Exit, Pursued by Bear

I have a history of shrugging off minor bumps and bruises only to find out later that I should have gone to the doctor immediately. So when I got a strange spot on my skin -- could that be a spider bite? -- I decided would rather be extra cautious and had Blade take me to an immediate care clinic.

When I mentioned it on Facebook, my friend Steve replied that he'd just been to the ER. Right now, Steve and two of our other good friends, Marty and Tim, are backpacking in the mountains in Colorado. I was afraid one of them had fallen off a cliff or something.


Me (on Facebook): As everyone knows, the best way to finish a Very Long Day is at the urgent care center.

Steve (via text): Small world! We were at the emergency room last night, too!

Me: Who was hurt? Are you all ok now?!

Steve: Yes. Sorry, that was mean. Marty had a weird altitude-related breathing thing, but they checked him out and he's completely fine now.

Me: My awful sore was caused by falling asleep at the computer.* First world problems.

Steve: Marty's lung pain was caused by ascending and descending a 13,000 ft mountain too fast. Awesomely-in-shape-super-badass-problems. ...



Me: Do not scare me like that, Slagg.

Steve: You did the same thing to Facebook!

Me: Sort of, but urgent care and the ER are nowhere near the same thing. Urgent care is for bug bites and flu shots, things like that. The ER is for when you get mauled by a bear while camping.

Steve: Fair enough. No, getting mauled by a bear isn't likely to happen until tonight. ...




*I take medicine at night for a sleeping problem, and I usually have about half an hour before it kicks in. Once it kicks in, though, I'm asleep immediately. This weekend, I misjudged that window of time, and I sat down at the computer to catch up on a couple of things before the medicine knocked me out. 

Five hours later, I woke up, still sitting on my couch, with a blister where my arm had been resting on the edge of my laptop. 

At least, I thought that's what it was, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't a spider bite, because it was more painful and angry-looking than blisters usually are. I knew a guy who waited too long to treat a spider bite on his leg, and his muscle was permanently damaged, so I am now absolutely paranoid about spider bites. 

I am very aware of how ridiculous it is to have a falling-asleep-at-the-computer injury.

Girlfriends. Also, narwhals.

Somehow, possibly because someone on the women's committee got me confused with one of my friends, I am heading up drama for my church's women's retreat, which will focus on female friendship.

My first thought was to adapt scenes from plays. I spent hours in the library and came up with nothing that passed my modified Bechdel test -- that is, that contained at least two women, {modification: who are not sisters or mother/daughter,} who have names, who speak to one another about something other than men.

Because of the nature of church retreats, improv isn't going to work, so I am supposed to write or adapt scripts for three short scenes.

There are reasons I am not qualified to do this. In outline form, those reasons are:

1. I have never been on a women's retreat. At any church. Ever.
    A) Aren't they for moms?
    B) Or at least grown-ups?
    C) I'm little.

2. I have never written a script.
    A) Remembering words is hard.
    B) Things always seem funnier when everyone discovers them together.
    C) I don't have good ideas when I'm by myself.
       a) A girl who has a theater background is talking out the scripts with me.
          i) It helps.
          ii) But only if she's there.
       b) Seriously, can I just have a couple of solid ensemble members and a suggestion of anything at all?


3. I am not good at female friendship.
    A) My ratio of guy friends to girl friends* is something like 9:2. If we expand that to friends I've had for over three years and still regularly interact with, that ratio is more like 9:1.
         a) I'm better friends with people I play with regularly.
             i) I mostly play with boys.
             ii) Why do girls quit playing?
         b) I do not have a roommate.
             i) My boyfriend has 5 roommates.
             ii) See 3.A.a.i.
             iii) A big part of me would rather spend a weekend being goofy with them than being awkwardly polite to women who I am sure are perfectly lovely and fun but with whom I'm not comfortable because I am shy-ish. Which I should and will just suck up and deal with.
         c) I have tried to put myself in situations to be better friends with women, particularly at church.
            i) They all seem to have a lot of girlfriends already.
            ii) It's hard to tell if there's room for more.
    B) When Blade tried to get me to brainstorm and feel more positive, he said, "Tell me a story about two narwhals. Who are friends. And also are girls."
         a) So I told a story about two narwhals
            i) who were friends
            ii) and also were girls.
         b) They swam around together for awhile, and that was fun.
         c) One day they looked around and realized they had been swimming in different directions for a long time and couldn't remember the last time they floated by each other.
            i) Neither could remember why.
            ii) Neither of them did anything to remedy the lack-of-proximity situation.
            iii) No one ever talked about it. 
            iv) Hey, I wonder where that gal went, I liked her.
            v) Shrug.
         d) The End.

With the generous help of newfriend 2.C.a, I have two scripts and one outline with some wiggle room in it. I feel pretty good about them. Still, it should not have been this angsty to come up with under 10 minutes of material. And my brainstorm story should not have been so sad.


*In this particular case, I am defining friend as "someone with whom I regularly interact, whose life I know and care about, and who knows and cares about my life." There are loads of people, guys and gals, I think fondly of but don't ever see or keep in touch with due to geographical distance or such wildly disparate schedules that when we do see one another we have to start off with something like, "So how was that thing you were doing last year? Where do you work again? Are you still dating that guy? Oh, wait, you moved? When did you move?"

Pretty cunning, don't you think?

This is my friend Liz.

Liz's apartment is often filled with balloons.

Liz makes movies. Last year, she learned all sorts of useful things, like how to cook and how to play tag. She's gearing up to teach other people things this year, so we'll see how that goes for her.

Real Liz (as opposed to HowToLiz, a distinction that can be wonderfully blurry some days) and I get together most weeks to watch TV, eat snacks, pray, and talk. I taught her to crochet not long ago, so now we are crafty together, too.

I made her a hat* for Christmas. It is featured about 3 minutes into her latest episode:

 

*The hat is Jayne's hat from Firefly. He receives it about 5:50 into this clip.

Aw, Miracle Cat ...

Back in November, Stradivarius and the Other Kinds* recorded a Bat as a Christmas present for our friend Duke, whom we miss. The only advertising we did was through a Facebook event, which told us to expect 12 people including the performers. By the time the show started, we had 70 or 80 people in the audience. Maybe more. Such a fun surprise.

The recording arrived in Laos via Thailand last week. Now that Duke's had first dibs, I can post the show online. Download it here: Daylight Savings Bat (aka "Miracle Cat") -- 11/6/2010

I listened to a piece of it for the first time the other day. It's always awkward to watch or listen to shows you performed. Besides the "does my voice really sound like that?" feeling, my main reaction is to be overwhelmed that people seem to enjoy when my friends and I sit around for half an hour and say strange things into the dark.

My favorite element of the show is how many of the later scenes grew out of a mistake in the beginning. In the third scene of the first beat, Marty asks Meredith why he would even bring up the cat --- now that I hear it, he clearly intended to convey that the cat had died. However, Kevin and I didn't pick up on that nuance at the moment, and we mewed as though the cat were on the porch.

At this point, Marty and Meredith had several options for dealing with our mistake:

1. Ignore us and move on like they never heard the mewing.
2. Call us out as a new cat or a stray.
3. Acknowledge us as the same cat and
    a) ignore/deny Marty's earlier implication about the cat being dead.
    b) kill the evil zombie cat.
    c) treat cat resurrection as a normal occurance.
    d) get excited about a miracle.

I am so pleased they chose to be excited rather than force everything into making real-world sense or killing off what didn't fit into their preconception. Miracle Cat mistakes are my favorite kind of mistakes.




*Stradivarius and the Other Kinds is**: Josh Blaney, Skizz Cheney, Meredith Malony, Kevin McLenithan, Marty Jones, and me, with generous assistance from Brendon Culhane and Blade Barringer.

**Or at least, it was for that show. We may grow and rearrange soon.

O Tree Most Fair and Lovely

Last year, I hacked my own apartment's Christmas tree out of an upside-down tomato cage covered in green fabric. It got the job done in a minimalist kind of way.

This year, my friend Sarah decided that a tomato cage Christmas tree was unacceptable, and she gave me the present of a little artificial tree, perfect for my apartment.

The trouble was that I didn't technically have any Christmas ornaments. So the first Sunday of Advent, I invited my boyfriend Blade and my friend Steve over to help me make decorations.

Here is what we came up with:

Your skirt's crooked.

I did end up finding a handful of little glass ball ornaments at a garage sale. The tree skirt is actually one of my summer skirts, and the garland and flowers are pieces of a long-abandoned crochet project. We used paint chips from Home Depot instead of buying construction paper.

 

Upon closer examination, you will notice:

The Amazing Technicolor Dream Bear

I crocheted him last winter as a test run for a baby shower present.

The Christmas Caterpillar

He started out as one of those paper kissing balls you make in 3rd grade art class, but that failed, so he became a squinty little caterpillar.

The Abominable Cyclops

Blade made the happiest cyclops in the world.

 The Seraph

I told Steve I wanted an angel topper. He made one of those scary angels from Isaiah, all covered in wings and eyes.

I'm not sure it would win Martha Stewart's approval, but it's worlds cheerier than the tomato cage.

TGITMOHSN

This is my friend Duke.

"I have faced existentialism and bitten my thumb at it."

Throughout college, Duke gathered friends and strangers around him for movie nights, often referred to with one of the following handy acronyms:

TGIBF (Thank God It's Brazil Friday, in which we did not watch more than ten minutes of Brazil every week before we changed our minds and picked another movie)

TGIBFBF (Thank God It's Boys From Brazil Friday, in which we similarly did not watch more than ten minutes of Boys from Brazil)

TGINMOPIN (Thank God It's Not My Own Private Idaho Night, in which, as rumor has it, they watched way too much of My Own Private Idaho)

After our cursory scans of the theme movie, the actual movies we watched ranged from popular to obscure, but usually more on the obscure side. Many weren't in English. Some turned out to be great movies, like Secret Sunshine and Tokyo Godfathers. Others turned out to be abusive, like Carnivale, or laughably horrible, like Zardoz. Some were too baffling to categorize, like Wool 100%. We didn't know what to expect, but we knew it wouldn't be run-of-the-mill. No summer blockbusters here.

---

These days, Duke is teaching English classes in Laos. We miss Duke. Besides missing him for his own sake, I've also noticed that my friends get together less frequently when he's not here. That combined with my new living alone situation, I see less of my friends than I would like.

So when Steve asked if I would open my apartment to a movie night, I said of course! Friends! Come over!

Steve paused the movie before it began and said, "I want to introduce this by saying that there's no good way to introduce it, just that Duke says it's important, so here's The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya."

That is how, even with Duke out of the hemisphere, I found myself watching an alienating anime, which I did not enjoy much, but which I kept watching because Duke wanted it. And I hung out with friends I don't see as often these days, because Duke wanted them to see the show, too.

So kudos to Duke, the only guy I know who can orchestrate a Wheaton movie night from Southeast Asia.

The discovery never seems to stop.

This is my friend Steve.

"Everyone stop asking me to do things I like!"

Not long ago, I borrowed Steve's computer for a few minutes to show him a video clip. In the short time we were on Hulu searching for the clip, we had to sit through two different birth control commercials, as well as repeat screenings of a disturbing, Lisa Frank-style cat commercial. Each time Hulu asked if these ads were relevant to me (read: relevant to Steve's computer) I clicked "Yes."

If you ever use Steve's computer, I implore you to follow suit. I dream of a world in which Steve is so bombarded with Yaz and Friskies ads that he writes unpleasant things on helium balloons and releases them over a field of ostrich-legged turkeys.

Good luck, and we're all counting on you.