numeric oddity

Today I am exactly halfway between the last time I saw MS, and the next time I will. I just figured that out; I was counting the days until I leave for Berlin, and trying to figure out everything that needs to happen before then and on what kind of timeline. Mom, for example, tells me that her passport is "dead", so she needs to get that dealt with before we can apply for our Ukrainian visas, and how much time will that take, and I need to figure out trains and lodging and interpreters and so on...but anyway. It's been 54 days since I said goodbye to him in SF, and it'll be 54 until I say hello to him in Berlin.

Which is sort of cool in its roundness.

So for anyone who hasn't figured it out, the someone who was reading my blog introduced herself, and is perfectly charming, and I find myself once again in the position of alternately admiring a lover's taste in other women and despairing of ever holding a candle to them. But it's not as bad as I'm making it sound, not at all; it's just funny to me how this seems to keep happening.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time now talking about how my tomboy childhood has influenced how I interact with men now, or how it makes me feel I compare to women who seem to have more control of the stereotypically womanly stuff, like, oh, high-heeled shoes that aren't chunky boots, or eye makeup that's the same on both sides. I spend so much of my time taking my clothes off, often in dirty places, that I live by Gilda Radner's timeless fashion advice: I base my fashion sense on what doesn't itch. There's no point in wearing something I care about to the Art Institute, for example, where chances are excellent some eighteen-year-old will spill paint on my street clothes while I'm on the stand (this has happened) or to a catering job, where I'm going to be lifting, hauling, and sweating until I change into my tux. In which I will also probably lift, haul, and sweat, come to think of it. So, you know. Jeans. A pair of cargo pants passed on by a troupemate. Another pair of jeans, these with a rakish smear of yellow paint on one leg. T-shirts. T-shirts. T-shirts.

But I wasn't going to go into this.

Sigh. Trying to work a transition into talking about a project that I'm realizing I should probably wait a while before I mention here. But--I'll tell you--just like Tuesday, I was approached by an editor at Thursday's reading. Who wants to take a meeting. This hasn't completely sunk in. If I let it sink in, I might completely flip out. So. Stay tuned. A very cool thing might be about to happen.

Anyway. Other things that are going on, because I'm not feeling wise or witty tonight and just want to crawl into bed and watch Atlantis on my laptop and satisfy my little pointy nosed/glasses-sporting/hopelessly brainy boy fetish with one Milo J. Thatch, cartographer/linguist (doesn't that sound tasty?), are as follows:

1. Emperor and I just drove an hour to Sebastopol to see D's daughter star in her school play 'A Roman Comedy', which was surreal. I mean, I get a night off from going to the theater for work, and what do I do? I go to yet another play which I Can Not Leave At Intermission. This one acted--and lit--by twelve-year-olds, many of them apparently the home-schooled children of hippie parents (at least two cast members were named after gods and goddesses), many of them wearing armor made of paper plates spray-painted gold, all of them very earnest. Some of them completely inaudible. The scene changes were often as long as the scenes themselves, and from behind the curtain we could hear the patter of running feet, the scraping of set pieces being banged into each other, the sound of glass breaking. I put my head on Emperor's shoulder and tried to nap, but it was difficult with all the talking around us as the parents in attendance explained the play to their younger children. This experience is having a decidedly contraceptive effect I told him sleepily. At the intermission we snacked widely from the bake sale concession stand--lemon bar, two kinds of brownies, a cookie, a hard-boiled egg--and told D, who was house-managing, what a good job her daughter was doing.

2. Today someone (besides my mother, who says things like this all the time) told me that my high-pitched, child-like voice stands in marked contrast to the tough-girl stuff I use it to say. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

3. I've broken my fast. You can all breathe now. Tokyo will not be smashed flat after all.