Friday night I went to see South Pacific with my mom. It was fairly awesome. They had an orchestra in the pit with three trumpets and a harp and a shitload of violins and all the rest. That just ain't how it is lately at musicals. And they played the overture and the entr'acte and everything. It was awesome and every musical should have uh....music in it. There were literally a zillion people in the cast and an airplane onstage and working beach showers. The show had tons of singing, dancing, acting, cartwheels and cute old timey culouttes...I love musicals of all kinds, from all periods, but this was like, a MUSICAL and the production really did it right. The story is pretty goofy and weird when you get down to it, but who cared when everything was so goddamned entertaining?

Seeing a terrific show like that made me feel pretty sad about leaving Atlantic. I am confident its the right choice for me, but I also feel wistful at the thought of not being part of a body that makes theater, not being around people who love theater, who are good at talking about theater, who know how to do the million things that make plays happen. I can still be around those people of course, socially. And I can find other ways to participate in the theater community. But yeah, that's a little sad for me at the moment.

Then again, I'm psyched at getting involved with librarians. They're another hardcore bunch.

AT the intermission for South Pacific, I called Jen and she told me that when she was out walking the dogs, someone tried to pee on one of them.  I'm standing in the lobby of  the vivian beaumont at Lincoln Center and I'm like "WHAT? Someone tried to PEE on our DOG?" and my mom was all Shhhhhhhhhhhh! But seriously. That was bizarre and shocking. I think a surprised outburst was warranted.

Last night, we had another musical extravaganza...karaoke with Adam and Jeff and Erin. Jen sang, which she never ever does in public (although we sing a lot at home) and it was the cutest thing I ever ever ever saw. (She sang The Gambler, which reminded me of my last night in teach for america camp, which was a night of extreme drunkenness on the campus of the maritime college and involved a lot of hitting on a straight girl and intense talking about how we FELT about the EXPERIENCE.) Adam sang a lot of ballads in chinese and the asian people in the place were like, who's the bald jew who loves to sing the sad ones? There was a baby got back rendition that I found quite poor. I participated in a couple of Amy Winehouse hits, but then Erin and Adam and Jeff had some internal weirdness arise among them that I really didn't understand and Jen and I decided it was time to bounce. So I didn't get to sing my NKOTB selection.

I quit my job and took a new one. I was finding it very stressful and unpleasant to try and juggle

• the full time, high responsibility, many evenings required nonprofit job
• two classes of not difficult but annonyingly time consuming library school
• the part time job to make ends meet.
  
• real life. including trying to have a baby with Jen.

So a full time job at Kaplan presented itself, with slightly more money, a schedule that is much more flexible, a responsibility level that is much more appropriate relative to me pursing school and trying to make connections and move ahead in library land, and I actually love teaching for them, so...I took it. And I'm excited. But things have been a little awkward at work of course. Not least because a lot of people have left from my dept in the last 2 years. But everyone had their reasons. And I have mine, and I think my boss is trying to appreciate that, even if she really really really hates it at the same time.

 Where've I BEEN? 

Rearranging my whole life, basically. Still working on it.  More soon. 

In the meantime - 

This weather is UNACCEPTABLE. if this is another one of this shitty, rainy summers...I am going to be displeased.

My friend nicole has a voicemail number and you should call it. She leaves messages, you leave a message. Its sort of like postsecret without the suicidal levels of depression. Or Overheard in New York without the other person in the conversation. Or like uh, leaving a message for your friend. 

Anyway, call her.

1.339.368.KOCO

skype: misskoco 

You can listen to other messages here. http://misskoco.podbean.com

Some people are freaks. Some people are sweet. Some people are boring. Some people are me.

 

From factoflife

The daytime soap opera “As the World Turns” has had an ongoing storyline about a young gay couple (Luke and Noah)-- even if you don't watch the show, chances are you have come across mentions of it here on LJ or elsewhere on the net. The couple haven’t kissed since last September; recently they finally did get a couple of kisses on screen and it has caused the AFA (among others) to start a campaign against Proctor and Gamble, the sponsors of the show.

You can read about the American Family Association campaign here:

http://adage.com/article?article_id=126673

The AFA were kind enough to include the YouTube video of the kiss scene in their email with the warning "Content is repulsive." (BCH PLZ!)

http://youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3Ddd9xCntVqc4

Procter and Gamble is conducting poll about continuing the Luke and Noah storyline. Even if you don't watch but don't want to surrender to one group's hysterical homophbia and their trying to enforce unnecessary censorship, please call:

1-800-331-3774

Press 2 for the Luke and Noah poll, and then 1 to vote to continue the storyline.

Then post this info in your own LJ. That way we can reach more people.

I voted, and I'm not a soap opera fan. (Well, not daytime soaps...hey Dynasty, hey Melrose Place!) It only takes 30 seconds.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

I sometimes read books many many times. If I read it for school AND read it again for pleasure, its bold and underlined.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment - I originally read for school, for fucking SUMMER READING. For the next few years after that I decided to make it my summer reading every year and perversely read Crime and Punishment on the beach.
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose - my grandpa was like, if you read this, I'll be impressed. I did. I can only assume he was.
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey - rocks!
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad - rocks less.
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner - i have like 4 copies of the kite runner.
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex - this book fucking pissed me off.
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - stopped after the freaky animal sex club. Whatever.
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath - one of my all time favorite books.
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections - pissed me off
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - pissed me off slightly less.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things - my friend and I had Neil Diamond sign it!
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit - i fucking hated the hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

There's an article in the NYTImes sunday magazine about young gay guys getting married. I'd link to it, but I think its shitty, so I won't, lest anyone mistake the link as a recommendation to read.

The writer starts out by saying that he was intrigued that many young (i think he says under 26 years old) gay men are getting married in Mass. and he wanted to figure out why. He talks to a few gay couples who are married or getting married and comes to the scintillating conclusion that they got married because they felt like it. Much like young straight people who get married, these young guys feel like they really love each other, want to stay together forever, enjoy validating their relationship in the eyes of their family and seem to think it'll be fun to be married. I don't see why that's newsworthy.

There are some allusions to a more complex context within which these marriages work - for example the view of monogamy taken by these young gay couples vs. older gay male couples. That was slightly interesting. Or what happens when young gay marriages don't work and you're a 26 year old divorced homo. Ok, maybe that's sort of a topic.

And maybe this is typical of me, but I found the author's blithe dismissal of any discussion of gay female marriages really irksome. The author states that yes, young lesbians seemed to be marrying at a rate 2x that of young gay men, but he didn't want to look into that cause its known that women like to get married and settle down. I don't know, the whole thing just seems really bullshitty. I can't deny that lesbians are are on the whole more likely to become committed faster, to have kids, to move in and all of that...but dismissing a clearly relevant trend cause all girls dream of growing up and being a bride, seems lazy. The author might have gotten a lot more mileage out of comparing young gay vs. young lesbian marriages. Where there different reasons for the male vs. female choice to pursue marriage? different socioeconomic status? Different ways of celebrating, or rules for conduct within the union. Or even, expanding on the sentence about a different view of monogamy to delve deeper into the differences between young gay men vs. older gay men getting married. Just SOMETHING.

As it is, the article doesn't really go anywhere. I actually do see why this might be an interesting topic, young gay men so eager for committment, but without any historical discussion of gay male relationships, its totally useless. Its like the author thought "wow, its SO WEIRD that my friends are getting married" and then wrote an article about how weird it was.

I flirted with Jen unabashedly last night. To the point of sexily doing pushups in a cute bra and panties. 

But no. 
no no no. 

She says she's stressed out, not in the mood, and decides to instead of sex, she'd prefer to critque my ability to perform budget analysis. She finds my projections unfounded. We engage in an energized debate about the way I think, the way she thinks and how the differences frustrate us. We conclude that as frustrating as it is, we actually compliment each other.

Heated up for real now, I try again. 
Sexy sex sex? 

No. 

I decide I'm gonna have to do something about this myself and retire to the bedroom. But its just not the same without her. I pout. I drink some wine. I sigh, on demand an episode of the L word and get ready for bed. 

I'm in bed, about to sleep. Jen comes in. Jen leaves. Jen comes in again. Lays down. Topless. 

Demands to know why I persist in ignoring her. 

I giggle. Hot sex ensues.

Just now on CNN, they were making fun of Hillary, calling her a wonk, and some talking head scoffed (getting it slightly wrong), "She's got a 17 point plan on the bee pollen issue."

I heard this from the other room and shouted "THANK GOD!" Dissapearing bees is a serious and scary thing! Where are the bees?! A plan to to investigate and rectify the problem is appropriate! Seriously!

When Jen was a little girl, she cried and cried and when her mother asked what the problem was, poor little Jen managed to choke out that she was distraught becuase Sunday in the Park with George was closing and now she would never get to see it with Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin in the starring roles. 

Her mother, not being a huge devotee of broadway, had no idea what to say to that. At that point, she did try to get tickets, but they were of course, sold out. 

It shouldn't have been shocking though, that these things were of vital importance to Tiny Jen, because only a few years earlier, when Jen was a mere 9 years old, she had begged and begged to be taken to see Peter Allen and the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. She couldn't for the life of her understand by neither of her parents could understand the magnitude of this (homosexual) extravaganza. 

I love that my baby has been a tiny gay man her whole life long.