mitch

i mentioned to chris yesterday that i wanted to see comedian mitch hedburg perform live, and he told me mitch is dead.
so for those, who like me, didn't know, he died on march30 of an apparent heroin overdose, and i'll never see him live, or live.
but because i think he's funny as ever, here's a site with some of his stuff.
laugh on behalf of mitch.
walk good. stay alive.

endless forms most beautiful

i just spent a fun evening with jake+chris- 2 people i don't spend nearly enough time with anymore. we sat @ guapo's and had margaritas and chips and shit and it was good. and we decided that we should check out the chinese-restaurant-with-brazilian-strippers when aly-from-cali's in town in a few weeks.

in other local news, yesterday i saw the police arrest somebody by running him down with their car- i was coming down my street, about to cross florida ave. (yes, i live in the 'hood) when the police came screaming past me and turned right onto florida. next thing i know, they slam on the brakes, throw it in reverse and come back at an alarming speed. and just as i think to myself, "they gonna kill somebody, i better go around that shit", they hit some bicycle-riding dude with the ass end of their car in the middle of the intersection, sending his ass one way and his bike the 'nother. so now i'm thinking, "holy shit! they just killed bicycle-boy!" but instead, they hop out their car, skip over to his prostrate body, and slap handcuffs on him right quick, then drag him back to their car to slam him against it (apparently the only way to have one's rights read).
so it seems that now, instead of chasing criminals (assuming he was one), the bullies in blue can just run them over...

in local news today there was a small herd of buffalo on the loose just north of baltimore, that was eventually corralled on a tennis court after disrupting traffic and alarming petit-bourg homeowners- speaking of which, i learned @ the radio station this week that cows (and other hoofed animals) have toes...
i'm working on this "evo devo revolution" book (evolutionary developmental biology) and it's pretty fucking cool- they recently learned that the same genes differenciate form throughout the animal kingdom, which means that the same genes that give zebras their fuzzy stripes, give us our skin, and the same genes that give fruit flies 6legs and 4wings, give us 2arms and 2legs! more later, if i can figure out how to explain without being too big a geek. but if you're interested, the book's by a dude named sean b. carroll, and it's called "endless forms most beautiful: the new science of evo devo" (the first part of its title is a darwin quote, about what the process of evolution creates).
check it out.

walk good.
ps: diatribe on pathological liars coming soon, as well as the need to ban forever and destroy all currently remaining white pantyhose...

trini dictionary, et al

so as i wrote my last post, i remembered posting post-carnival and a few other occasions when i used words/expressions foreign to non-caribbean readers.
early on in this blog i explained words like "lime", "fete" and "wine", but i realise that not everybody coming to a recent post has read (or would remember even if they had) those early explanations. so i figure is high time i add a trinbagonian dictionary to my blog (for those who don't know, i'm from trinidad but the nation is comprised of 2 islands, called trinidad+tobago, which we contract to "trinbago"- trinbagonians are nothing if not language efficient- we never hesitate to leave out those less-important words and syllables- see why i need to add a dictionary?)
so i'm adding these links to my sidebar for future reference as well.

skettionary- of course if you use this trini dictionary, the first thing to look up is the word "skettel" that its name comes from. and the skettel homepage has links to other fun stuff too.

this dictionary looks like the definitions were pulled from a great book called cote ci cote la which not only gives definitions, but explains how the words (many are patois or of spanish origin) came about. my mom got me a copy when i came to d.c. and i love it.

and this isn't a dictionary but has a bunch of trini-related links courtesy of a friend of mine, in case you think carnival and curry might be calling your name...

this is a plethora of random trinbagonian stuff, including local writers and artists, with its trini dictionary here (again, very similar to the cote ci cote la version).

well, grims just called to say we going to the grocery, which we have to get done before our production meeting tonight, so that's it for now. i'll add shit to my sidebar later.
walk good.

jam and wine

for any non-caribbean visitors, the title of this post is not a reference to food.

another busy week and i'm a little closer to making it out of april alive.
i knew april was freelancers' busy month, but this one's been ridiculous. maybe being sick had something to do with it- i ended up not getting better for real until friday morning, and i'm still hacking and sniffling, while grims sounds like he trying to cough up his internal organs. we just not very sexy right now. and i'm still unsure about allergies because all week it's been impossible to tell what was pollen and what was viral.
anyway, almost there...

so since i woke up that morning feeling miraculously better and knew i wouldn't see grims @ any reasonable hour anyway, i went fetein' with carla friday night (dat bajan could wuk up!) and lemme tell you- i think i'm back on track for losing that 10lbs. i mean, i was just home for carnival the other day, but that's my other life. feteing in d.c. and managing to have a good enough time to break a sweat is different. i have to find a place that plays what i wanna dance to and is populated by people who can wine, and know a dance is just a dance because i hate nothing more than to be wining my waist hard and having a time, and have some man hypnotised by a pelvis in motion come up behind me and spoil it because his ass can't keep up.
don't approach it if you can't fall in and ride it. on the rhythm, not beside it.
so big up crossroads for bringing bunji garlin and denise "saucy wow" belfon up from sweet trini to get me back out to the club. i'd been to crossroads before, but that was years ago and is years since i had a fetein' pardner to go with. but me+carla had a time! more than made up for being too sick+tired (literally) to go with her the previous friday.
so this is my new exercise programme- i need to afford to go wining every week to supplement my weekly dance class because i remember how good i looked when i had regular class and feteing, and the approach of summer signals the need to be able to wear pumm-pumm shorts. and knowing i will never willingly go the the gym...
crossroads here i come!

walk good. wine better.

call me a rose but i won't change my name...or whatever the fuck that saying is...

i'm sure i'm way behind on this, but here it is anyway (and i kinda like the idea that not everybody who reads this will know my real name):

1. pornstar name (name of your first pet/street where you live): dribble montello (gross!)

2. fashion designer name (first word you see on your left/favorite restaurant): queen raku (much better)

3. exotic foreign alias (favorite spice/last foreign vacation spot): chardon benit trinidad (or pepper trinidad)

4. fly girl alias (first initial of your first name/first 2-3 letters of your last name): e. bart

5. icon alias (something sweet within sight/any liquid in your kitchen): paradise plum juice

6. detective alias (favorite baby animal/where you went to high school): goat bishop anstey

7. barfly alias (last snack food you ate/favorite alcoholic drink): pop tart bug juice

8. soap opera alias (middle name/street where you first lived): efua st. lucien

9. rockstar alias (favorite candy/last name of favorite musician): chocolate monk (although this last name could change daily)

10. star wars name (first 2 letters of first name + first 3 letters of last name = star wars first name; take first 2 letters of your mother's maiden name + the first 3 letters of the city where you were born to get the last name): elbar smmar

well. ok.
walk good.

murphy strikes again

when i started this blog, i said straight up that it'd be irregular, but then i somehow got pretty good at posting at least every other day. however, now that it's freelancers' busy season i find i can't keep up with the standard i set for myself, and even reminding myself that i never promised my few readers frequency doesn't make me feel better. it's not like i don't want to be here, time is just shrinking @ an alarming rate. i need a tesseract to get my shit under control.

so of course, just as i thought i'd almost made it through my shitty week safely, i got sick.
we had an outdoor shakespeare gig on saturday, and i was planning on posting when i got home that evening, about this funny dream i had about unexpectedly finding my (male) friend stripping (more later) and my jalapeno-contact-lens-incident (also later). and figured i'd also write some more monday night, since i had an audition and a teaching gig, after the radio station- surely there'd be stories after a day like that...
by the time i got home from saturday's outdoor shakespeare i felt a little less than lovely. but i put it down to allergies and took a claritin. i didn't end up posting that night because the claritin and presumed allergies were making molasses in my brain, and i absolutely had to work on my monologue for monday's audition, and could tell it was going to be slow. so i skipped posting to prance around my living room in what i can only assume was a very ponce-y fashion, while talking loudly to myself about brushing my hair, which my neighbours no doubt found bizarre, with the dreadlocks and all...
i felt pretty crappy the rest of saturday night and decided to take sunday as recovery+monologue day because i wanted to be prepared for monday, but all of sunday i still felt bad in spite of keeping the windows closed against pollen on an otherwise gorgeous day, and could only try not to cry at the thought of how losing my voice would affect my monologue. so monday, on claritin, i hit the radio station and was very productive, auditioned, which went reasonably well, and i think i managed to hide the slight raspiness tickling the back of my throat, but as i headed over to teach (on the opposite side of the district) and the adrenalin deserted me, i realised i felt worse than over the weekend.
got off the metro and walked uphill (of course) to the school, lugging my backpack (3gig-day) and struggling to breathe through congestion and my asthma's response to it, barely made it through teaching, and by the time i got home (1 hour commute, just when i thought it was finally all over) i had almost no voice, but chills as some sort of evil compensation.
meanwhile, grims is sick enough that he got to work and had to turn around and come right back home, so yesterday, when we were actually home at the same time, we were both horribly sick with fevers, congestion, headaches and cramps. clearly, my allergy-assumption was an underestimation of the problem. lamer than lame. last night was miserable, and we slept on the couch the past 2 nights, so grims could half-sit-up in the recliner to help him breathe.
and i forgot to mention that as i was rushing from my audition to the school, i found out the hard way that the d.c. metro only allows you to buy a farecard with your debit/credit card twice per day. so i was standing there with an unusually (for me) fat bank account (freelancers' busy season pays off), but couldn't ride because i had no cash. i had to go beg the station manager to hook me up and he had to call ahead to my destination to explain what happened so they'd let me out. i must say that both the besthesda and benning road station managers on duty yesterday from 1.30-2.45p.m. were the best!
but on the way home, instead of metro-to-bus i had to bus-to-bus the whole way (a lot less comfortable when you sick). at least i had bus fare because i take the bus from union station to my house anyway. thank who-the-fuck-ever for my having bus fare. myself, i guess.
anyway, i feel somewhat better today in spite of sounding like shit dragged across a cheese-grater, and the rest of the week's mostly @ the radio station- no more shakespeare until sunday (dude's birthday is supposedly sometime this week, even though scholars can't actually agree on who the hell he was) so on to the more amusing shit.
the other day (lost track of time between being busy and sick) i dreamt that i went to this strip club we heard about recently. now we long suspected it was a strip club because very few buildings on dupont circle corners have so few windows. it always looks clean and well-kept, but has no sign, no windows, and no obvious clientele. a friend recently told us it's a chinese restaurant with brazilian strippers, so as one who enjoys a good strip club, i must go. especially since i think chinese is a much better meal than burgers+wings to accompany naked women (and yes, i'll tell once i see for myself).
so the other night i dreamt we went, and upon walking in saw my friend watkins onstage, stripping. he was wearing nothing but pasties, but for some reason, my subconscious (and if you know me, you'll understand how surprising this is) censored his naked self. there was a general blurring of him between the waist and knees. now i love watkins to death and i think he's cute, so i don't know exactly what this blurring of his nether regions was about, but as i've been asked by mutual friends, i will point out that waist-to-knees is indeed, a big blur.
but the other thing that amazed my waking self was that he had his pasties twirling simultaneously in opposite directions (speaking of which, did you know that birds have 2 voiceboxes that they have simultaneous independent control of? that shit's so cool!). now i haven't had a moment to call and ask him if he does in fact know how to simultaneously twirl pasties in opposite directions, but you best believe when i find out how, i'll post instructions alongside the directions to the chinese-restaurant-brazilian-strip-club.

sorry this is another blogella (credit to rosie for that lovely word) but before i go, i have a cautionary tale that alyincali (who'll be here soon! yay!) reminded me of.
when we were in university, before i found contact lenses that were comfortable, a friend who i've wisely forgotten told me that if a lens was gunky i could take it out and put it in my mouth for a second, or just lick it, then put it back in my eye. one's own saliva is apparently a good quick fix when there's no solution available. so i took this advice, and it seemed to help on those long days when my contacts felt like nickels, but the last time i tried it, i forgot that i'd recently eaten a sandwich liberally garnished with fresh jalapenos. needless to say, i haven't done that since (lens-licking, not jalapenos because i can't give up pepper).
i would try to explain what it's like to put a contact lens covered in capsaicin in your eye, but i think you get the point without a description of the unparalleled, seemingly-unquenchable agony. couldn't wear my contacts for days.
feel free to point and laugh.

walk good.

surprise poetry (or should i say poetry surprise, in the same tone of voice as tuna surprise?)

last night i realised that i'm so much further from being a blogguru (i'm allowed to make words up here) than i knew. my favourite local band was back in town for a gig and i went and they were amazing, and only when i was hit with an unexpected poem that i decided to post, did i realise that what i shoulda done was post about their gig in advance, link to the band's website, and tell people to come out. they had a fabulous set.
but i'm lame and didn't think of blogging the band.
so here's a poem instead:

intrigue:
he calls to say
i still wish it'd happened
he calls to say there'll always be something
something about me
something between us.
(and) i say yes.
that something is
that it never happened.

it's unedited, appearing here exactly as it was delivered to my brain as i waited for miscellaneous flux to take the stage. sorry if it stinks for you, but i kinda like it, especially for a quickie (sometimes that's all you need...)

we started the garden today- and by "we started" i mean that grims went to the store and bought all the necessary bush+seeds, as well as the lumber and soil to actually build the garden boxes, then he came home and built and set them up.
he's the best. more later on the (hopeful) tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapenos, et al.
i will be gleefully playing in the dirt soon.

walk good. find some relatively clean earth and roll in it.
ps: the flux was noted by the washington post (twice) too, if you looking for another opinon, and you can listen to and pick up their cd @ cdbaby...
how's that for some make-up band-blogging!

word to the herd

i had to right quick mention that i feel one with the word.
when i read jake's comment about mos def and decided to quote back my favourite lyric, i realised that it (very nicely) led directly into his quoted lyric, and that was kinda cool, but then i decided to give a douglas adams quote too, and after posting my comment i read whitey's comment on a different post of mine and discovered that he'd quoted the same douglas adams line i had.
word is bond.
walk good.

quicker and dirtier...

made me think today:
whitey
and in a completely different way:
jake.
when you read jake's, do read the article he's linked to and discussing.
walk good.

don't leave earth without it!

dude! within the week of the beginning of batman begins, i just saw the trailer for the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy!
i can't decide if mos def, or douglas adams, is sexier...

walk good. snatch your towel and follow ford prefect.

my knight in dark armour

watching the teasers for batman begins makes me wonder if i could get grims in the suit...
that'd be pretty fuckin' sexy. damn sexy.

ride that batmobile good.

new big wong

as if in response to my dismay @ losing the bruce lee restaurant (immediately below if you're on my main page), today as i rode the x2 through chinatown, i saw a sign- literally.

it said "new big wong".
how can i resist?
it's closer than bruce lee, and right by the full kee, which bodes well...

walk good. speak softly and carry big chopsticks.

general tso's game of death

i also found out yesterday (in addition to the previously-posted-and-now-immediately-below-if-you're-on-the-main-page discovery of idiots posing as parents) that the bruce lee restaurant has moved and changed its name.
now the move is neither here nor there- well, i guess it's actually more there than here, in that it moved further away from me- but the name change is what's killing me.
the first time i indulged was strictly because of their name. how could i say no to the bruce lee restaurant? and then when the food proved good i became a regular customer, eventually introducing grims to the joys of their fried wontons of fury (no, they don't reference any bruce lee movies in their menu or decor- i'm just lame and waxing nostalgic). then we moved out of their delivery area, and it became an occasional treat, fondly revisited as an integral part of our pre-marital-shacking-up.
so we decided it'd be nice to have bruce lee on our anniversary for the first time in too long.
we exited the cinema, angry at the foolish adults who would lead a child into sin city (yeah, that abovelinked previous post again), and called bruce lee to place our carryout order (i didn't actually know what the place looked like for the first 3-and-change years of my consuming the lychees of their labour), thinking that we'd grab our bruce lee, go home and open the rum-punch, and erase the horrid memory of assholes almost ruining sin city for us, until we would only remember the on-screen part of the movie experience, and a great dinner.
alas, it was not to be.
i called the bruce lee restaurant, and was told that they moved further away than we felt like going, but even worse, that they changed their once-beautiful name.
to "super panda".

i don't even know what to say...
how do you go from bruce lee to super panda?
i almost cried.

walk good. treasure your chinese connection.

driving the bus to hell

it seems that while i was out watching sin city, everybody else was commenting on my blog, telling me i should see it. so now we all caught up. i loved it.
and as keif mentioned, also coming soon (in addition to batman begins) is the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, starring one of my favourites, mos def, as the inimitable, wisely towel-carrying ford prefect. once dude doesn't ruin revenge of the sith (episodes 1+2 were shit- visually stunning, but shit nonetheless) it should be a good movie summer for me. i'm also hearing about the fantastic 4, but once i get batman and hitchhikers guide, i'll be set and everything else is bonus.

i loved sin city. i saw the graphic novel, frame by moving frame, and was pleased.
but i'd like to vent my frustration in the hopes that the dick-cheese-for-brains couple that sat behind us during the movie can actually read, and might possibly find this and learn why they should never have been allowed to breed.
and so that there can be no doubt in their puny little minds that i'm speaking of (and directly to) them, they sat in the furthest row up, house left, for the 3.55p.m. showing of sin city (theatre a, not b) @ the newish gallery place/chinatown movie theatre in d.c.(n.w.) on sunday april 3 (2005), thus ruining part of my 3rd wedding anniversary.
as a sometime writer/actor, i'm more aggressively against censorship than many, and as an independent thinker i believe in letting people make their own decisions and fuck up on their own. but i must intervene to say that if your child is not yet old enough to be aware of the convention of not babbling constantly and kicking the backs of others' seats for the full 2hour-duration of a movie that we paid far more than we should to see, then perhaps you should especially not be bringing said innocent child to see sin city (the name alone! if only you were smart enough...)- just because it's a sunday matinee does not make it appropriate for a 4year-old. it's still rated 'r', and with good reason that doesn't translate as an invitation to 'retards'- who would be you, not your poor child, although it seems you already working on that.
it's not his fault that he cries and chatters when the near-naked women kill the asshole dudes- it's yours, for bringing his impressionable mind to a film he's clearly not ready for.
i don't have children yet because there are sacrifices required that i'm not ready to make yet. but if you have children, for any reason, then you either find a sitter, or make the fucking sacrifice and deal with it.
in the words made famous by everybody's favourite will-sing-for-crack-addict "...the children are the future, teach them well..."
your baby musta learned some serious, life-changing shit @ yesterday's family outing.
you must be so proud.
because of course, you're far too vacuous to realise that you should put aside your desire to see this movie until you can do so without a 4year-old in tow, as evidenced by your not getting the hint from the many, many, many angry looks and grumbles you got from myself, my husband, the others in our rows and the 10 rows in front of us, as we all tried to make our point without loudly using foul language with regard to your person and lack of mental faculties in front of your apparently already abused child. in retrospect, i should have turned around and cussed your asses anyway, because sin city was fully preparing his developing mind for the things i wanted to say, and it's not like i could hear the dialogue i paid so dearly for anyway.
you should not be allowed to care for a child, and if you read this, i hope you feel like the shits that you are.
and while i do not presume to know anything about the details of your relationship and division of responsibility, i also found it shitty when 3quarter-way through the film, the 'mother' suddenly (finally!) realised that perhaps she should remove the rugrat, but the 'father' (i use these parental terms loosely) got to stay and watch the rest of the movie, like it wasn't his family too.
i hope your kid yakked all over your favourite clothes when you finally left, and if the poor baby has nightmares, i hope he keeps you both up all night, every night for the next 3years. you stink.

that aside, sin city was great, and we'll prob'ly try to see it again, without the assholes.
walk good.

happy birthday zed+fred!

walk good.
biglove to you both.

batman begins!

so i'm sitting here, sadly working toward the eventual doing of taxes, and happen to look up @ my tv for a split second, just in time to see my favourite signal in the world, and the words flash across the screen:
batman begins
june 17

yay! unless that meant i just missed the actual trailer...

walk good. unless, of course, you happen to own the batmobile, and thus need no pedestrian assistance...

holy teaser batman!
as i was typing that last sentence there was a winged migration in my peripheral vision, and on-screen was an orange-red sky, filled with bats, then the title and date again but no signal this time, so i guess what i saw of the first one was prob'ly the extent of it...i'm all aflutter like a cloud of bats (also called a colony, but 'cloud' is a much better word for my sensation, and grammatically correct, too)...

the dark knight cometh.

fictitious fiction

just a quickie to say that my yet-unposted-fiction does exist, contrary to how it may seem. this evening, between frantic phone calls to attempt a solution to my financial woes, i was ready to put the beginnings of it out there- until my slow-ass machine fucked me.
now i love my ancient laptop, but it's slower than molasses on a lunchbreak. its speed deficiency doesn't usually matter, since all i use it for is creating documents for my stories, and occasionally checking email. it's slow enough that any real internet surfing/searching sends me running to caress the keys of grims' 'real' computer. i don't know that i've ever even posted from my own machine.
but all my work is saved on my dinosaur, and this evening, it was apparently pissed off at my recent neglect. it is not interested in bringing its contents to the blog. we currently defragging, and hopefully will make up soon, so i can get on with this shit.
on another note, it gave me a great idea, and now i plan to network the 2 household laptops, so that i can access the net from his and simultaneously access the files on mine, which allows us to not dish out the big $ for a new laptop until we take care of more pressing costly things.
yay.
walk good. stories crawling your way soon.

crazy bus stories

on my way to meet patrick+erika yesterday, the prerequisite crazy person got on my bus and i saw every rider's facial expression register, "here we go. again."
it made me wonder if every single bus has a crazy person on it, or if some of us publicly-transported are unluckier than others. i think i fall in the unluckiest percentile. i can't remember taking the bus without a crazy person along for the ride.
neither can erika, and she drives one...

last week on the way to covey's b'day celebration i had to take one bus to a transfer point, then another to my destination. so we coming down k st. (n.e.) at a good clip- faster than i trust a cellphone-chatting-busdriver with, but a speed i'd drive comfortably- and some unseen jackass throws a rock @ the bus. just as i was thinking i might actually make it to my transfer point (4blocks away) without the particular entertainment of the mentally short-changed.
the stone cracks one of the windows- not shatters, just cracks- one of those long streaks you get when some truck carelessly looses gravel on your car's windshield- and the driver, without missing a word of his phone call, gets out to check it out.
now, everybody riding the bus is thinking "fool, you need to get back on this bitch and make it safely to union station in a hurry, then check out the damn window- none of the passengers screaming broken glass so we temporarily safe". i mean, since somebody threw the fuckin 'rock, why assume no further intentions?
homeboy gets back on the bus, hangs up his call to make another, and turns off the engine. all without a single word to any of us paid passengers. he talks on the phone a little longer, then gets back off the bus to inspect the window further, as if anything's changed. he eventually gets back on the bus again, mumbling to himself, still not saying anything to the now-impatient passengers- it's been about 5 minutes of no motion.
finally, as i'm collecting my bottle of wine and other shit from the seat next to me, intending to kick this driver's ass and ride out, some lady asks him what's happening. he apparently says (loud enough for only that questioning individual to hear) that we need to catch another bus because he's now outta service. so she walks out, and i realise the gist of his repsonse and follow, neglecting the necessary ass-kicking to walk the 4 blocks to my transfer point with the wine intact, but still missing my bus when i'm a block away and can see it leaving me to wait in the cold for the next one, 20 minutes off, which meant i might as well have taken the time to kick his blasted ass after all.
it was only a few blocks walk, and i don't mind, but i coulda caught my next bus if the damn driver woulda said something. i mean, wasn't that an appropriate situation for a public service announcement? would he have let us continue sitting there indefinitely?
i'm so pissed i didn't mash him up. me and my silver box coulda done some damage!

this is a whole nother kind of 'walk good' i now offer you...