Zoe is off to Utah today. Matt’s friend picked her up sometime this afternoon, so this is my first day in well over a year of coming home to no dog. It’s a bummer. I went to the backyard and found that Stinkfoot had killed a mother mouse and was in the process of taking out a baby, so I prevented that. I don’t need any more depression around here.
I’m really going to miss having Zoe. She was the best dog anyone could ask for – she was talented, intelligent, and did what she was told, most of the time.
No more frisbee. No more trips to Petsmart. No more walks through Hillcrest at sundown, like we did last night. I picked up some Chinese food and gave Zoe some choice pork bits as we sat in front of the post office.
On the bright side: no more fleas, no more cleaning dog hair off the rug and bath mat, no more worrying about her constant scratching, no more smelly house and car. And I can wake up on weekends whenever I want now.
It was about a 60/40 split on giving her up. I’ll probably start bawling later tonight or tomorrow as I start to realize how much of a part of me I’ve lost.
I have an unfortunate habit of not planning my weekends. And I really should learn that, particularly with a 3-day weekend, plans need to be made. Otherwise I run the risk of doing nothing and feeling bad because I wasted a great opportunity. I could have taken a road trip, I could have organized an outing of some kind. Here’s how lame my weekend was:
Saturday no one was around. I ran random errands, took Zoe to the park, and tried to find something fun to do. The weather was beautiful and the dog park was EMPTY. Kind of amazing, really. I also read a lot, played guitar a lot. That was it. Sunday I tried to get someone, anyone, interested in seeing the last baseball game at Ray Winder Field. No takers, although Kathy and some friends tried to make it but the game sold out just after their arrival. I made it in, but there were no seats, and the lines for beer and hot dogs were crazy long. I gave up and went home during the first inning. I had coffee at Sufficient Grounds with Jessica, and caught up with Frisco (my first LR roomate, recently returned to town from Tokyo). He came over laster with Kirsten from Sandalwood Forest and we watched the DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist “Brainfreeze” DVD.
But here’s the best part: Saturday I knew that nothing was really on the horizon, so I thought I could maybe run up to Harrison or something. The one thing that kept me from doing so was that Don Caballero were playing at Vino’s Sunday night. So I went, assuming that the show started at a normal time, like 8:30. But no. On Sundays, Vino’s closes at 9, so the show started at 6. I got to see all of 30 minutes of the band’s set.
Sigh.
Today I played guitar all morning. I went to Target, grabbed some lunch at Quizno’s, and finished reading the plays I’m doing in a few weeks at Hendrix.
The sad thing is that the weather was so nice this weekend that I just wish I could have done more with it. Must Plan Ahead.
In other news, Zoe will be leaving this week. Matt called. A friend of his is driving to Salt Lake City, and can give her a ride. I’m sure I’ll regret it later, but that dog is such a handful. She really does demand a lot of attention.
Oh, and to top it all off…Steve Irwin is dead.
Does all anger come from fear?
I don’t mean angry yelps after stubbing your toe – I mean anger between people. And hatred. Give me examples of anger that does not arise from some kind of fear.
Monday night and all Tuesday I took care of Madeline, Jennifer’s daughter, while Jenn is on the road. Madness, as I like to call her, is 8 and quite the handful. I got to do all the fun things parents do – get food, walk the neighborhood, play board games, get to bed, wake them up, drive to school, etc. I stayed at her house in Cabot and if I learned one thing, it’s that I could never fathom living in Cabot and driving to work in Little Rock every morning. It’s utter hell, and I only work in North Little Rock. The only thing worse is trying to drive back into Cabot at 5pm.
Seriously, though. Kids. I get along well with them because I’m still one of them, despite my height and mortgage. I wish I could say I look forward to having them, but really I don’t look forward to the first 5 years. Babies I have no use for. Give me a kid that is verbally coherent and fully mobile, and I’m good. If only there were some way to skip infancy….
You know how public bulletin boards are full of goods and services for sale and you can pull a tab of paper off the bottom with a name and number? Well I thought it might be terribly amusing to make a sign that simply displayed a name, and only a name. Maybe “Kevin.” And you could pull little tabs off that just say “Kevin.” I can’t remember what movie I saw that gave me this idea, but I though it would be a lot of fun just to make people wonder. Maybe it’s something similar to what Improv Everywhere does – little harmless amusing pranks basically.
So last night DeLaine and I made some signs. Most of them were just names – Kevin, Mike…and Chet, Max, Grover, Jane and Otis (yes a tribute to Kicking and Screaming). And one of them said “Free Refrigerator.” We posted that one at the Kroger in Hillcrest. We put some other ones up at Sufficient Grounds and Harvest Foods on Cantrell. Those were actually the only public bulletin boards we could find on a Saturday night. Wal-Mart doesn’t have one, the Krogers of the Heights and Chenal don’t have them, either. Apparenly Hillcrest is the only area with any sense of community. We may hit UALR or Pulaski Tech later on. We also thought a sign saying simply “Lost Dog” might be funny. We’ll see.
I was discussing typecasting recently with Melissa, the girl from the blind date I mentioned awhile back, and she was complaining that she always got cast as the ingenue when she really wanted to play meatier roles – she’s always Hero, never Beatrice. I said that I’ve been fortunate in my admittedly limited theatrical carer in that I generally get cast as the eccentric supporting character. At Hendrix I was noted for playing a cross-dressing former 60’s radical in Division Street, a reluctant hangman in Our Country’s Good, and even in the Playwright’s Theatre a few years back I was the criminal redneck ne’er-do-well.
And so Playwright’s Theatre is coming up again next month at Hendrix. I just got my scripts. They’re doing two plays this year, and here are the respective descriptions of my characters:
Sam Benson: Stan’s father, he’s eccentric, a free spirit like his wife.
Pittman: Age? Male, dirty. Homeless, a little off.
What do you think this says about the theatre department’s opinion of me?
One of my favorite bits of philosophy that I learned from Dr. Churchill at Hendrix was the indeterminacy of rules. Basically it means that you can’t ever really totally define anything. There are always counterexamples. What is a chair, for example? Everybody knows intuitively but you can’t define it fully without allowing in things like stools. It’s a big problem for the field of law, and now it’s a problem for astronomy. What the hell is Pluto?[1]
Pluto has been demoted to a “Dwarf Planet.” Big deal. So he gets a modifier. Kids will still learn about him, and maybe they’ll get an early taste for the shades of grey that permeate our universe. Relativity is a philosophical concept as well as a scientific one. Science changes and adapts. That’s what separates its dogma from that of most religions.[2]
Interesting side note: the last time I mentioned the indeterminacy of rules, a Google search brought up only a handful of results. Now there are 28. It has a long way to go before it’s part of conventional parlance, but it’s a good start.
1.) We’re still wondering what the hell Goofy is. Is he a dog, too? He wears a hat and drives a car. But then so does Donald.
2.) God bless you, Martin Luther.
Two new things.
Mog is kinda half myspace, half pandora. You connect to people based on what you listen to, which is a great idea if enough people catch on to it. Given the obscurity of my musical tastes, very often I’ve found that no one on Mog listens to the stuff I like. But maybe more will come. Mog scans your music folders and makes public everything you listen to – which sure is neato, assuming you have nothing to hide.* It also tracks your most recently played tunes. All of the technology is somewhat scary as far as movement-tracking goes – I’m trusting their terms of service when they say they’re not snooping other things or selling that info. Anyway, here’s my page, check it out.
Writely is a Google-copyrighted product that’s basically the same thing to Word that Gmail is to Outlook. It’s online document creation and storage, but with the added kick of collaboration features and versioning (you can roll back to earlier drafts).You can import and export your documents to and from Writely. Apparently this Web 2.0 thing is taking off – I never thought I’d store documents on the web, but this thing looks pretty appealing.
1.) Which I don’t. I’m steadfast in my appreciation of Winger.
Here’s a new spam tactic – rather than pull entire passages from literature, why not just grab the important nouns and verbs? For example, I got this today:
oak falls dissolves heap ashes fire consumed king. Then itself. implies examining examine prior Indeed election unanimous minority submit choice majority wish vote behalf something unanimity occasion least. SOCIAL COMPACT SUPPOSE reached point obstacles resources disposal state. changed manner engender forces existing ones formation
case divided. enter upon task without proving subject. asked prince write politics. answer neither why so. If were should not waste time saying wants doing hold peace. As born citizen free
It goes on, but you get the idea. Reading it, I noticed some conceptual continuity, as though there were a writer stabbing at something, gasping the important words as if out of breath. I Googled the first few words and found that they were extracted from Rousseau’s The Social Contract.