Here at the cafe watching the pre-lunch crowd fill in. Figure I would root through my email here for an hour or two in order to ge tmyself out of the house. Ron is at his place making coffee and prepping to go to the gym.
I’ve become strangely optimistic about the book in the past few days. The book edged into the top 10,000 on Amazon for a few hours on Friday and that’s with very little advance marketing so far. The big blitz starts next week where I’m getting all of my colleagues with big networks to email their lists during the same 2 day stretch.
I’ve been having lots of dreams lately. I had one where surgeons had left some sort of ‘carbon rid’ in my chest cavity – it was called a ‘rid’ and not a rod. And the nurse wouldn’t tell me if it needed to be removed or not. I think this was from a combo of watching Dr. 90210 this weekend coupled with a few weeks ago of ‘101 Things Found in the Human Body’. Most of my dreams are focused around anxiety or foreboding – but mine have always been like that. I rarely have ‘nice’ dreams. I don’t really think that makes me nuts per se – I just think my subconscious has more important things to do than entertain flying around on Gwaihir.
I’m starting to train my virtual assistants to do more administrative tasks, trying to move more time for me to work ‘in my business’ rather than ‘on my business’ (thanks, Michael Gerber).
I did get my business blog upgraded to WordPress 2.0 without event. I just knew it would blow up on me but it took me longer to prepare in case of the need to restore tha it took to upload the new scripts and run the upgrade.
I don’t think I blogged about Monica and Brian coming to visit 2 weekends ago. They were in the acting class after Karen and I in college (they were in the same class as Matt and Brigitte). Monica, Brian, Brigitte, Matt and I met for dinner 2 weeks ago and had a truly grand time. I am strangely devoted to the success of this small group of people – I truly am an advocate for their success and well-being. I hadn’t seen Monica in years but it didn’t matter, we couldn’t stop giggling and being chummy. I’m hoping when I go to New York in May I can see her again. Brian and Monica had been teaching together at a community college in Dayton (where Brian lives now). I just know they are hard-as-nails acting teachers. Their class was very very stringent on technique and hard work and they really didn’t like our class who had a much more laidback attitude about class work.
If I returned to acting training I think I would be so much better now. Good God, I would be so much better. I’m less concerned with what other people think, I wouldn’t be as likely to jump into the ego-destruction game of arts education, I would take full advantage of the facilities around me. I’m not a great actor by any stretch – I’m not very good at bleeding emotionally – I’m much better directing and writing. I like the ‘full system’ of the world of a play – that’s why I always preferred to be the Dungeonmaster than a Player Character. I notice this with Ron and I – if we’re gonna talk MBTI, he’s an S and I’m an N. He sees teh details around him – if he can’t sense it, it doesn’t exist. I see the full system around something – macroview along with past/present/future. I think that is one place where we bicker the most – long with our P (him: more data!) and J (me: make a goddamn decision!) sides. I think I’d be much more protective of my creative soul in training – I’d be more likely to tell a professor to go to hell than accept any sort of pedantic cryptic ego-game.
Brian, Monica and Brigitte and I ended up at Sweet Occassions for dessert after dinner at Andie’s which I think is Lebanese/Mediterranean. The host (owner?) at Andie’s was there – the hot guy Karen always had a crush on. At Andie’s we had the Saganaki (and the requisite puns on Nagasaki) and I had the kabobs as well as a vodka tonic that made me a little bubbly. Ron says he can always tell when I’ve been drinking when I talk to him on the phone because I sound ‘looser’. Heh. Brigitte and Monica threw back wine and anyway we ended up at Sweet Occassions ice cream and cake store. Brigitte had a piece of red velvet cake that was as big as a dictionary, Monica had german chocolate cake (I think…?), Brian had a milkshake, as did I.
The highlight of the dessert-gathering was Monica perusing the ice cream flavors and seeing a flavor called Zanzibar – she leered:
Oooh! Three kinds of African chocolate… I could use that inside me…
I feel like I have to say that ‘ya see, Monica’s black’ and that is supposed to make the joke make more sense but then I feel like I’m being weird having to say ‘Monica’s black’ because it points out her ethnicity or whatever and I don’t want to make it sound like I put Monica in this ‘black woman bucket’ or ‘African American box’. Ugh. ANYWAY. Monica is a black woman and it was funny when she talks about wanting to have three kinds of African chocolate inside her. Actually I think one of the first things Monica ever said to me when we met over 12 years ago was
You ever have black coffee, no sugar, no cream?
She’s a very direct communicator. And I think she also said
You’re pretty sexy, you know that?
When we all lived together it took me a few weeks to adjsut to her super-direct communication style. We used to stay up all night eating romaine lettuce and solving social ills. But back to Sweet Occasions where one of the participants who shall remain anonymous also was heard to say:
I can’t have ice cream. Too much dairy and phlegm. Besides the chocolate will go straight to my clit.
And there was much raucous rowdy laughing.
I miss the intellectual stimulation of an arts program. To spend a couple hours each day hashing the nuances of Stanislavski’s method versus Michael Chekov’s acting method… or taking half an hour to cover how to present your calf to a lusty lady in a Restoration-era play…
These are the people I want to do Moliere with. I’d like nothing more than to make a billion dollars and each summer invite these pals to come out and we all do our favorite plays together. As we are maturing we are becoming more appropriate for Ibsen and Shaw.
I feel like I really have to get this personal blog back into high gear – since I mention it in the book.
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