Below are the most recent 6 friends' journal entries.

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
_fool	12:53a	i promised, in the stupidly long post about my old drama teacher, to talk about getting over stage fright. mostly because i was going nuts in parenthetical passages in that entry, not necessarily because i had anything insightful or interesting to say. but i'm not sure, i might find something of value there, so i'm gonna give it a try. i've always been shy. the TMBG song if i wasn't shy has often haunted me---all the things i might do if i were bold! and Jenny Holzer's truism, "TIMIDITY IS LAUGHABLE" makes me cringe. i know, ok! i'm just really unselfconfident. and really that's more about wanting not to overstate abilities than a deep seated belief that i'm inferior or something. but it's enough to keep me from being the braggart or basking in too much pride, which i've always worried about, like Salinger's Zooey. so i chose to blend in, be quiet, unremarkable. i still choose that sometimes. but i think i got over the intense need to be that way by getting up in front of people and being the focus of attention for awhile. i never do excellently. usually i do good, i think, if i can remember to keep my pace at a non-exhausting level (for the audience, that is...not that smart, just talk that fast). but i am not a great public speaker, just moderately entertaining. anyhow i started acting in school plays in 7th grade. i had a small role, but it was primary for a few minutes. i hadn't really thought to be terrified before the show--not realizing that a little embarassment acting in front of the director and my fellow cast members probably didn't bode well. when i was under the lights, i promptly forgot my lines and had to be ad-libbed for by the character i was talking to. oops. but somehow the director gave me credit for some of the ad-libbing and boosted my ego enough that i made it back out the next night and the one after, and it wasn't so bad. or so good. but tolerable. i think i kind of go on autopilot when reciting memorized lines, so that was a good kind of stasis to be in until i could get comfortable actually expressing and living the moment. which happened when i started giving presentations without any notes. i guess i did it some in high school, but never for as long or as focus of so many folks' attention as when i started teaching short topics for the linux users' group at UT that i got involved with in 1995. those smallish workshops (maybe 30 people tops) led to me being an officer in the parent organization and eventually running meetings of hundreds of people. and i never had memorized what i was going to say, just made an outline and worked my way through it. tried to inject humor as i found funny things to share. which was sometimes a lot, and sometimes a little. i wonder how i'd do slightly drunk--i'm much funnier/wittier (i think--feel free to confirm or deny) after a few drinks. but also distractable and probably sloppy. hmm. so i don't really mind the attention of the world these days. and i don't have to retreat to meditative autopiloting as i did in high school. the end. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 28th, 2009
_fool	7:43p	shaking in my boots a dog tried to eat me today. a huge black rottweiler in a huge black suv (the driver, though, was small and white) passed me while i was biking. the dog sounded angrier than any dog i've ever met and i was worried he'd break out the rear window he was throwing himself against. hard. at least there was glass between us. until i pulled up to the stoplight, and the dog was still going nuts, and the driver rolled down the back window so he could thrust his snarling, roaring, slackened choke-collar-girded head in my direction. thankfully there was not quite enough open window for him to escape, so i just sat there intimidated and vaguely wondering if my death would be my fault if i started growling back. but that might have been the death of me. sure, i wear bunny ears on my helmet when i ride. but i think i ought to be able to wear steak and live, wriggling kittens and not be in fear of my life or at least limb from a dog's angry teeth, when i'm in public. i was still shaking when i got home. typing this entry gave me back the nervous sweats. thanks to the random cyclist who stopped to ask if i was ok when i stopped shortly after the stoplight, who'd seen the whole thing, i at least get to retain some faith in humanity, if not dogkind. i miss you, Pong. if you'd been along you would have cowered behind me, but i would have felt braver. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
_fool	1:14a	some things i learned in and out of school ( some background that you may not care about ) ( my life in high school ) ( the set-up ) at this point, it's just me, Mr. Moore, and Tyler, who is of the aforementioned "in kindergarten when i graduated" category, and Tyler and i trade tales of how much Mr. Moore influenced us, between Mr. Moore telling stories about how students influenced him, in a kind of roundabout way. and those are the tales i set out to tell you tonight, as they seemed so momentous and, well, influential, even as i drove home soberly. but when i got home last night i couldn't bring myself to write any of them. one reason was that i was feeling tired and less articulate. a better reason was that i was afraid they wouldn't stand up to retelling, that they were "you had to be there" moments. but now on an airplane alone and surrounded by strangers, i feel up to giving the retelling another try. so bear with me and accept my apologies if they don't hold up, because at this point i have to get them down, and out. for me if not you. the one that i retold a few times last night was that Moore, despite, i think, never being my teacher (maybe for a quarter or two, instead of PE, but never as a full-year class with a grade that really mattered academically), left me with a concise and frequently useful lesson. he had an...annoying and endearing habit of going ballistic once per production (for that was all drama class was--the rehearsal, setup, and staging of productions on stage and open to the public). just bawling us out for something we frequently didn't understand. and the memorable one was a show where i was the quasi-lead (it was not a play with a clear leading role, but i was on stage for almost the whole time. the lottery, and i was the mayor, for those who might care) anyway, after dress rehearsal, he sat us down in the audience seats, and got on stage, and just harangued us. "there is one person in this room with a reasonable, a worthwhile, a usable and acceptable amount of ENERGY. and he is talking right now." it's true--our energy was not on display that night. and so we all (i really do think, all of us) reached inside and found more energy. maybe not the amount he was hoping for, but enough. and that production went off pretty well. the lesson i took away was that when my audience (be it me or many), sometimes, just really believing and feeling and then ACTING that belief would impart enough energy to the process of whatever i was doing to make it engaging and interesting. sometimes that turns out not to work, or i can't just *snap* summon the energy. but i have another tool in the toolbox for turning a situation that isn't working into one that does. the one that i heard from Mr. Moore is that he did what he thought was best despite what other teachers/administrators thought, and it seemed to work by and large for his students--i didn't meet a single boring person there last night. people with boring jobs (hey, like me!), sure, but the people were real, sincere, feeling, and caring. and Moore wasn't the only cause. but he was definitely a big part. a part that stuck with everyone there, unlike, say my well-meaning and nice and good spanish teachers, say. or one terrible english teacher, who failed to serve even as a good counterexample to a good life somehow. the one i heard from Tyler is that Moore pushed him and he ended up doing what he loves (well, for now). wish I could find something more profound to say. but i think that'll do for now. thanks, Mr. Moore, and a cast of hundreds (thousands?) from his tenure at TVS. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 25th, 2009
_fool	9:33p	gaining family, losing tradition spent half of the day yesterday and all of the day today with meredith_mccraw's fiancé Mark's family. this is the first non-nuclear mccraw-family xmas (except for kim delaying it slightly 8 years ago) in a very long time, like, since the 1980's. i wasn't sure how i felt about it beforehand, and afterwards, i just feel drained--i don't mind Mark's family but sitting around chatting for 6 + 12 hours was kind of too much. actually would have been fine with it on another day i guess, but it just wasn't quite as relaxing as i like xmas to be--no time for scrabble and napping, and i escaped to the bathroom to take a shower after dinner just to get some alone time. i think we probably won't do double-family xmas again after the marriage--it was a pain for them to travel down here (from NYC and pittsburgh) and this was kinda a pre-marriage meetup anyhow. i wonder if this, though, is the end of our traditional xmases...which would be ok with me, because i am increasingly sour on the air travel. i love getting together with the whole family but as meredith_mccraw begins the childbearing, it's all going to change anyway so...yeah. i guess i'm pretty blessed to have a family that i love both unconditionally but also practically, so maybe i should be sadder than i am. but i'm sure i'll still see plenty of everyone, somehow. just maybe not twice a year (thanksgiving/xmas) every year from now on. and maybe they'll come to me more, since they obviously don't mind travelling for the most part. so you know, maybe it's not antitradition but time for a new tradition of vegging out or volunteering at a soup kitchen or going skinny dipping. yeah. i'll work on that =) in the meantime, i am very thankful for getting quality time with my quality family. i hope you got something you wanted for xmas--i have all of you and got a few nifty presents to boot. can't wait to give dark_knightly present #2 and casadedoom theirs. that's all the presents i bought this year (save for secret santa), and i'm good with that. yay less materialism & more spirit =) (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
_fool	10:45a	failure and success i look out the train window and see only a single car in the graveyard and one guy standing nearby, staring at the ground, holding a bouquet and holding himself, a still life with far more stillness than life. and i get to re-reflect on how lucky i am--nearly all of my loved ones are still with me. friends, i've lost one in my life. relatives, i've lost only the ones i don't know very well (and i am blessed with more friends and more family than the average fool..) i guess you can't be lucky forever, statistics say that my friends circle has gone too long--we're way ahead of the MTBF curve, but i'll keep hoping that shit doesn't happen. success! inbox 172 is the best it's looked for months ande a hundred smaller than when i started working on it two hours ago, but all of those 172 deserve action, further thought, and likely some reply (some from as far in the past as 2 years ago :/). it probably speaks to something about my involvement in LJ that over a hundred of those (mostly older ones) are LJ comment threads to which i intended to reply to with some depth. i count this as a failure, but hey, i can fix it anytime, right? i can stop drinking anytime, too... serendipity in austin meetups has been intense. i've seen a lot of folks i came to see--chicafantasma, jessimonsta, shaynabelle, missingwatch, rondanskin, meredith_mccraw and junkmenudo_rss was my first 36 hours or so, and the serendipity was finding that a long-known and little-chatted acquaintance is growing an orchard--so i stopped by with jeff between a couple of social obligations and found some encouragement for doing this whole tree-growing thing on the cheap and easy--just try a lot and stick with what works. hopefully toasthaste will help me formulate a slightly more in-depth plan. additionally i got a bonus meeting with xomox and shubbe while i was wandering around campus killing some time. it's always great to see them even if our paths are so-far separated for the most part these days! thenn there was some dinner with green_pheasant and missing of linearb who was scheduled to be there with us, but we caught up with him later on, so at least there's that! then what was one of my favorite events of the whole trip, a couple of hours of heart-to-heart talking with my old writing group (incl audissius, deannaroy, and signor_ferrari, capped off nicely at sheilagh's solstice festivities where i got an hour of the squeak and xacat show (plus of course sheilagh and others i never managed to connect with in my post-silverchat days, like litch). tuesday was a lot calmer until the evening, which featured a highly nonsuck happy hour with the old (what, 10 years now, bermanism?) DRK101 crew, in which we roped in sheilanova plus some others who are always great to see and get drunk with... weds was largely friends older than LJ (i met gavino, scott, and jeff in 1994. holy crap.), relaxing and eating everything i'd so far missed (barbecue and blue bell for the win!) before a nice relaxed evening with chicafantasma. we dined on breakfast tacos this morning and realized my credit card had been left at the bbq place, and then i got on the train anyway, cos it was leaving. ohwell. stage 2 of xmas trip, with $5 in my pocket and nothing more. we'll see how this goes! next time i should make a conscious effort to meet up with more of my rarely-seen friends whom i miss a lot--bigreddot, bikers_are_hot, neutron, mr_skullhead and the GYMO crowd, plus the nucleartacos crowd, and more. fortunately next time is soon--see you folks in march, i hope! (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 21st, 2009
_fool	2:16p	all my exes don't live in texas, but most of them do. i actually think hannah may be the only ex who doesn't live in texas. funny thing though, i've seen three of my exes here since i arrived in austin 2 days ago, and remembered some of the things i loved about all of them. they're all happy and in good spirits for the most part, though as is the human condition, none of us are perfectly happy. but as i was telling missingwatch, i don't think perfection is really desirable--we need a little struggle to keep us engaged. even the dalai lama said that mosquitoes still upset him, and he's probably the most at-peace person who isn't a total hermit on this planet. so there's that. i'm laying in the st. augustine grass in front of the littlefield house on the UT Austin campus. (incidentally, i'm about 3 blocks from where the userpic i'm posting with was taken, in the 1990's. still my favorite coffee shop ever, RIP insomnia!) i swung though here because the weather is gorgeous and i love this place...it's a place a piece of my heart will always live, after i spent 12 of my best years here (ok, all of my years so far have been my best years!). a bit of the texture of some of my time here can be found in this post from 2004: http://users.livejournal.com/_fool/5122.html anyhow, the weather, oh yes, you damnportlanders should envy me. sunny and 60, mmm. today featured lunch with shaynabelle, and i'm about to head south on my velocipede to visit my favorite bike shop, then have dinner with an old dinner crew (wow, i think we started doing cynical geek chow in about 2002...how time flies!), then swing by my old writing group to pass out hugs and have a drink, then on to sheilagh's fine solstice festivities. yay a full but relaxed day in a town i still love a little. don't worry pdx, i love you a lot. i'm in town for a couple more days, so if you are too and haven't seen me but want to & aren't coming to sheilagh's, try tomorrow 5pm onwards at the gingerman, where i'll be holding forth and drinking quite a lot really. hope your holiday is turning out as relaxed as mine! no work = no stress = some joy. (7 Comments |Comment on this)