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I'm The One That I Want by Margaret Cho. I was so disappointed that I couldn't make the book fair at UCLA last weekend with my friend Tracey, so she thought to buy the book for me. I missed the one-woman show when I lived in New York, but Tracey and I went to see the film last fall in Santa Monica. If you want to know how much my friends rock, Tracey even had it autographed:
Erica
Good luck in New York!
-Margaret Cho
. . .
I'm also still reading Simple Indulgence: Easy, Everyday Things to Do for Me by Janet Eastman. I'm such a dork, I keep reading the quotes and ideas, but not doing the journalling portion.
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"Someday we'll find it
the rainbow connection
the lovers, the dreamers and me
alllll of us under it's spell."
-Kermit THE Frog
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Stuck in my head:
"Boogie-oogie-oogie get down."
Thank you, Disco Stu! (My favorite Simpsons sight gag-cum-character.)
I heard Britney Spears' "Bottom of My Broken Heart" while making a selection from the feminine hygeine aisle at Wal Mart and exclaimed, "Fucking Britney Spears...Gah!"
That's one of the videos I had to watch about a million times to select snippets for the web site and the enhanced CD single. Ever hearing it again is too much, too soon.
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The Simpsons, The Sopranos & Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City. I didn't even realize there were making another one, I just happened to see it listed. I'm going to have to finish the book series now, as I think I've only read through the fourth book and this mini-series is based on the third book.
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While you're visiting the Gallery of Regrettable Food, don't miss Meat!. This one in particular made me laugh until I couldn't breathe. "Sometimes meat likes to dress up and feel pretty."
Swanson Parade of Lost Identity -- women who, in probably their only 15 minutes of fame, were for the most part known only as Mrs. HisLastName.
. . .
Co-Author of The Rules to divorce! So you can't manipulate a man into marrying and staying married to you? Perhaps you have to come into it as two individuals and show who you really are from the beginning? I guess this means that no amount of growing your hair long, pretending not to be smart or funny, and "training" a man will make for a happy marriage.
. . .
Ever wonder where that dollar bill's been? Mine was in Chicago two months ago.
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Another Elvis dream (I'm doing the Memphis section of my color scrapbook now, but I haven't got to Graceland yet), this one cannibalistic.
What started out as an autopsy to discover THE TRUTH, turned into Elvis Stew. It was rich and beefy. Ewwwwwwwww!
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Why is it that the same personality quirks are taken as crazy and stalky by some, while loveably wacky by others? Is there some litmus test for this, so I stop wasting my time?
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now I'm blogging what I'm eating, whoa.
Still literate as of 9/29/2000 12:20:01 AM
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just what I needed...another dorkblog.
Jeepers, creepers, I last used my peepers on 9/29/2000 12:24:59 AM
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My trip photographs, they're better than expected. Now to get them all organized, it's only been a year!
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Saturday, February 10, 2001
12:46 PM
 happy to report that the reason I haven't updated much is that I finally got a bug up my behind to work on my trip pictures. I don't know why it's taken my so long, since the 13 rolls I did last night were on disk. I just needed to crop and optimize them. I'm trying to keep them pretty small, so they don't choke anyone's computer and so I can show more.
I guess I wasn't sure how I wanted to do them. I decided to just do them straight, to give myself more options in the end. I had been leaning toward the soft edges I usually use in the journal, but it would a) take me that much longer to edit them all and b) lock me into one color scheme forever and I might as well break out of black page mode for a change.
I'm disappointed that a lot of them are blurry, especially from Graceland, because I couldn't use the flash indoors. The camera compensates with a longer exposure time, but often, not aware of that, I moved the camera too soon.
Also, I kept looking at the huge project and putting it off. I did 13 rolls of film yesterday -- that's over 300 pictures, most of which I thought were worth saving. It was great to relive the trip like that, maybe I needed some distance from it. It might be a while before I get all the navigation and pages done, though I tried to do titles as I went along. I'm probably going to use the Travel Blogue and my paper journal to flesh out the pages.
Sorry to be such a tease, but this was such a personal project, that I thought I should concentrate on John's site, Some Crazy Dame and Erica Jackson first. I was working on my portfolio though and realized the one section I could really flesh out was the photo section, if I scanned in the trip photos.
It's good that I whipped through those 13 so quickly, since I have about 2 dozen more rolls to do and all of those must be scanned. Obviously, that will take longer. I could kick myself for not getting those rolls on disk in the first place. I am still pissed at Wal-Mart for refusing to scan the black and white photos. That's a load of crap -- I would've taken them to Wolf, had I known.
So I'm not out of the woods yet, but since I've made some decisions about how to go about it, at least I have a start.
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Friday, February 09, 2001
8:19 AM
sorry I don't read French, because this article seems very interesting. I especially like how he describes how one tells how long someone has been developing web pages by the design.Animated gifs and links which point directly on the hard disk of the author? Cheer! Let us guarantee that this page is the first that the artist published on Internet.
As for I am..., he says, "In English, certainly, but so interesting. To see!" I'll take compliments like that in any language.
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Wednesday, February 07, 2001
7:14 AM
embarrassed I fell for this.
When I saw this on on Metafilter this morning, I just figured they hadn't updated the page since Clinton left office. If you look closely at the site, you'll figure out what's wrong. This is all the more reason to be nice to geeks.
The new king's, I mean president's real biography is illuminating. Did you know he has a dog named Spot? Those Bushes never claimed to be innovators. I for one take great comfort in knowing the new president will take the same "common sense approach" he did in Texas.
I forsee nationally televised executions, so we 'mericans can completely mortify the rest of the industrialized world and be the execut'nist country on the globe. Which begs the question, given our new chief's limited vocabulary and reading comprehension, what exactly did he think it meant to be head of the executive branch?
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3:46 PM
a hypochondriac. Today's disease is epilepsy.
I was listening to a Fresh Air on NPR and Terry Gross interviewed an author with epilepsy who wrote a book about an epileptic nun with a brain tumor.
It's not entirely in jest or paranoia, though. I was blacking out and having weird spells where I wasn't quite asleep or awake. Sometimes in that place between sleeping and waking, I found myself quaking. I felt like I was a rocket, launching out of my body.
I haven't had one of those spells for a long while, it seemed to coincide with coming back here. At the time, I honestly thought I was having run ins with my Dad's ghost. It seemed weird enough to be true.
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11:08 PM
aware of a depth, beauty and wonder in you of which I doubt many are aware. You saw this first in me and enabled me to recognize it in others.
How magnificent to see this light in a world of darkness. Many stuff down or run from their own glimmer of hope. I am so proud of you and honored to call you friend.
For this and more, I am eternally thankful.
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Tuesday, February 06, 2001
4:51 AM
a writer, it's what I do, what I've always done. It's frustrating when others don't understand that -- either the process itself, the outcome, or most of all the fact that writing 1500 words on a given topic doesn't mean I'm upset, for fuck's sake.
While most of the response for the piece on Politically Incorrect the other day was wonderful beyond my expectations, there was definately a camp that decided my writing on the subject was somehow a reflection of my mental health. One person suggested that if Bill Maher's opinions affected my self esteem, then I had some serious issues.
Yeah, that's astute, it was all about my issues and my idol (bah!) Bill Maher shooting down my dreams. Uh huh. That's it. Because when I wake up in the morning, I cannot function without first asking myself "What would Bill Maher do?"
I'm taking all of this under advisement, however, as from the moment I wrote the piece I knew it would need fleshing out over a few days time. For one thing, the transcripts to the show were just published very late last night and I want to be on point. For another, bear in mind it was a first draft. Further still, and this is the important part, it's a bigger issue than Bill Maher or that one show or those few comments.
Finally, that 2 minutes of commentary awakened all those words in me is a reminder that I am not doing all I set out to do, neither with my writing at large, nor specifically with my web sites. I started them originally with the intent of posting essays on political topics. What better way to combine my interests? (I double majored in Political Science and Journalism with a Womens Studies minor -- I know from writing essays about politics.)
I've had the sneaking suspicion for weeks that I'm not doing my best work on these sites, in this journal. I am capable of so much more. When I was a little girl, I didn't fantasize about being married or having babies. I wouldn't even say I fantasized about my future. I saw it, as clear as could be. Always, I was in a room alone, typing away. Sometimes daydreaming, sometimes scribbling in a book, sometimes in New York with street noise wafting in, other times in the country somewhere. But always, always in solitude, creating worlds of words. I've had more solitude and time to write in this year than ever before in my life and I never want it to end.
In high school and college I was the mistress of the five paragraph essay. When there was a term paper due, my classmates struggled to eek out the minimum 10 pages, while I struggled to weed it down to 15.
In high school I had an English teacher whose term paper could mean the difference between passing and failing, graduating or flipping burgers for the rest of your days. Of all of her classes, I was one of about a half dozen people who earned an A. If memory serves, the paper was 15 pages minimum and mine was 22 after days of paring down. There was so much to be said, so much that I found interesting. I have that sort of attention span.
Classmates started calling me Erica Hemingway and E. Scott Fitzjackson (the paper was on parallels between Scott Fitzgerald's life and that of The Great Gatsby). That's what my writing does...it belies the part of me that is shy and reserved by garnering attention when I least expect it.
In college I wrote a paper about being biracial. Also in the 20 page range, it was written in just a few days. The paper sailed up through the department, right to the VP of Academic Affairs, the highest academic officer on campus. Her assistant called me to set up a meeting. I was encouraged to seek scholarly publication, a real feather in an undergraduate's cap. I had no idea how to go about it, however, and didn't want to become "the biracial girl" and be painted into that corner.
While I have a certain pride about everything I write, I dislike being characterized by any one piece. It's why I've been tempted to take Bleed down. I haven't because I think it serves it's original purpose -- speaking up about something that is the source of deafening silence. I'm especially proud that I gave other women a place to post their thoughts and experience and now that my skills have grown some, I hope to make Bleed more interactive and responsive. I'm not just the blood girl, however and it still surprises me that I ever had the nerve to post that page for all the world to see.
I hope that people who came to this site over the PI brouhaha stick around, but have open minds. I have so many more things to say.
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10:47 PM
not sure where to go now. I've been developing the different sections of this site over the last few weeks and am happy with them, for the most part.
I find it difficult to separate the journalling aspect from the essaying, which was always my original intent. Maybe it's a new genre -- the fuddy-duddy in me used to have such strict deliniations. Now it's all blended and blurred.
I used to get completely bent when light-weight stories appeared in the newspaper. "No room for that crap," I thought, "there's real news happening." I still largely agree with that -- I naively think newspapers should be about, you know, news -- an infotainment-free bastion of truly important events and analysis.
Three and a half years ago, just before I started my first site, I took the first of two semesters of an autobiography course. That did two things for my writing -- it suddenly became personal (with the exception of the biracial essay, it had never been thus) and extraordinarily prolific. I'd started writing journals perhaps a year or so before that. By the time I left New York last year I had 14 journals filled up, most of them Mead composition books with the black marble cover.
I started thinking of my experiences as stories that could be written for a larger audience. I took courses on writing short stories, novels and plays. I didn't get them. Often, teachers and classmates told me my stories were implausible. "That could never happen," one woman told me of a story I'd written about a homeless woman and I beating up a guy who'd broken into my neighbor's flat. Only the names had been changed.
In hindsight, I find it hilarious that someone would say any story written about San Francisco was too fantastic, particularly one greatly influenced by the real San Francisco treat. No, I don't mean Rice-A-Roni.
I've sometimes felt like I'm not fulfilling my destiny, working in the dead end jobs I have. Then I thought of Langston Hughes and Jack London. I don't dare compare myself to them except that in looking at their lives, I learn about my own.
Both worked their way around the world and had adventures in places I've only dreamed of seeing. Their jobs were rarely glamorous, lucrative or upwardly mobile. The jobs were not the point. The work provided food, clothes, experience and travel. That's what I need. Adventure, experience, new faces.
Maybe New York isn't the answer right now. The thing about NY is there is so much to experience in Manhattan alone, one need never leave. However, New York is also the gateway to the world. I'm a bit ambivalent, because I never saw myself going back to somewhere I've already been. Given the chance, I always try new things.
However still, something in New York is unfinished, if only as a stepping stone to the rest of my travels. I was on this eastward trajectory -- London and Paris were clearly next. After that, I was open to wherever I felt like going.
One of my problems, I suppose, is that there are so many places I want to go, so many things I want to do, it's hard to decide what next. There is a multitude of options! I may make misanthropic remarks in this journal from time to time, but the people I meet while travelling are always interesting, intelligent, good folk.
Maybe one just gets lazy and complacent in familiar surroundings. I find my radar isn't as in tune since I returned home. It's partly a function of population density as well. I so rarely encounter new people here, even when I'm in school, that I put up with a lot of b.s. that would never fly in New York or if I was on the road.
What I need to do is get a job I don't care about for now, for cash. I'm not a good liar, unfortunately. I cannot tell people I'm interviewing with that I'm going to be around, when I know good and well I won't be.
Next, I need to go through my posessions and make some hard decisions. I always get rid of about 10 boxes worth of stuff when I move. That still leaves me with a lot of crap, but there's always storage or mom's garage.
As for my room, I've decided I'm going to try to get rid of everything. With the bed empty of the zillion gallons of water, it's a good time to take it down. The drawers on one side are empty, but the other is full of crap. Anyone interested in more 16 year old issues of 16 Magazine, Bop and Star Hits?
I don't even want to think about the closet. What I'd like to do is sell the bed ("big enough for two, if you really love each other"). The wall unit is huge and would either do for the living room or my brother can keep it. It leaves him plenty of place to put his toys and stereo. I think he should get my room, it makes no sense to leave it as a shrine to me. It would give him a little bit more room, working electrical outlets and about double the closet space.
With the extra room fee, I wish Mom would consider an au pair, as it would give her child care and perhaps cooking and light cleaning. There are several universities in the area and with a spare car, it's perfect. Heck, she could even sweeten the deal with Internet access.
So, that's what I'd like to happen, but I don't think my mom will go for it. At the very least, I can work on the changes that are under control so that I leave this house less cluttered, less selfish, less tied to it. I hate to feel as if I'm abandoning my family, but the fact is I'm still a young woman with many adventures ahead of me.
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Monday, February 05, 2001
5:07 PM
amazed at how much response Friday's essay on "Politically Incorrect" is receiving. I obviously struck a chord, because journallers and 'Net denizens who read but never wrote me started emailing their thoughts.
Then Derek reported it to Plastic and the Mighty Kymm herself picked up on it.
Someone on Journal-L speculated that maybe Maher is smarting from an online journaller's scathing remarks, so Kymm hopes it was when she called him a pig, but Amanda called him an Oompa Loompa when she went to a taping of "Politically Incorrect."
I'm still waiting for a transcript, as I'd like to flesh out that entry. Suffice it to say, this is proof-positive that people do care what I, and thousands of other journallers, have to say. Indeed, for as long as I can remember teachers and friends encouraged me to share my ideas with the world. One thing I hear quite often is, "Erica, you should write a book." All that and I've never performed fellatio on the President.
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8:40 PM
so amazed that Breakin' has a web site, produced in cooperation with none other than "hoofer of the '80s and '90s," Shabba Doo.
So is he to blame for starting Jean-Claude Van Damme's career? No matter, I'm just happy to find a resource on '80s movies.
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10:15 PM
just an average Internet user, with a score of 33 on this test. Darn.
I'd had trouble figuring how many of those questions applied in my life to time spent online or time spent on my computer in general. It seems a lot of things have converged and I tend to multitask. So, I might spend a four or five hour stretch on my computer, possibly even online the entire time, but I'm writing, working on my resume and/or working on graphics during that time and can't really say how much time goes to what.
Also, does the job hunting count, when most of it's done via email and the web? Does the graphic work count, since most of it is for my web sites? I was pretty good about getting my school work done, though I did sometimes avoid it, but not just with the Internet -- with books and daydreaming, too. I just think that's my personality.
As for chores, I'll do anything before I do a chore. It's my secret, evil plot to marry an anal retentive germophobe who actually gets off on cleaning up after me. I'm messy, I'm not a big cleaner, I stay just on this side of filth. I don't care much about my surroundings, because I'm deep, deep, deep in Ericaworld. I've been that way as long as I can remember. I can stare at a wall and come up with a thousand theories in the span of an hour, but I'll be damned if it ever occurs to me to dust. I'm probably going to hell for all of the above, but I just can't seem to care enough to be bothered, when I have so many other things I'd rather do.
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