It feels weird not to be at Mint Manor.

I have still not started my paper but I swear I will tomorrow.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:46 PM | shower me with attention

I'm not sure what's important to me anymore.

Actually, I'm not sure what was ever really important to me.

I had to throw a lot of the old things away (Grow Up To Be A Disney Animator! Graduate Prestigious Public High School and Get Into Good College!) and replace them with smaller things (Grow Up! Get Out of Bed in the Morning! Go to Any College!) and now I've got these sort of smallish-average things in my metaphorical basket (Graduate College! Pay Off Credit Card Bills! Have A Crappily-Paying But Otherwise Pleasant Part-Time Job!) and I kind of want to dump everything out of the basket and replace it all with jellybeans.

I don't even like jellybeans. What a stupid metaphor. Where did this basket come from, anyway?

Long dark twenties twenties/Loser!

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:30 AM | shower me with attention

I saw a man today walking up Lexington Avenue wearing nothing but his tightie-whities. No shoes, no shirt, nothing but tightie-whities.

And they weren't that damn tight. Sort of baggy, really.

He reached the corner of 69th and turned nonchalantly down towards Third.

Undy-wear is funny.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:20 AM | shower me with attention

Wednesday, May 07, 2003

I got one passable piece off the pottery wheel tonight. A wide bowl with a little bowl rising out of the center. Sort of a big candle-holder type thing. I must remember to go into the pottery studio tomorrow and place it on the greenware cart to be bisqued because we're not allowed to work on things past Friday? Which means that most of my bowls will go unglazed? It would've been nice if someone had told us this before.

Actually, my teacher's exact words had been, "You'll be able to use the studio until the end of the month." That was last week. This week is an entirely different story. Now we only have til Friday. Which means, goodbye everything that was thrown in the last two weeks. There's no consistency with this woman. She's an awful, awful teacher.

Today she gave a slideshow of her work. It lasted over an hour. Usually her slideshows feature other artists and go by nice and quickly. This one dragged, because she felt it necessary to tell us her life story. More than half the slides were of her travels from the past 25 years. I shouldn't have been relieved when she finally started showing pictures of her ceramic work, because, as it turned out, her work is all about female circumcision. It's very disturbing to look at-- incredibly ugly, and I understand the power of her intended message-- and accompanying the slides was an endless, terribly graphic lecture about the horrors of female circumcision.

I'm all for educating the people. But, for god's sake, I've been over the female circumcision issue in countless anthro classes, as well as a feminism class. I've got it. To pound it so relentlessly into the heads of people who were there to learn how to throw and glaze pots was unnecessary.

But, she kept repeating, the primary intended audience of her work is Western women: us, those of us sitting there in the class. (What about the men in the class? Could they have gotten up and left, then?) She feels it is necessary to educate and inform Western women because we "have it so good" and we "need to be woken up". While I'm not denying the truth in this, in many cases, I found her implicit messages insulting and racist. And although her slides from her trips to Asia and Africa were interesting, they weren't ceramics.

I wanted to get up and leave, get back to glazing my pieces, but I didn't. Good thing, too: I found out later she had locked us in. That's gotta be a fire hazard. And us so close to blazing kilns.

We filled out the instructor evaluation scantrons tonight, and I was brutally honest.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:53 PM | shower me with attention

I dreamed that Gina's whole family-- mother, father, sisters, brothers, (in-law and regular), nephews-- came to visit and we had a barbecue outside. Her mom and nephews were splashing about in a big inflatable pool. And then I looked up at the sky and there was an airplane, and I saw it turn down suddenly at a 90-degree angle and plummet towards the ground. Then the sky turned orange and Gina's sister screamed, "The sun fell out of the sky! The sun fell out of the sky!" Then came the pandemonium and we all tried to run from the sun plummeting towards the earth. We ran inside and there was a huge man, red all over, with horns-- yeah, a big old cliche of a devil, I don't control the dreams-- and he was herding people down into a dark chamber. I tried to get away from him and managed to escape and ran outside and there was the barbecue again. Then I had the whole dream again, only this time I knew that I was repeating it. I kept telling them, "It's going to happen the same way, we're all going to die and I'm doomed to keep having this nightmare" and they were like, "Do you want relish on your hot dog?" And the sun kept falling out of the sky.

I blame the Benadryl.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:12 PM | shower me with attention

Make way for the kittens!

The kittens are coming

Dust is dusty in the nose and dusty in the eyes

No dusty kittens if you please!

Benadryl helps undo what the dust done done

But it makes me sleepy and tend to ramble

Done bun can't be undone hun fun sun run

Run DMC

The kittens are coming!

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:02 AM | shower me with attention

Tuesday, May 06, 2003

I know I've said it before, but I really cannot stress it enough: Inverness by The Loud Family is the best song ever written. And try to get the original album version, which is even better than this live Aimee cover.

Dude. Just saying.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:41 AM | shower me with attention

Last night I dreamed that Mark married Naomi. It would be weird in real life, what with him being married to lovely Marina and all, but it wasn't weird in Dreamworld.

And I traveled to Japan, where the wedding was taking place, and Mark wore a blue tuxedo and kissed my hand.

Then I dreamed that someone I used to be friends with that I've been dreaming about a lot lately got mad at me and yelled because I was an attention-stealer and only thought of myself, and I was so glad she was yelling at me because it meant we were friends.

When you dream, your brain
sends out random electrical impulses that your analytical forebrain scrambles to make
sense of, assigning meaning to them.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:55 AM | shower me with attention

Why haven't you started your proposal yet? Why haven't you started your proposal yet? Proposal yet? Proposal yet?

It's due in exactly thirteen days. Thirteen days. Thirteen days.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 9:41 AM | shower me with attention

Monday, May 05, 2003

When I bought this yarn on ebay a few weeks ago, I very lazily ignored the weight/gauge of the yarn I was buying, and failed to notice that I was getting a very light sport-weight yarn. I began knitting it up anyway, and I'm so way into it now that I just ordered another skein.

It's a little extravagant, but there are worse habits I could have than yarn.

I'm making it into a really light scarf-- decoration, not warmth-- in a roman stripe pattern, which is a very simple lace pattern, the first lacy pattern I've tried. It takes some getting used to, all that k'ing2tog (I speak a different language! All that "knitting two together", which is just knitting two stitches together at once), but I'm loving it.

Yes, I know I have homework to do.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 6:17 PM | shower me with attention

Listening to that Broadway internet station, and it really sucks that I can't control what songs come on, because there is some cheesy-ass shit playing through my headphones a lot of the time. The good stuff makes it worth it, but, you know, I think the very cheesiest line ever written for musical theatre is from Phantom of the Opera:
Let me take you away to my kingdom
Where all must pay homage to music

This song would be so much better if she was singing it:

I really want to print that out and frame it on my desk.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:56 PM | shower me with attention

I've been repeatedly advised by various friends to read the Lemony Snicket books. Finally, yesterday, at erin's urging, I grabbed Gina's copy of The Bad Beginning.

It's great. I find it much more engaging than Harry Potter. Not that there's any need for comparison, but when you have these new-fangled, faddish, childrens' series with an old-fashioned flavour to them, you can't help but. So far I'm much more drawn to these characters. There's something much more E. Nesbitt and C.S. Lewis about these kids. Although I still like Harry too, he's a good old chap.

But I wish I'd snagged more than one. I read this first one in about twelve seconds. I sort of forgot, when I was taking it, that I'm older than six and therefore it won't take me as long to finish it...

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:35 PM | shower me with attention

My poor sister accidentally took an old lady's grocery bag while standing at the bus stop.

Poor old lady. I hope she doesn't miss her box of waffles, quart of 2% milk, two tins of vienna sausages and three bags of frozen ravioli.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:56 AM | shower me with attention

Sunday, May 04, 2003

My caffeine addiction is a problem. The frequency of headaches/need for caffeine is increased (last Wednesday, supposedly a caffeine-embargo day, I bought a coffee on the way to class because I was jonesin' some'm bad), and I think the coffee's starting to stain my teeth. Attractive.

I figger with the 2-3 travel mugs of coffee every work day (and at least a junior pot a day on Fridays and Saturdays), added to the uncounted cans and glasses of Diet Coke, I'm pulling in close to a gram of caffeine a day. (Equivalent to 10 6-oz cups of coffee.) Not Foley level, but then, I don't have access to the kind of expensive teeth-bleaching procedures that he must.

I'm worried about the inability to work/wake more than the teeth, of course. And the headaches. Jesus god, the headaches.

Anyhow, this site told me about the hormones and stuff that caffeine messes with, which of course overlap with the sleep hormones. Throw the antidepressants into the mix and you've got an Endocrinological Jamboree.

I've got these two chemical addictions that are playing holy hell with my ability to sleep at night, and I can't function without either of them right now.

Oh, well. Whaddyagonnado.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:40 AM | shower me with attention