Last Night I Dreamt of Letterman

Thursday night I dreamt of David Letterman. Really.
No, not in that way.
I was a guest on his show doing a comedy bit and I did so well that afterwards he came up to me and shook my hand and offered to have me come back for another go round of the character.
I then ate a couple green grapes and chatted to the regular writers that appear occasionally on the show.
Then, yesterday I was out and about doing errands and just happened to pass by the Late Show theatre where they were replacing bulbs in the CBS sign.
This means one of two things:
Either I have a premonition of a career breakthrough happening any moment; something that will be a 'lightbulb' moment.
Or the prednisone that I"ve been taking in combination with the sleeping pills to calm me down from the poison ivy I've been suffering from the past two weeks has finally taken it's toll.

I desire to believe the former. :)

I Remember Bob Hansen on ExtraCriticum

Yesterday the BF and I went to see the documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN and, after being reminded just how good my small town education was compared to the dizzying statistics the movie puts forth about just how illiterate the vast majority of up and coming students are, I received a text from my best childhood friend Kristen that our music/drama/band teacher from our days at Mosinee High School had passed away that morning.
Now the man, Bob Hansen, was not a saint. There will be no statue erected in his honor. No marching band. But there should be.

CONTINUED ON EXTRA CRITICUM

Snow Stormed

It's easy though to hate the snow living in the middle of a city - an irrational panic runs up the spine of anyone worried that the stores (all eight billion of them) will somehow magically run out of food or that somehow the snow will be so heavy that we'll be trapped.

But being 'trapped' at home is it's own kind of joy. Back in Wisconsin we lived on a country road near a highway but a country road nonetheless at the edge of a big pine forest, near to the Wisconsin River. A snow storm warning would hit and the race would be on to get to the store and get food (and treats - it's amazing how it was OK to get anything and everything we wanted when there was a threat of being homebound, and we'd always of course get too much) to see us through a couple days... because it was not unheard of that the plow wouldn't get to us immediately and that we would have to shovel out our own driveway. It would be a snow day (it always seemed like a waste when we'd have a snow storm on the weekend) and all the neighborhood kids would get their sleds and go to the hill above Redmond's pond.

The Redmond family had a nursery and at some point had decided to create a little pond back in the middle of their vast property. I wasn't around when it was made but it seemed as though the family had dug a big hole in the middle of a field but only the very bottom of it had been filled with water. It wasn't deep enough for fish or clean enough to swim in, so it just became this big hole with some water in it. We cleverly dubbed it "Redmond's Pond" (a creative lot we were) and enjoyed sledding down the sides of the hills during the winter.

When you're six or eight or ten, you don't give much thought to much else on a snow day other than your primary goal is that you've got to put on longjohns, thick socks, three layers on top (undershirt, shirt and sweater), jeans, a heavy coat, mittens, a hat, scarf and rubber boots to put on before you venture outside to meet the other kids in the neighborhood for a day of sledding.

The hill wasn't huge but we didn't really care. We cared about how many times we could sled down and how fast we could go. We didn't care about how red our faces would get, or how wet our clothes were or if we were hungry or had to go to the bathroom; we just cared about the sledding. We would hardly notice the sun's descent from up on high to low to the ground and it was only because we did eventually notice that we needed to eat or that we couldn't feel our fingers anymore, that we figured we ought to go home.

My mom would know I was home by the pile of wet and frozen clothes heaped in the back hall knowing I'd come back to once I'd warmed up a bit. There was nothing better than getting into something dry and having dinner or hot chocolate after all that play time.

When I first moved to New York in the mid 90s the winters were snowy. There was one fantastic blizzard in early 1995 that was pretty spectacular. There was no sledding to be done (although I suppose I could have gone up to Central Park) but I walked out onto the street, where I lived at 17th and Irving and, because the streets were closed to traffic, I could stand in the middle of an intersection without worry.

The usually unbearably noisy city was muffled, silenced by a blanket of frozen liquid falling from the sky. It's as if each flake had been infused with a little Prozac in order to calm the masses and give us all a gentle snow day. The quiet was comforting, not eerie as one might expect. A woman passed by and noticed my smile saying "it's so quiet" and for that brief moment I didn't care that my face was red or that my clothes were wet or that I needed to get back to my work at home or that I was hungry or anything. I embraced the snow storm and enjoyed it's unexpected benefit.

Meanwhile, Three Months Later....

So it's what December 10th already and I have not looked at this blog in three months.. that's pretty sad! Well, if there's anyone out there still reading this blog after all this time.... I just may be in the mood to update it more often.

Here's the problem - once the initial flush of unemployment freedom hit - and I took a couple trips and started back on my old work habits of writing on my own, putting tiny fundraising events together and even doing some social network consulting, I found myself tumbling into a deep depression. I did some temp work but the sadness of making crap wages (down from slightly better than crap wages at the old survival job) and sitting at a sad and slow computer in the middle of an office, was too much for even me, and I've done some seriously terrible temp jobs in my life. This one wasn't abusive but it was just.. well, sad. And that it came on top of finding a new roommate, well, it was just overwhelming.

But now although the new roommate hasn't worked out and I'll be bidding him goodbye in the new year and work hasn't turned up, I am oddly hopeful. I guess the only option would be to be suicidal and as Peggy Lee says, "I'm not ready for that final disappointment" So I will carry on. My heart isn't in the tiny fundraising work I've been doing again and other things seem at a dead end.

If only I was even remotely interested in cooking, I could go all Julie/Julia on the world's ass and write a big old blog following recipes. But the reality is that I'm happiest when I eat simple meals like cheap chinese food from the place around the corner and chicken dunked in super fantastic gravy when visiting Montreal.

So I will sit here and type my little blog again.. and ask.. is anyone out there?

First, You Get Dressed.

My first paid job was that of "painter".

My dad owned a trucking company in central Wisconsin and had decided that there was better money to be made storing the cheese in warehouses rather than be the company that employed the men that drove the trucks from one warehouse to the other. In the warehouses, the cheese would be stacked in round brown tubs, sealed and cooled to a certain temperature. The tubs needed to be stored a certain number of feet away from the walls and so a yellow line, about a half a foot wide needed to be painted around the perimeter of the warehouse rooms. I had the roller brush on a extended stick and a can of yellow paint and a vague idea of how far from the wall it needed to be and .. I painted. The portable tv blared with the sounds of Greg and Jenny on All My Children and the days of summer breezed by as I applied two and three coats.

My first artistic job happened right around the same time. My dad had bought me a drafting table (just like real artists use!) for Christmas because he saw how much I liked to draw and thought that it would be better for me if I sat up at a table and drew rather than laying on my bed drawing as I had been. Then, my best friend Brian and I got this crazy idea to co-write and draw a comic strip for our weekly hometown newspaper, The Mosinee Times. Brian eventually went to college and I wrote and drew the last few months of the strip alone. The paper decided that after two years it was time to end it and as Brian was gone and my dad had just died of cancer, I wasn’t much in the joke telling, comic drawing mood anyway.

Just out of college I worked at a cab company in London as an operator. I went over on a student work program and landed this customer service position. They had a whole system where the customer who was calling in for a cab would tell you their code and their address would come up on our computer screen. It was a stressful job dealing with stressed out customers but what was worse was that they made all of us wear a powder blue vest over a white shirt and dark blue polyesther pants. But it allowed me to earn a living and live in one of the greatest cities on the planet and I ended up making friends there that are still a part of my life today.

For fun, while I was there, I took a job at a gay music video bar called Banana Max which was located in the gay neighborhood of Earl’s Court. I was 23 and fair and American and they hired me on the spot as a barback. I had to wash glasses and haul beer but I had a good time meeting new people. I also met a couple people there that I’m still acquaintances with. The owner, a pint sized raging queen had a voice that cracked the air, would tell everyone to ‘get the fuck out’ at 11pm when the bar was closing. People didn’t seem to mind and I found it amusing. Banana Max had a habit of burning down every couple years and reopening with a new name and new interior. Funny, that.

I spent most of the 90s and 00s pursuing an acting career which I never quite caught up with and an unexpected career in fundraising and event planning. It was fun and I worked for myself, spending days on end making phone calls, sending emails, brainstorming new ideas and “All My Children” was frequently on in the background keeping me company. Greg had long since moved on and Jenny had died in the 80’s in a Jet Ski accident. It was OK because she wound up on NYPD Blue and got to make out with Jimmy Smits.

A couple years ago I took an assistant job at a media company here in New York and it was allright I suppose. Mainly the people I worked with was what kept me going through corporate b.s. that seems to unfailingly permeate every endeavor that we as human beings strive to take on.

But, as with many people in New York, the recession catapulted the company into the pit of economic downturn. As the ranks of the people around me dwindled, I knew that as an assistant, my time to leave would come, sooner or later. Surprisingly, it was laterish. After about 100 people had left the company over the course of a year, in July, another batch of us were let go.

There is some comfort in knowing you’re not being let go because of incompetence but it has, unexpectedly, hurt to be unemployed.

At first I outlined all the projects that I was going to do this summer and all the places and friends I was going to visit. I had calls out and got the energy flowing … I even took a trip to San Francisco just after my last day thinking that I’d be able to reconnect with old work friends from my event planning days. But I suppose, not surprisingly, the work friends were.. working and as I’m not really doing much of the event planning anymore, there was no incentive for them to incorporate me into their workday.

I returned from the trip feeling sorry for myself and ended up bingeing on the things that one does to cope with stress: sleep, food, tv, email, the internet, hopeful thinking and avoidance of the world in general. True, I’ve been able to get out for bike rides but there have also been days when I’ve sat around checking my email obsessively after sending resumes to a half dozen places.

In my logical mind I know that these places get a few hundred resumes for every job even in a more normal time, I can’t even imagine what they’re going through now. I even switched on “All My Children” and that just sucks these days (although I do have to admit that “One Life to Live” is rocking the socks off me these days).

I realized this morning that I hadn’t really been anywhere in a couple of days and had hardly left the apartment. Part of it is the intense heat and humidity but part of it is just a general sense of gloom.

I realized this morning that I have to do something to change it because no white knight is coming to save me, it’s time for this Cinderfella to save himself. And the first thing to do? Get dressed.

That’s right, get dressed. For too many days this month I’ve wandered around my apartment in boxers and a tank top. True, it’s summer and I’m worried about driving up the ConEd bill by turning on the air conditioner for long stretches, but sitting around in my underwear all day long for days on end, well, it’s not good.

Granted no one is going to see me but it’s not really about that of course, it’s about an intangible feeling of being a productive person in the world and getting dressed is part of that.

So I’ll take a shower, and then I’ll get dressed and while I don’t really have anywhere specific to go today, moping around here won’t help either.

Another job will come along and perhaps it will be mindless or perhaps it will be creative; perhaps it will be functional and perhaps it’ll even be fun.

And I’ll be sitting here, clean and dressed waiting for it to show up.

Hurry.

Taking a Little Break

will be back with more Jumping for Joy and other entries starting Wednesday July 1st.

The Beautiful Storm

Despite the fact that New York seems poised to become The New Seattle (gee, thanks global warming), I do love the beautiful storm.

Beautiful?

The drip drip drip of drops on the outside provide rhythm and insistence, the curlique breeze that wends it ways through the barely cracked open window brings refreshment and even the general gloom casts the city in a pale that softens and shades the often harsh corners and edges of a city that must move at lightning speed if for no other reason than because it can.

There’s also certain kind of loveliness in the boom of thunder at 3 in the morning that is at once scary and also at the same time reassuringly beautiful to a child of Wisconsin. It causes one to burrow further under the covers finding companionship with the sheets and blankets wrapped around ones legs and arms causing a clutch of the pillow and a general gratefulness that one has a place to call home, that’s warm and dry, even if sometimes one doesn’t appreciate that place. And in and of itself, the storm, with it’s falling sheets of water and white grey splatter across the sky has a beauty of it’s own, swarming with emotion and angst, a Mother Nature temper tantrum that releases all the emotional toxins and sows and nurtures the Earth, cleansing and scrubbing, wiping away the grit and grime allowing a new day to be just on the horizon, just over There.

Almost. But not yet.

But beyond the beauty and the lovely, beyond the harmonic ideology and the paradigm of storms and their sweeping promise of the blessing of freshness, I am most grateful that I don’t have to go out into it. That I took the day off and have work, tea, a baggy sweatshirt and the rain to keep me company.

And that, perhaps, is the most beautiful thing of all.

Shimmer

Lost and Found

So last weekend when the BF and I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden we decided, upon looking at the map, that we wanted to find the peonys. We went along the path where we thought they were and got distracted by the liacs and the cherry blossoms and lakes and trees and things. We had circled back to where we thought they were and found more flowers and beautiful sites. At one point it dawned on us that we hadn't yet found the peonys... and we realized that we were actually at the peony beds and had passed them about two or three times while looking for them.

The beds themselves were rather unimpressive as they hadn't bloomed yet.... so the destination, well it was hard to find and we got distracted a lot but they weren't ready anyway but meanwhile, we sure did see some terrific things! Just goes to show you, the Journey is just as important as the destination (and sometimes more interesting).

All Roads

This is a picture of a path.

The path divides in two but really it goes to the same place because it's all within the same park.

However, one path stays on the higher level, and one path goes down a small embankment and is on a lower level.

If that's not allegorical, I don't know what is. :)

Welcome to May!

I took this last weekend on my bike trip up the Hudson but for me it symbolizes May.. the month when all that has fallen and been gone, returns with vigor and strength and beauty! May your month blossom before you and your life burst into life!

What You Make of It

Life is what you make of it. I took this photo when I went for a bike ride this past weekend. The weather was glorious and I never tire of the path up alongside the Hudson to the 'little red lighthouse' under the George Washington Bridge.

Life is what you make of it. Now, I know that the photo is of me taking a picture of my shadow and the front tire... but if I didn't know better, I could be eating a sandwich or playing the harmonica?

How often in life do we see things and react depending upon what we think we see rather than what is actually there? I certainly know I've done it. Have you?

Man, This Place is Like a Circus

Yesterday 2 friends of mine invited myself and a friend of theirs who has a seven year old daughter to go to the Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden. Four adult gay men and one 7 year old girl. It was like the time I directed a play at the California Theatre Center in Sunnyvale and four of my friends drove down together but I didn’t know whose name to give for the tickets waiting for them and so I said to the woman who was in charge of the ticket table, ‘you’ll know them, four grown gay men, no children’.

Anyway, yesterday’s trip to the circus gave me the following reflective thoughts:

1, The spectacle of hundreds of whirling thingabob lights throughout the crowd is one of the most beautiful man made sights. A child’s smile reacting to said sights is one of creations more beautiful sights (no matter how much said smile is stuffed with the man made delights of hot dogs, cotton candy, popcorn or snow cones).

2. I love elephants and feel that no matter what I know about how they might be treated and trained, I still want to see them and the entire day was made for me at the sight of a dozen pachyderms parading through the coliseum, some with beautiful ladies in colorful costumes riding them. It’s a simple pleasure and I can’t underline enough how happy this made me and I’m willing to look the other way on animal rights abuse issues (ok no I’m not but I was for the few minutes they were out there).

BTW I could swear I saw one elephant snark to another. Three of them were lined up to come out onto the main floor; one of them ducked their head to the other in a way that said to me “hey, pal, get a load of THIS crowd, wanna go crazy with me and watch everyone run in terror? We’ll totally be put down but what a way to go, and hey, we’ll be on the news!” to which the other one just did their best ‘harumph’ at and ignored them. I still maintain that one of the elephants when walking past me winked at me. Just me. No one else. Really. Why don’t you believe me? :)


3. There is not much at the circus to hold my interest: the clowns are too broad and are shouting, straining their voices too much to be funny/heard; the ‘magic tricks’ creep me out (anything having to do with knives, flaming pokers, steel plates, etc slicing people up upsets me); the high wire and aerial tumbling acts frighten me and while I love the animals, my bleeding heart liberal mind can’t get around the fact that these creatures are being subjugated into doing the bidding of others, something they didn’t choose to do. Add to that the very plastic feel and the over consumption of it all, I don’t know that I’d go back.

4. The Roadies were almost more interesting to me to watch than the main acts.. although in concert with the performers, the Roadies completed a sort of ballet --- actions (walking to a spot to put a chair or bench down while something is happening elsewhere in the better lit area) and reactions (taking said chair away, or helping a performer down a rope ladder from a tiny staging area on the ceiling) were somehow compelling to me. Although that the Roadies seemed completely indifferent to acts around them left me feeling both confident that they had seen it all before and there was no real danger and worried that they were getting to complacent and Something Bad would happen because they weren’t paying attention.

5. There are people who are still willing to get up on all sorts of manners of ropes, wires, cages and moving contraptions and walk, run, ride bikes, do flips and generally endanger their lives for the entertainment of others. There are still lots of people who find this entertaining. What’s wrong with me that I don’t?

Half the fun of a circus (from what I can remember in my one or two childhood experiences going to them) seems to me to be not only the sideshow attractions and the games but also the smell of a circus, the gritty odor of live animals mixed with cotton candy and popcorn.

I think it’s part of the same fun that’s lost on me with big theme parks. To me, ‘riding the rides’ (as my Texas friend Karen said in the 80s when we were working for the Bible camp) means walking through the dirt fairground and the fairway and seeing the town you live in from the top of the ferris wheel.

In any event, it was nice to spend some time with friends and over and above everything else, that alone made the circus worthwhile. J

The Miracle of the Internet

Over the past couple years I’ve indulged in time traveling, dipping into my past, reliving certain times and eras and Googleing people and catching up with them. It’s been a great time. I never assume that anyone remembers me especially if it’s someone that I dated a few times back 20 years ago. They may have made an impression on me (no double entendre intended) but I can’t just take for granted that it works both ways.

When Facebook re-appeared so did a collection of friends and acquaintances from years past and there seems to be no end to the excavation. Just when I think I’ve exhausted everyone I’ve ever met, along comes a friend request for someone ‘new’. And that’s just been pretty damn amazing. There are a couple people in particular that sent my heart into paroxysm of joy when I saw their name on the friend request and a couple that I simply went “oh, you’re kidding, right?” (these would be people who made my life difficult who now want to be ‘friends’… you’re kidding, right? I know it’s been mumblty mumble years but honestly, really? Friends? No way. Ignore!)

But this morning the unthinkable happened: I got an email from a woman all enthusiastic about reconnecting mentioning a reunion and other friends. She was so excited to be in touch with me and I momentarily got wrapped up in it until I realized: I have no earthly idea who this woman is.

Now, I can name pretty much everyone in my kindergarten class picture (me with the clip on tie and bright sunny smile) and I know the name of my first grade teacher (Miss Trinka) and I remember vividly all the people I worked with at Tarkington, O’Connor, O’Neill (it’s funny that I don’t have dreams about that place to be honest considering I was there when the SF earthquake happened) and I even remember a few names and faces from my couple summers as a drama camp counselor and definitely remember all the counselors I worked with the four summers I was at Lutheran Association of Southwest Camping. I can tell you various people that I temped with at Burson Marsteller both in Chicago and here in New York and I even remember the name of the delightful neighbor I had across the hall in my second favorite apartment of all time in Chicago for whom I helped pass a class in children’s literature (she also brought me Thanksgiving dinner one year when I was sick as dog). I could tell you the names of the people that I worked with at Disney when I temped there a few days every month for two years ….
But this woman, I have no idea.

So I wrote and explained that she might have the wrong Andrew Altenburg and her reply was “If there is another one of you, he is the exact same age & looks just like you and is from the same area!” to which I am left with more “who the hell is this woman?” thoughts. I also noticed that she addressed the first letter “Dear Andy”… and no one who has known me more than ten minutes knows that I never have gone by “Andy”. (UGH)

Maybe the other Andrew Altenburg, the one who goes by ‘Andy’ is straight and got married, got a job just out of college and has two kids (a boy and a girl naturally) and currently is worrying about his 401k plan and what his mid-life crisis will look like (I’m thinking blonde and stacked).

My advice to you if you time trip back through your life via the internet is this: Identify yourself and assume the other person won’t remember you. It is not self deprecating to take this position as through our work and social life, we all go through the world meeting hundreds and hundreds (perhaps thousands depending on your line of work, how much you like to travel and how long you live). Sending a picture isn’t the worst idea either.

As for my new friend, she sounds fun and perky and perhaps she can introduce me to that other Andy Altenburg at some point. Wonder if he’ll remember me?

Meanwhile, back in New York City....

So Sunday the BF did our usual Walking Tour Sunday thing (the weather was finally nice enough to do it again) and we had the distinct pleasure of visiting the New York Tenement Museum down on Orchard Street just at Delancy.

It’s a really great (and grim) representation of how life was for our city’s immigrants in the mid 1800s and through to the early part of the 1900s …although truth to tell I’ve had friends who have lived in apartments about as big as some of the ones they showed us.

In fact, if you could get around the crumbling wallpaper and disheveled ceilings, the apartments wouldn’t be half bad. I mean, other than the lack of personal bathrooms, running water, adequate sanitation. And of course they’d be great for one or two people…. But maybe not so much for a family of 12.

You can find out more about them by going to their site, www.tenement.org

Woke up This Morning

The past few weeks have been stressful for everyone... layoffs, financial pressures, worry about everything under the sun.

For me, it's meant a lot of sleepless nights and that's turned me super cranky and irritable. If I got even an hour or two sleep a night I would consider that a good night. Even if I do get multiple hours of sleep, they are never more than two or three in a row. I wake up and then struggle to get back to sleep.....

But last night I finished up some work that I had to do, had some popcorn, watched the third to the last episode of Battlestar Galactica (this series is SO incredibly good), took a sleeping pill and climbed into bed and did my level best to relax and let go of all the mountains of things I've been thinking about...

.... and after some fun dreams one of which I was (again) in classes (I seem to be having those kinds of dreams often) I woke up after a solid seven hours of sleep at 6:30am this morning not quite wide awake but enough that I had this exact thought process:

"wow, I'm awake so early! I can make breakfast, do a little email and then get dressed and get to work early for a change... wait, what am I thinking? It's SATURDAY!!!"

After which I fell back asleep for about an hour or so before I climbed out of bed and am now startin my day.

And while this isn't a monumentus occasion for many, given what I've been through sleep-wise lately, it's a flippin miracle. :)

PASTRAMI

My mother wants me to mail her a pastrami sandwich. No kidding.

A tall two and a half inch thick pastrami sandwich on rye bread, preferably with French fries wrapped up with it. The kind of sandwich that you have to open real wide to wrap your lips around and the kind of sandwich that stays with you for a long time afterwards.

But I don’t think I can do it.

You see, back in October she was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with COPD/emphysema which is pretty much what happens after you’ve spent 55 years as a regular cigarette smoker. She’ll be on oxygen for the rest of her life. But if she can stop from smoking and eats right and takes her medicine she could still have quite a few years left.

To describe my relationship with my mom is probably as complicated as trying to describe the taste of pastrami. If you try to liken it to other things, you never really get quite the right flavor. To swallow it, you have to open wide and digest slowly.

But suffice to say, she encouraged me to be independent which I was then criticized for by the rest of my family when my independence didn’t coincide with the agendas that they had lined up for themselves. Free to be you and me my family are not.

In 2000 following some demoralizing comments made by my sister and my mom (just the latest in a long line really) I had decided that perhaps the indifference and out right cruelty that plagued the relationships with my family (I should stress: my biological family, I don’t put up with that kind of crap in my acquired family) was better left behind.

I vowed that since I could not end the abuse entirely (try as hard as I could to seek peace and understanding), I could end the communication and at least start the healing of the debilitating paralysis that had plagued me up until then.

And to some degree it worked although occasionally the last 8 years were filled with angry one-sided arguments in the shower in the morning and the occasional bad dreams at night.

Still, when the email arrived from my sister that mom was ill, none of that mattered much and I immediately planned for a trip back to Mosinee to visit her.

The BF joined me in what was his heroic act of bravery. Neither of us knew what kind of movie of the week scene we were going to walk into and both of us prepared for what felt less like a family reunion and more like preparing for war.

But all things considered, my brother and sister gave me and my mom a present by staying away and giving us space and peace. At least I didn’t have to deal with the barrage of their abuse on top of everything else.

We arrived at the nursing home where she recovered and although frailer and older than last I’d seen her, she was still my mom with all the mom charm she’d perfected over a lifetime. The BF was won over and I think so was she by him, and the three of us spent time together acquainting each other with who we are now.

She has since gone home and is on her own to decide whether she will eat healthy or not, or smoke or not with only the threat of a return to the nursing home (or worse) to keep her healthy.

Whatever the problems and trials that we’ve had we’ve tacitly decided not to talk about, and maybe it’s just simply better that way isn’t it?

I mean, at some age, I guess that some stuff just has to become unimportant. The childish mind wants everything to be solved neatly and tidily (the really childish mind wants everything to be solved in their favor) but I think the grown up mind realizes that not all can be solved and the one sided arguments and bad dreams can be put away and one just has to live with what one has rather than continue to wish otherwise. It’s messier than one thinks it’s supposed to be.

So we stay in touch by phone. It’s been a beautiful time filled with stories of the past and keeping up with what’s happening now. I even called her from the street in front of the capitol when I went down to DC for the Inauguration festivities. She asked for a t shirt which I have here on my desk packaged up and ready to mail. It was fitting somehow. She could be there with me but be in the comfort of her home and by sending her something from there, she felt as though she was there with me.

The question still remains whether or not I’ll send her the sandwich. It might simply be unhealthy or unhygienic to send such a long distance but if something as simple as a pastrami sandwich will make my mother happy, who am I to say no?

I AM A SLACKER I AM

A friend pointed out to me last night over dinner at Vynl that the trick to creating a successful blog (ie that people care about and follow) is to update it every day and that it doesn't always have to be some big essay.

So today's entry is simply this entry. Nothing big deal to write about although there is always stuff to write about, I just don't feel like writing about it right now. :)

Anyway, Day 1 of my own version of Norman's committment to journaling once a day. See you tomorrow!

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog - The Most Fantastic Thing You Will Ever See. er, almost.

I heart Dr. Horrible. www.drhorrible.com

This past spring a bunch of Hollywood types got together and wrote and produced a little thing they called "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog" featuring Neil Patrick Harris as the eeeeevil doc trying to rid himself of his nemesis The Hammer. There's a lot of singing and there's a lot of intentional hambone acting. And it was also the most entertaining thing I've seen all year with the possible exception of WALL-E and the season finale of LOST. There was more heroics in the first five minutes (and we're talking about a movie that focuses on the villain here) of Dr. Horrible than in the entire 13 hours of this season's HEROES (what a bag of crap that show is, who's writing this shit? I can only assume that they are drunk with the money that NBC must be feeding them and not spending enough time.. well, you know, actually writing).

Anyway, more and more people are spending less time watching the traditional gawk box (television just in case you weren't paying attention) and more time watching television shows and videos that other people create on the computer. This is a trend that will continue in earnest the more we hardcore tv addicts have to endure the piss poor quality of shows like HEROES and MY OWN WORST ENEMY (ugh, more on this as I write a fall season wrap up in the days to come) as well as a half dozen other shows that the network suits I'm sure are sitting there scratching their heads wondering 'gee, why aren't our shows doing well?"

Would someone please tell them (politely if you must but tell them nonetheless) "because your shows are terrible. There is nothing entertaining in watching people be beat up, shot at, cut open and die. There is nothing entertaining in watching good people kill other people in a cheap SAW rip-off as the HEROES season finale pretended to be. And if you want us to come back, you'd sure as hell know where you're going with the story because we can sniff out a writing team that doesn't have a clue a mile away" (LOST is for some reason excluded from this.. we all know and strangely accept that the writers have zero idea how to resolve all the balls they've thrown up in the air but I guess we'll just learn to accept that .. I'm not sure why but we do).

Anyway, I think we'll look back at Dr. Horrible as the thing that kick started web-only entertainment with professional name recognizable talent. And thus the death knell of television begins. Oh and thank you Jeff Zucker at NBC for making this happen just a wee bit faster. Oh, and in case you weren't paying attention to these things: NBC owns HULU.. and HULU plays what? oh yeah, internet videos. Have we found the smoking gun? Is NBC purposely trying to kill it's prime time lineup in order to bolster it's online profitability?? sniff.. smells like it. Only my opinion of course but that's what it looks like from here.

If you haven't seen it, you can download it off of iTunes and you can go to www.drhorrible.com/ to pre-order the DVD. Honestly, you'll be glad you did.

Mad, Sad and Just Plain Blahhhh

This morning we had an ‘all-staff’ meeting at work ..well, actually it was held at the 34th Street Loew’s Theatre since our usual meeting place – the studio - is being used by the set for WorldFocus the new news show being produced by Thirteen.

Our president Neal had some grim things to report about the economy (not a shocker of course but unnerving when it’s pointed out on the big screen reminding me of a slide show that Lucy once showed Charlie Brown depicting his faults) but also, thankfully, some good news about the exciting projects in the new year.

Not only is everyone eagering looking forward to the Make ‘Em Laugh six part series in January, the new studio space at Lincoln Center, some incredible music programs and the series about America’s infrastructure, Blueprint America but also the new hosts of SundayArts and some really great Masterpiece Classic programs including a spring series of adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens.

So today, I’m trying to focus on the good things. And that’s not been easy given a very depressing weekend where not one but all three days of plans that I made got changed/shortened or outright cancelled. At least I caught up on my tv viewing.

This is good I suppose since One Life to Live continues to really be spectacularly well done and I had three eppys of “Pushing Daisies” to watch. The sad note is that of course “Daisies” is cancelled and we’ll never get to see how everything gets wrapped up – unless creator Bryan Fuller gets it out there in a comic book. It’s bad enough when comic books are made into terrible movies, but a tv show made into a comic book? Did they not learn their lesson from “Welcome Back, Kotter” the comic book?

So this week has started with a thud, but the holidays are nearly here and that is a good thing too.

Finally, today is Facebook Blackout Day when people who don’t like the “new” Facebook will be silently protesting by not logging on. Or logging on but suspending poking each other. Or something like that. Me, I prefer the old design as well but wasn’t quite sure how not using some free service would really make an impact other than make it cheaper for them to run for a day.