Days 9 through 12 (sorry!)

Okay, in my own defense, my computer has been spazzing out for a while. Getting it to work long enough to get this posted was an epic battle.

Tammany (continued):

There was an uncomfortable silence until we got back with everyone's drinks, at which point Cale started talking with Grace as if nothing had happened. I found myself getting well and truly pissed with this Morgan person. Whatever she'd done that made Cale this edgy and uncomfortable so long after it happened must have been awful. I slipped over to her once we'd distributed beverages. She smiled at me, the awkward smile that says, 'you're in the same group of concert-goers as I am, but I honestly wouldn't know you from Eve, so I'm just going to smile and hope you go away.' And she made it seem elegant. Bitch.

I smiled back to her, and said, sweetly as I could, "I don't know what you did to Cale, but if I ever find out, and if you ever do it again, or hurt him in any way, I will murder you and turn you into sandwich fillings. Okay?"

She stared at me, the irritatingly sunny expression gone from her face, replaced by a frown. But before she could respond, I said, "No," and walked back around to join Andrew and Cale. I felt better.

The band was due to come on at any minute. They were an as-yet unsigned group, hence why Andrew had brought Nathan along. I'd seen them once or twice, and they were good, but only in parts. The kayboardist and drummer were merely mediocre, but the lead singer and guitarist, Rhiannon Shay, was possibly my favorite of all the musicians to frequent the Oyster. She could sing down the moon, if so she wanted. She was absolutely amazing. I intended to point her out to Andrew at the first available moment. Of course, it turned out that I didn't have to,  because as the band filtered onto the stage, he leaned over to me and asked, "Who's that chick?" I told him. "I like her," he said, decisively. "She's the only one who seems to have a clue what she's doing."

And she was - she was helping with the last minute adjustments with the other two, as well as getting her guitar ready. Then she turned to the audience, and we all fell under her spell. Her stage presence was magical. Twenty songs later, she released us all by announcing the set break, and I turned to look at Andrew. He was still staring at the stage. Grace, who was on his other side, leaned around him and stage-whispered to me, "He's in a music coma. We should probably shake him."

"No, I'm good," he said, shaking himself awake. Then he mentally disappeared again for a moment, before returning to announce, "I need her." He grabbed Nathan and marched off.

"Does he have a plan to get backstage without getting in absolutely huge amounts of trouble?' I asked his sister.

"Oh, he usually manages," she said, with a wave of her hand. "I've only known him to get thrown out of a place once, and that was because we were in Portland over the summer and he chose the wrong room to march into. It was the employee break room, not the backstage area."

"That must have been embarrassing," Cale said, (sort of) interacting with me for the first time in an hour.

"Well, he still signed the person he wanted to sign, so it wasn't a complete loss," Grace said, smiling at him. Then she turned away and started talking with Jim, who'd been her companion all night.

That's when Cale grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the crowd, the performance hall, and even the building. "God, Cale, wait, do we have our ticket stubs?" I asked, leaning back against his tug.

"Yeah, yeah, I got them," he said, continuing forward. "Look, you're the one who wanted to find out what happened with Morgan, alright?"

I followed without complaint.

When we were out on the street, leaning against the cool brick wall in the smoky night air, I looked at him expectantly. He took a deep breath, and said, "You remember your senior year of college, when I was a new graduate trying to figure out how to not become an accountant when my degree was in business and math?"

"Yeah," I said, nodding. "Bright idea, that major, by the way."

He rolled his eyes. "Anyway, you remember how intense I was about music back then. Way more than I am now. I was doing auditions, sending out tapes, all that crap, just trying to get a response, seeing if I could make it that way rather than doing the books for places and working fast food."

"You complained all the freaking time," I said, shaking my head at the memory. "No sympathy for my senior project."

"Hey, real life is hard," he said, turning his face up towards the streetlight overhead. "You didn't get that yet. But the thing was, with all those tapes going out and stuff, I was getting responses. People were interested. Even our very own local Music Inc. asked me to come in a do a demo."

I stared at him accusingly. "You never told me that!"

"I didn't want to get both our hopes up," he said, apologetically. "If I got turned down, you'd have gone mama bear and torn someone a new one and I'd have been embarrassed. But I did the audition - and I met Morgan. She was just a secretary there, with a brand spanking new degree in the exact same stuff I had a degree in, unsatisfied with her job, looking for something or someone to keep her mind off the fact that she was basically a data entry clerk and coffee-getter. I ended up becoming that someone."

"Was this when I was on that trip to Chile for a quarter?" I asked. "Because if you'd gotten yourself a girl that looked like that, and I was around, I would never have heard the end of it. Ever."

This Posting Thing is Hard

First - mea culpa. School is hard and distracting and the head cold from Hades hit two days ago, so I've only been partially conscious for the past seventy-two hours. (Boo! Hiss!) Hush, imaginary audience spawned by cold medicine, I'm making my apologies. You aren't helping.

Second - Today's my birthday! I'm officially a year away from being a Legal Adult. I no longer need parental permission to give blood. I can get senioritis and only be normally annoying. Good stuff.

I received, so far, cash, from the vast extended family that my mom knows intimately and I've never met; a GPS to remedy the sense of direction that can lead me in circles until I lay down in the metaphorical sand pit that's following me and wait to be rescued; a MLP cake, because my parents think they're funny; a Doctor Who shirt that tells the world Rule #1 (The Doctor Lies); a thing of Thunderstorm perfume that I can't actually smell yet, but I'm told it smells like dust and wet grass; and finally, a poster of my favorite painting, Chop Suey by Hopper.

So pretty.

I've used the GPS to get to school, I've used the perfume and I'm told I smell quite nice, although that's mostly hearsay at this point, I'm in relaxed dress (which means jeans, because my school is the kind that requires collared shirts and khakis normally) and wearing the Doctor Who shirt, and the poster is on my bed at home, waiting for me to figure out what posters get the chop to get it to fit on my walls.

Robotics began last night, and all my favorite people are on the team. It's pretty cool. Even Intelligent New Senior Guy with an Amazing Voice is on it. My only issue is that I'm beginning to suspect he's me, only gender-swapped.

My ginger and I found out that we're actually living in each other's heads, after we spent about two minutes talking in sync with each other and finishing each other's sentences. The rest of the seniors ran away from us, convinced he'd stolen my soul and was using it for demonic purposes.

I diagrammed sentences in English whilst valiantly battling my sinuses for air. Diagramming's hard, people. It's as hard as correctly reading maps. I'm no good at either.

And now I'm doing college applications. I'm up to three on the Common App, which is awesome. That means I only have one extra to do, and that's for U Idaho, and therefore should not be too hard. Now excuse me, I need to go see if drilling a hole into my sinuses will relieve the pressure.

Sunburns and Jobs and Absences, Oh My!

So I had orientation for my summer temp job yesterday, and I got to walk around behind the scenes at EAA's Airventure for a good two hours, being orientated and watching the helicopters and biplanes and awesome cars fly and/or drive around. I'm working at the Ford tent, stamping booklets for people, so I'm going to be sitting out of the sun among brand new Mustangs, F-150s, and other cars whose names I don't remember. It was all very interesting, and I might get to meet George Lucas (We were told to always address him as Mr. Lucas should we see him. That was an actual warning they gave us. No lie). However, being the highly intelligent and utterly prepared person that I am, I wore a tank top to the orientation, thinking that we would be given our uniform shirts right away and not wanting to roast. I also did not wear sunscreen, because the bits of me that are visible whilst wearing a t-shirt no longer burn. They have lost that capability in self-defense.

Unfortunately, we did not get our uniforms until the very end, and we did not put them on at any time. So I walked around, outside, in the 90 degree weather, with no shade, for approximately an hour and a half, correcting for the short periods of time I spent under a tent. I am sunburnt beyond belief. I am a shade that, when seen on a human's epidermis, is typically deemed 'lobster' or 'tomato'. Clothing hurts. So do goosebumps. With the interesting tanlines created by my tank top and bra straps, I look like a candy-cane made of flesh. It huuuurts. (I wonder how many hits I'm going to get for 'flesh candy-cane'. Hi, slightly creepy people!)

'Kay, so now that I've finished complaining, the reason for this informative but slightly rambling bit is this: for the next five days, I'm not going to be around, what with working 9 to 5, then rehearsing until 9 again. I'm going to go and rescue poems and rants from my notebook, though, so there shall be posts! Huzzah!

Now I'm going to go put more creme on my shoulders. It huuuurts.

And Suddenly, the Author Changed Her Mind!

(Ooh, lookit, a blog post that was not scheduled. Oooh!)

So I was writing the synopsis for Americana, and I actually got halfway through it last night. I was quite proud of myself. Then I actually read it, and realized that it was an accidental but very unsubtle Jesus metaphor. Which is absolutely not at all what I wanted to write. So. Those character things I've been posting in lieu of actually giving you lovely people (All like, two of you. But you're both lovely!) real posts? Those are going to be put on hold, in a 5-star spa specifically for characters of indecisive authors. They will get written about, I'm just going to have to rework some stuff so Americana doesn't turn into some sort of author tract.

My plan was always to write a comedy this August, and the best comedy I've written (and my favorite thing I've written, period) was written without character summaries, without a plot outline, and without a clue what I was planning on doing. All I had were chapter subtitles. (Chapter Four: In which there is an explosion, our hero is mailed to Chesterwick, and there is time travel; necessarily not in that order.) I'm going to do that, this year. It's fun, I'm able to be funny - it's way more funny if not even the author is expecting it - and as an added benefit, I suddenly gain time to write my college essays. Win-win-win!

Scariness, Now in Mold and Energy Drink Form

Icky icky icky icky icky. Ew. Icky.

Okay, I'm better now. I just spent the past several hours cleaning up a house after some neglectful renters with small children. I'm slightly traumatized - there was mold. And weirdly painted walls. And holes in walls. And cobwebs. And mold. Normally I'm not squeamish at all.. However, after spending a good portion of the day in a house repainted pink and brown, without air conditioning in 90 F weather, scraping (I cannot repeat this often enough) mold off the windows and cobwebs, with spiders still present, off of everything, while light-headed due to having given blood recently and having consumed the ungodly power of Rockstar Energy Drink to stay awake, I feel a bit nauseous. Ew.


(Also, this is my excuse for not posting yesterday - they successfully vampired me and I was silly enough to not drink a ton of water before, so it was like trying to write in the midst of a day-long period of vertigo.)

Nauseous or no, I have come to respect the power of said Energy Drink. 

This stuff is scary.

I only drank a quarter of the can - supposedly about half a cup of coffee - because dear God, it was like drinking fruity flavored, carbonated electricity, in that it was good but sort of stung. Its fumes were worse than that of the cleaning solution I was using, and that stuff was close to making me loopy. For the time that the drink was presumably affecting me, I was like a light-headed, bouncy, Queen-belting, distracted-by-shiny-things cleaning machine. I almost didn't care about the mold (so much mold!). Then, as I had not continued consuming the scary drink, I crashed, nearly fell over, and told people it was time to go home because I said so, and because everyone was traumatized by the mold, they all agreed. I only recovered from the ensuing Rockstar-level caffeine hangover after we stopped and I got deep fried mushrooms, which are both a thing and completely awesome in a greasy, Wisconsinite way. Less cliche than deep fried cheese curds, too.

In my hubris, I drank some more a little while ago, so if I seem a little hyper, that's my excuse. I can totally see  why it's called Rockstar - it's like someone distilled one of the Who's room redecorating parties and added ionized slushy syrup to it.

I can see music. Lookatalltheprettycolors...

Excuses and SUGAAAR.

I've been away for a bit (yeah, sorry about that), but it was for, if not a good purpose, at least an explainable one. Rehearsals started for Mame, my current off-Broadway summer show, and also, I got The Long Earth. (squeeeeeeeeeeeeee)

So that's taken up most of my time for the past couple days. But never fear! Tomorrow a review of The Long Earth shall be put up, because now that I've said it will, it will hang over my consciousness until I actually write it. It shall hang like a doomy cloud of doom. Doooooom.

The reason it isn't being written now is because I'm on a bit of an adrenalin-and-sugar high, because my SAT scores just got in and I'm celebrating with an abundance of reese's cups. :D Nothing I wrote right now would be as coherent as I'd want a review of a Terry Pratchett novel to be, so I'm going to hold off until after the sugar crash.

 Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!