Fuck yeah, dreams! Fuck yeah, theatre!

I've blogged about my dreams before. More often than not, the dreams that I remember come from those times when I've woken once already, but sleep in because sleeping in is for the cool kids. It's those mostly-asleep states that generate, for me, the most interesting, memorable dreams.

I really liked this morning's dream. In it, I had written a children's play about fairies who hadn't gotten their wings yet. On reflection, it's pretty damn close to the Cutie Mark Crusaders from My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. But it's a dream, so I'm not going to be too hard on it for being a bit of a rip-off.

It was hard to tell from the dream whether I was watching the play, in it as one of the fairies, or stage-managing it. I remember that there were 3 fairies who had yet to get their wings and were very frustrated about it, and one fairy who had her wings, but couldn't fly, which was really embarrassing. There was one bitchy fairy who was a total bitch at the other four for not being able to fly, and she had this sort of lackey character that she could drag around and feel superior to. That's really as developed as the story every got - at least in the dream. After I woke up and thought about it a bit, I realized it would probably work better with fewer fairies. Two without wings, tops. And bitchy fairy's lackey shouldn't have wings, either. Because then there could be a plot thread that would allow one of the fairies to realize that she was actually just like the lackey, who was like a pixie or sprite or something - she wouldn't be getting wings, but she could do fucking magic, which kind of made up for it. It's a children's show, these kind of things totally make sense, I promise. Also, spoiler alert: bitchy fairy couldn't fly either. She was just being a bitch to hide the fact that she was just as flummoxed by the whole flying thing as the non-flying fairy was. And spying on non-flying fairy to see if she can figure out the trick first. But they all learn a Valuable Lesson about stuff at the end.

The set was awesome. There were poles set up stage left, painted green so they were like flower stems, that the actors would swing around. Um... kind of like pole dancing, my brain has just pointed out, but more fanciful and fun, and a whole lot less smutty. Apparently dream brain is much less smutty than awake brain. Or more so. ANYWAY, the fairies would swing around on the flower stems and pretend they were flying, and it was all a whole lot of fun for them. There were trampolines strategically placed around the stage, so that fairies that could fly could jump on the trampolines and fly through the air without having to get into any of the complications of a fly system, which, I'm given to understand, isn't any fun for actors. Besides, it's fuck-off expensive. Look at that Spiderman musical. Even when I'm asleep, I'm completely focused on low-budget theatre. The first play I was ever in was A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which I played the fairy Cobweb. We used trampolines to fly, and it worked really well. Plus, it was wicked fun.

I even dreamed up a meeting with the costume designer, as we tried to figure out how to do the fairy wings. The initial idea was to use those lame wings that you always see on bad Halloween costumes, but we ended up coming up with something much better. The actors would wear a lightweight harness that held a pair of thin, curved PVC pipes (or something similar) at their shoulders, that were draped with colorful ribbons to make it all look fluttery when they moved. Trust me, visually, it was epic.

Even though I know that I'll probably never get around to fleshing out this dream into a fully-staged play, unless I get a co-playwright to work on this with - I am not good with kids, you guys - I like that a part of my brain is still thinking about theatre, and wanting to be involved in it. It's been hard going to school for 9 years, high school and college combined, and having your whole world revolve around the stage, and then only working on two plays in the 5-6 years after you graduate. I have this hope that starting next year, things will change and I'll be able to do a lot more of that type of thing. The ultimate hope is that I'll be able to create a career out of it eventually. I'm just stuck right now.

UPDATE: I just got confirmation from a 100% legitimate and not-completely-perverted scene designer that my flower stem poles are the way to go. So take that, smut!

New Shiny

I received a new laptop today, and there was much rejoicing. Now, there are a great many things I can do that I could not do before. The intended goal of this purchase is to get me to stare at a blank page more frequently, in the hopes that I'll stop being so afraid of the goddamned thing and put some fucking text on there once or twice. I spend a lot of time on the futon (still too poor/cheap for a couch) watching television and movies via the magic of Netflix and our ever-growing personal collection of DVDs and, let's face it, sometimes what's on the television screen isn't all that interesting. Those who follow my Twitter feed (which should be nearly all 11 of you, considering where my traffic sources are coming from*) will know that I'm currently in the middle of a prolonged Nicolas Cage marathon. We love it when he goes psycho, but his films are largely hit or miss. Largely miss. And so up until today, I've spent a whole lot of this movie-watching time doing crossword puzzles on my phone, or playing Dragon, Fly! on it, or just generally paying more attention to my smartphone's screen than that of my television.

Anyway, I eventually gave in to that nagging feeling that since I was really just sitting on my ever-flattening butt, I really should attempt to at least finish the current draft rewrite re-re-rewrite of the novel I wrote when I was in middle school and the beginning of high school. It might not have sparkly fucking vampires or magic wands and shit, but it's been sitting in my brain like a fat albino toad in an empty soup pot**, and having a laptop will give me less of an excuse to not stare this beast of a book down while Nic Cage is losing his shit.
At least until we get to the end of the marathon (which will be quite soon, we just finished watching Lord of War today), at which point we will have to find some other marathon to latch onto.

So here's me, writing in my blog instead of staring at a blank page and wondering what the fuck Peria is going to do to help Twaise and all his people, and how to not make it so goddamn fucking obvious who the really really important person that's been hiding in plain sight is. I'm giving the whole first bit of the book away right here, and I don't care because I know I'm going to get dissatisfied with the 45 pages I've already got in another year or two, and start a re-re-re-rewrite. Largely, my problem is that while I grow increasingly satisfied with the development of the relationships between the characters, the actual events that allow that development to unfold leaves one fuck of a lot to be desired. And that's why I spend so much time staring at a blank page. Because while the characters are solid in my squishy brain, the events are not so much, especially since the latest rewrite kind of threw a whole lot of the early stuff out on its stupid ear.

When it comes right down to it, I'm just in a cranky ass mood because I wanted to see a movie tonight, but the showing that I intended to see was mis-labeled as being in 2D, and fuck 3D right in its stupid ass. I love David Tennant, and I was really looking forward to seeing him in leather pants, but I'm not going to spend money to tell movie executives that seeing David Tennant in leather pants is worth prolonging this stupid 3D trend. So I'll go see the only 2D showing on Wednesday, or wait until it's released on DVD, because that's how I roll.

*Except whoever is using that Trafficfaker site. Seriously, where the fuck is this blog linked that is so embarrassing that you have to use Trafficfaker to hide it?

**I'm almost completely sober, I swear. It was just the only analogy I could come up with that didn't involve turds, or nutsacks.***

***I've been reading Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. One of my favorite bits is where a dude's nutsack is described as being covered in the only wrinkles that bring anyone any pleasure. Also, according to that book, every dude in England has an enormous, veiny cock.

OMF.

I thought I'd take a shower to help me come down off this trip I like to call... ok, I don't have a name for it. Not important. What is important is that I took a shower, and I had a fucking brilliant idea.

Someone needs to create a scale for inside the shower. Not for crazy people who obsess over how much they weigh whilst soaking wet, but rather for crazy people who obsess over how much shampoo they have left in the bottle versus how much is left in the conditioner bottle!

I don't know about you guys, but it's a pain in the ass when you run out of shampoo before conditioner. Or vice-versa. Because you can never catch up! Or you have to use way more conditioner than you really need, and just waste it, in order to catch up with where you think you are with the shampoo, because maybe that bottle feels just a bit lighter than the conditioner bottle.

So just picture this with me. You're in the shower, and you're not one of those really smart people who buys the shampoo and conditioner 2-in-one bottle. Or even those really really weird people who buys the shampoo/conditioner/bodywash people. You don't want to be one of those people. Because the only products I've seen with the 3-in-one are Axe products. And you don't want to use Axe products because you don't want to be a cockbite.

Anyway. Shampoo bottle. Conditioner bottle. You weigh shampoo, and that comes up something like 5.23 oz. You weigh conditioner, and it's 5.30. "Hmmm... I've been a little stingy with the conditioner, lately," you think to yourself. Or, if you swing that way, "I've been using too much shampoo! What have I been doing with my life?!" With the handy-dandy Shower-Scale-Thingy, you can now moderate your morning (or afternoon, I'm not judging) ablutions accordingly, so that you can run out of shampoo and conditioner at the same motherfucking time!

Best part of this: you sell a single scale for the regular price. You sell a double scale, where you can weigh shampoo and conditioner at the same time, as a deluxe model, for an extra $20 $35. People will buy it, too! They love those As Seen on TV products. They're all the rage.

Ok. One of you go and invent this product, sell more units than the Snuggie (whose only purpose to me seems to be as a Halloween costume. You get a red one, an fancy red hat and a saucy moustache, and go as the Snuggie Inquisition, which nobody will expect) and you get back to me. I don't even ask for much of your millions. I think 10% is fair, considering how all I really did was take a shower and type some words, while you had to do the hard part of inventing it, marketing it, and overcoming the fact that shampoo and conditioner often have vastly different consistencies, and so the same volumes of each may not exactly weigh the same.

Forget that last bit. If you don't, that just means that you hate money. And I know you don't hate money. WHY DO YOU HATE MONEY?!

Fucking shitball mothercock.

My work schedule right now oscillates between opening, where I wake up at 4 or 5 am to be at work at 5 or 6 am, and closing, where I go in to work around 1pm and am there until 9:30 or 10 pm. It could be worse, but it royally fucks with my brains sometimes. For instance, after returning from a 5-day vacation, I had two closing shifts in a row. I then had a midday shift, and today I went in at 6am. Tomorrow will be another 6am shift, Sunday will have me there at 5am, and then Monday I'll be going back in at 6am.

For those of you keeping score, that's five seven days in a row. My brain first thought it was five for some stupid reason. It is not capable of keeping score.

I don't intend to bitch about how much I'm working. That's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm very glad to have a job. But sometimes I wish there was a way to express, via this text, how long it took me to finish the previous sentence. It sort of went like this:

"That's not the point I'm trying to make. I'm very..." *blink blink* *type type type* *blink blink* *staaaaaare* *delete delete delete* "... glad to have a job."

Where was I?

I'm glad to have a job. Things suck right now, but they'd suck worse if I wasn't working. And this is not the worst job I've ever had. It's actually in the top five. My boss isn't an asshole, my coworkers are a fucking laugh riot (ye gods, I can't even spell riot correctly the first two or three times). I have awesome coworkers.

I keep losing my train of thought. Ok, going to start over. Again.

I'm glad to have a job. What I'm whinging about is the fact that my sleep schedule gets so fucking cocked-up sometimes, I lose many of the faculties that make me feel superior to the people I see on websites like... oh, I don't know... Lamebook. I can spell words with, like, seven syllables, whereas those people can't even spell words with three letters. Though I realize it's probably more due to laziness and the oppressing mentality that communicating in (*blink blink blink* *staaaaaare*) anything resembling an educated manner is for morons who can't grasp the idea that i can rite lyk dis n u stil no wat i meen, bra.

Someone help me. I'm losing control of my brains, and it's because I couldn't fall asleep last night. It's appalling that even though I've only technically been awake for (*staare* "ok, the first alarm went off at 4:30 am, and it's 6pm now, so..." *blinkblinkstare*) almost 14 hours, I feel as though it's closer to three times that amount length. I mean, I did sleep last night. Just not for long. I was definitely still awake at 2am. It's just kind of dumb that I can easily stay awake for more than 14 hours with no brain-deadening effects when there are more than 2.5 hours of sleep in between awake periods.

Ok. I'm done. I'm going to post this and let all 11 of you know just what a pitiful, broken creature I become sometimes for no real reason at all. But first, a picture. Because why the fuck not?

I was going to post a pic that was strange and out of nowhere, but that one is appropriately topical. So now I'll look for another strange and out of nowhere picture.

I really hoped more people would buy that t-shirt. Because then I would have more moneys, and people would be wearing Taintpuncher shirts.

A saga of flowers and herons.

This weekend I took a trip down the Mississippi, and I took photos of the things that I saw there. I saw mostly flowers, and a heron. And some spider webs, but those photos aren't interesting. Click to embiggen.

Not bad for it being almost unbearably hot and gross outside.

In other news...

Ok, that last post was kind of sucky, but I have too much pride, or not enough sense, to remove it. So here's a post with some pictures I took recently that I do not hate. As always, click to embiggen.

I need a damn haircut. But I still love adding all the random labels that Zemanta suggests for my posts.

First World Problems

Laundry day always has the potential to send me into a fit of rage.

I'll admit it: I absolutely loathe those people who throw a load of laundry in the wash, or the dryer, and then just forget about it. It infuriates me when I go down to my apartment's laundry room with my laundry, and someone else's clothes are just sitting there.

Because I'm a wimp, I'll usually give that person the benefit of the doubt, and head back upstairs, wait a half hour or more, and go back down. Because maybe the machine had just stopped. They're not precise. The washer usually takes a little less than a half hour, the dryer a little more than 45 minutes. It depends on the load, so it's no big deal.

But when I go down there repeatedly, and the same clothes are just sitting there, utterly untouched, my blood kind of starts to boil. There are only two washers, and two dryers. There are 16 units in this building. How arrogant do you have to be to think that you're the only one who'd like to have some clean damn clothes that day?

It's moments like that that make me want to throw the forgotten clothes onto the laundry room floor and just use the machines. I hate that I have to drag out someone else's laundry (which is sometimes damp from the washer and starting to smell a little gross) and pile it on top of the narrow, rickety table. I hate that I have to feel guilty about doing that, and that a small part of me is worried that I'm going to get caught in the act, and bitched out by the owner of the orphaned laundry. I wish I just had the balls to do what I had to in order to get through this chore that I already hate without feeling like I'm the asshole here.

I know that sometimes things come up, and that emergencies happen. I'm sure that people are probably willing to take the fact that their clothing has been displaced in stride, in a cool and mellow manner. I'm perfectly aware that there is a laundromat not three blocks away from my apartment - but frankly, it's more than twice as expensive, and it's goddamn hot out there and no relief of inconvenience is worth spending more than $15 to do 2.5 loads of laundry.

I'm in a miserable mood today, and I won't feel better until my laundry is clean and I don't have to think about it for another week.