Hope Junkie in Flight

As some of you may remember, I spent a good portion of last summer on a walking truss at 37 Arts, running followspot for an up and coming Off-Broadway show. The patrons were always either amazed or terrified by our assent (in full fall arrest harness) to the truss on a "rope" ladder made of aircraft cable, but once we were up there, it was surprisingly comfortable to sit on the edge of the truss rail and lean against another pipe until the show started. It was a fun show to run, challenging

Full post and comments at The Audacity of Hop

We made the mistake of letting the bunnies have too much space to play in for their last date, as they had been getting along reasonably well in the confines of the pen, and it ended in flying fur. Just a little, and no injuries, but it's back to the pen for our furry friends. Interestingly, the dynamic appears to have changed significantly when we let them have the whole room. Now instead of Juno trying to be the dominant rabbit, Jupiter is chasing her around the room! He tugged out a small hank of her fur, but since she's shedding quite a bit, he didn't actually do any...

Read the rest of this post at Audacity of Hop. Comments are there, and there's even a cute picture of a dog...

Today is the anniversary of the landmark supreme court decision in Loving v. Virginia(1967) which ended race based bars to marriage by declaring Virginia's anti-miscegenation statutes to be unconstitutional. In this case, a interracial couple, Mildred & Richard Loving, were married in D.C. and then returned to the commonwealth to live. At the time, there were laws on the books in Virginia stating:

"If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."(Virginia Code § 20-59)

And:

"If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage." (Virginia Code § 20-58)

When they returned to Virginia, they were charged with violating these statutes and pleaded guilty, being sentenced to one year in prison, which was suspended conditionally as long as they left the commonwealth.

So they left. They moved to D.C. and made friends with the ACLU, who drove the legal train to the Supreme Court.

The court reversed the convictions, with Chief Justice Warren stating in the majority decision that:

"The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942). See also Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190 (1888)."

I'm sorry to have to say that it was a suit brought against my own beloved Commonwealth that occasioned this change, but I do find it encouraging that now, forty years on, this particular form of discrimination seems so antiquated. It gives me hope that soon we will find our current marriage related bigotry quaint and old-fashioned. Perhaps the next iteration of Loving v. Virginia will be a gay couple suing the Commonwealth for not recognizing their Californian marriage.

This is another reason why we need to elect Barack Obama. Can you imagine the current court, or even worse, the court after four more years of Bush (as played by John McCain), making a decision based on "the broader, organic purpose of a constitutional amendment" rather than the "passage of specific statutes"? I can't.

And yes, in the interest of full disclosure, I am a card-carrying member of the

This latest development will amuse anyone who knew me as a bunny mad child - my best friend and I wrote a newspaper based on the exploits of our stuffed animals called "The Bunny Press", for crying out loud. (Yes, I was a nerd, thank you very much.)

Dave and I have adopted two bunnies from the Manhattan Shelter of NYC's Animal Care & Control. We went intending to adopt only one rabbit, if that, but we both fell in love with separate bunnies, so we decided to take both of them. On the left here is Jupiter, Dave's selection (and now my favorite, if I can be said to have a favorite - they're both pretty great) and below on the right is my selection, Juno. (The Roman goddess, not the movie, just so's you know.) Juno is now Dave's favorite, being the more mild mannered of the two. I was actually starting to worry that Juno was too forceful a name for such a sweet and friendly rabbit, until the two of them met on their first bunny "date". Turns out that our sweet girl is quite the dominatrix!

I say "date", but the process of bonding two rabbit strangers promises to be quite the challenge. You can read more about bonding rabbits, or house rabbits in general, at the House Rabbit Society. The first time they met, Juno tried to exert her dominance, which, despite her size advantage, I didn't expect, and Jupiter resented it. Yesterday was their second date and they seemed to get along better, he mostly ignoring her and her attempting occasionally to groom him. Tonight we decided to skip the date, as there was a storm and both bunnies were a bit edgy.

So there they are, our new rabbit friends, Juno & Jupiter. Expect to see a good deal more of them as they learn to be friends with each other as well as with us.

I'm hanging out at blogger now, for no really good reason. Come see me there. Or one of you guys with a paid or permanent membership could create a syndication feed for lj, and then friend that. (If you don't know how, ask me.)

The new url is http://audacityofhop.blogspot.com. I'll try to cross post for a while, but let's be honest, we all know I'll get lazy on that one...

Though I'm not going to lie, the little green keyboard is really little...

I'm visiting Alan and Beth on Dave's Easter vacation and while Alan was wrapping up some work I decided that I wanted to play with the child-like computer.

It's been really nice having Dave with me, visiting my family the past few days. I wish I didn't have to take him back to his tour tomorrow. Boo. I'm also not terribly keen on the return drive to New York, but I'm hoping to see txtarheel on my way out of the triangle area in the morning. I don't seem to have her phone number, so that may be a problem...

Ok, no more tiny green keyboards for me.

I can't seem to keep track of my phone today. I left it at home this morning when I left, but both our shows were out on Long Island today, so I swung by the house on the way to the first school to retrieve it. I was even smart enough to bring the charger.

Then I left the damn thing in the van when I parked it in the garage. I realized this only AFTER fighting my way to the 59th Street Bridge, so it's going to spend the night there.

When are we getting those phone implants?

edit: crap. Just realized that my phone IS my alarm clock.

Check, one, two, check...

I got home slightly too late to listen to the ballgame I was particularly interested in, though I did listen to the last two outs on the way home from the train. I haven't broken down and subscribed to either the cable Extra Innings package ($$$ but high quality) or either of the mlb.tv packages ($$ but medium to low quality with crappy support) but my brother got tagged by mlb's auto-renew on his subscription to mlb.tv from last year. (I avoided this fate only through the cunning loss of my debit card and subsequent replacement last fall. Clever of me, no? And quite foresighted as well. How did I know in October? Must be psychic!) Sadly for Thomas, he has the World's Worse Web in his apartment (or possibly a faulty network card) and isn't capable of utilizing said subscription. Besides which, with tonight's Sox game in the books, he probably wasn't watching anyhow, so I decided I was intrigued by the 13th inning Nationals/Phillies game and tried to use his log in.

There are two different levels of mlb.tv this year. The basic 400K version and a theoretically much better 700K. Thomas has the 400. So I click on the 400K link and am redirected to a page telling me that "You have reached this page because your current subscription does not authorize viewing 700K streams" and giving me only one option - pay them $30 more (presumably of my brother's money) to get the 700K. I tried it again. Logged out, tried again. Asked for a different 400K game (MIN/SEA - I really didn't care.) Same thing.

Apparently there were no 400K webstreams tonight. Screw you guys who didn't want to give big greedy MLB more money. MLB.tv is run extremely poorly, so I can't say that I'm surprised, but it sure doesn't make me want to subscribe. I think I'll be listening to my Sox play on XM, or I'll pony up the cash for cable.

I'm listening to the Sox game on XM, like you do when you don't have Extra Innings. (I'm still seriously tempted by it - cable had a free preview on all last week and I loved getting to turn the game on and watch in on TV. (Wow. I feel like some sort of freakish throwback to maybe the 50's... "Holy Toledo, Mabel - we can watch the game on that thar television.")

Sometimes, during the commercial breaks, they play ads for other XM stations, and I swear I just heard one for Casey Kasem's American Top 40. "Do you remember waking up and knowing it was Sunday morning because you would roll over, turn on the radio, and hear Casey Kasem say, 'Now, on with the countdown.'" Why yes. Yes I do. I remember the little red radio I had too. It was rectangular, about 8 inches wide by maybe 6 high and few inches deep, rounded on the sides, and bright cherry red. With a handle on top. I remember going outside at the old house, setting the radio at the base of the big tree, and swinging on the rope swing for hours.

It's funny, because I was never actually that huge a fan of the countdown. I didn't care especially where Madonna hit, or anyone else for that matter. Sometimes I would tape the countdown because I knew that a song I particularly wanted a copy of would be in the top ten or so, but generally it wasn't a big deal to me. But it is evocative of the 80s for me, the way I imagine VH1 would like "I love the 80s" to be. Just hearing that quote made me virtually able to smell the spring grass in the front yard, and feel the thump of the hard packed earth under the swing where my siblings and I had worn away the grass with our feet on the swing.

It feels like a long time ago.

I need to change.

I like what I do for a living. It's fun. It (mostly) pays the bills. The people are pretty great.

I don't feel fullfilled anymore though. I feel like I'm just muddling through, doing the work. I'm not accomplishing anything. Increasingly, I feel as though I should be doing something that has impact. I should be living a useful life. I should be helping people, or changing things. Perhaps I should just sell everything I own and join the Peace Corps.

Except that the Peace Corps doesn't want me. Remeber that college degree I set out for? I got distracted by the lure of work in my field and I have't much regretted that. I finished three years of college, and I got out of it what I wanted - good training and experience that helped me get an apprenticeship in technical theatre. Since then, I've been working continuously in a field where it seems like all jobs are transient. I can't complain. But it's hard to switch careers (assuming I can think of something I want to do) without a degree.

I thought about going back to school in VA, get a job at the nifty performing arts center there at CNU, spend a few years there doing the part time student thing. I just don't really want to move back to VA. There were, I thought, two good reasons to return there to finish. One, the director of the theatre department would be very helpful in getting me credit for lessons learned elsewhere (for example, he doesn't think that I really need to sit Lighting Design II since I've designed professionally) and two, going to school in VA seemed like it would be a cheaper prospect than going to school in NY.

Those advantages aren't what they used to be. I don't really want the theatre degree, unless perhaps it becomes an arts administration degree - for the technical applications, my work experience is far more importaint. So the additional credits for life experience at CNU are only useful insofar as they get me closer to graduation, with a degree I don't really want anymore. (Dave points out, accurately enough, that if I finished that, I could go to grad school in something totally different.) It turns out also that in-state tuition at CNU (I've been faithfully paying income taxes to VA while on tour and in random other places for that status) is almost twice as expensive as in-state tuition at CUNY. I should apply to City College and see what transfers. Especially if we're going to move to upstate Manhattan next year!

Problem is, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I always thought I would have that sorted by now!

Dear Al Gore,
You are a dirty dirty tease. That was hysterical. Thanks.
Love,
Yet another dissatisfied voter.

Dear Apple,
Stop advertizing that damn iPhone. Yes I want one. No I'm not willing to go to Cingular to get it. Alright already, it's cool. We know.
Irritatedly,
SprintUser


Dear AmEx,
Damn that commercial was long! My life is not that tedious, my card is not american express.
Snooze...

Dear Academy,
Why are you letting freakshow Cruise give humanitarian awards? He's a weirdo. Seriously.
Thanks,
Sarah

Dear Gwyneth,
Sorry I'm so late in picking this up, but you know I don't follow the celebrity stuff. You really named your baby after FRUIT? Are you planning a second chiled named Pear? Or maybe Plum?
Just wondering,
Me

I just got the sweetest note and a completely unexpected AIDS Walk donation from Dave's Grandmother. She really is the nicest person, but she was also one of the last people I expected a donation from - she's on a fixed income, and not even MY grandmother, so I would never have asked - but it turns out that Dave's mom told her about it, so she sent me a check. So very kind. Wow. I got a little misty-eyed, I'll admit.

On that note, the current list of my favorite people is:

Joshua Fowler
Ernie & Betsy Gates
Brina Guild
Alan Hoyle
Sue & Craig Phyfe
Yvonne Sternberg

There's plenty of time for you to be one of them too!

I asked the passing question about a week ago "what cartoon is on at 11 pm?" I'd been wondering why I never see Good Eats, as Dave does a lot of flipping around and the Food Network is a regular stop on the dial, so I looked up the FN schedule on their website. 7 and 11. I know I would never see it at 7, since the Simpsons are on then, but I couldn't think what it was at 11. So I asked.

Since then Dave has been turning to the food network at 11 so I can watch Good Eats, which is awesome. It's a little thing, but thoughtful and it makes me happy.

One of the people I talk to on my diet website (yes, I have a diet website, shut up) just signed up for AIDS Walk in Florida (Ft. Lauderdale, I think) because of me. YAY!

My favorite people in the whole world are:

Josh Fowler
Ernie & Betsy Gates
Brina Guild
Alan Hoyle
Sue & Craig Phyfe

Want to know WHY they are my favorite people ever? Because they donated to AIDS Walk for me! And you can too...

Get a Thank You Card from Sarah!

So, while I am annoyed that Opera doesn't seem to support Google documents, I am super amused by this...

"If you are working to fix problems with a specific browser and would like to bypass this check, just add &browserok=true to the end of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets url.

Please note that it is a violation of intergalactic law to use this parameter under false pretenses, so don't let us catch you at it.

And, it won't work very well -- really."

Dude, check this shit out - Juice Bags. Seriously! My own little solar panel to carry around with me. Love it!

I just realized that my paid status expired. It made me sad. But then it's not like I've exactly been USING lj lately! What do you think?

Brilliant! I was waiting around the house today for the Keyspan guy to come and install a remote reader for the gas, and when he he was done he left us with a gas safety pamphelet. Perfectly reasonable thing to do. In it is a description of the added fragrance of their natural gas, so that people know what to sniff for in the event of a leak.

With a scratch n'sniff of the very thing. I couldn't resist, I admit, I scratched. Sure enough, absolutely wretched smelling, just like gas. (Yes, I know natural gas is odorless, I'm just talking about the added safety stench.)

I found this hysterically funny, though ultimately pretty clever.

I just realized something about friendships. When you admit something you are ashamed of to a true friend, instead of judging you, they love you more for the admission, for the trust.