This morning, I was really, really angry. 

Last night I worked on the podcast, and I got a lot done, but I was feeling very, very dark. 

I planned to work on the podcast some more this morning, but I was angry. I read this article about this rich guy who bought himself the right to have his play professionally produced at a regional theatre in a major city. I also read about Larry David's new play on Broadway. 

I was so angry that I got an image in my head, and I started writing a play about how theater is not a meritocracy, and how it's okay to suck if you have enough money. 

Eleven pages later, Vince came home and took me out for lunch. 

I just finished revising it and condensing it down to ten pages. On its surface, it's now about the fashion industry. I'm taking it to a playwrights' meeting on Sunday. We'll see how it goes. 

I haven't had a writing day this good (balls-out, spark-to-completion)  since probably last May. 

I don't know if it's good, but I like it. 

Thanks, Matt!

yesterday afternoon, I wrote longhand at The Last Drop for 3 hours. It was productive, but almost not. 

There were two men sitting next to me having a coffee date. One looked to be in his mid 50s and the other seemed like late 40s-early 50s. They both set off my gaydar, but lightly; you could tell they were men who'd lived in the quadrant between Vine & South, Broad and Front since maybe the 90s. Both of them had high-quality clothes and silver in their hair. I tried to ignore their conversation, but it was difficult.

They were talking extensively about properties they'd bought and sold, properties they'd bought and wanted to sell, properties they were trying to buy, properties they owned, in the city, in the burbs, how the city had changed, and all of this in a way that indicates money was not an object. Some of their details seemed fuzzy, like they weren't sure about whether or not certain businesses still existed or not. I know there's a lot of turnover in Philly's real estate market, but it was as if they were out of touch with real life.  Still, I got the sense that they were guys who'd bought property in Center City back before or in the early days of the Street administration, taken advantage of tax breaks, and done well enough to now look down their nose at newer housing trends.

"It's nice. It's trendy, but not hipster. You know, not like... Fishtown."

"Remember back when Old City was nothing but us and Mulberry Market? We were pioneers. Pioneers."

The ease with which they talked about buying things was off-putting. I finally put my earbuds in and cranked up Pandora to block them out. After an hour or so, I took a bathroom and coffee refill break, so I took out my earbuds. When I came back, they were still talking about real estate.

"Oh, I LOVE New York. You know what I really want? I want to be able to have a place here, and then have a little place in New York."

"Huh. A little place? Like, two thousand bucks a month for a cubicle?"

"Oh, well, yeah."

"That's what a friend of mine has. He pays two grand a month for a room. That's it, just a room. It's like a hotel."

"Well, sure, but if you're out all the time, what do you need?"

"It has two windows. That's it."

(I wondered if the residents shared a bathroom, like in a dorm.)

"But you're out, you're going to museums, eating in restaurants, the art, the culture-"

"Oh, sure, sure."

"I'd just go up there on Thursday, stay there all weekend, come back on Monday, go to work."

I wanted to take notes on their conversation, and I wanted to dig in my purse for my emergency orange earplugs. I wanted to tell them that if they're so nuts about art and culture and able to work only 4 days a week, they should be throwing their money around here instead of spending it up there. 

On the one hand, for example, I think it's great that The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time and The Audience and Hedwig are playing on Broadway. I think it's great that there's off-Broadway shows that are unusual and cool and might even star someone you've seen on TV. But their proposed system makes you not so much a master with two servants, but a tourist with no home. If your own city doesn't seem good enough, maybe it's because you didn't invest in it. Maybe if they quit looking for happiness and money elsewhere, they'd find it were they are. Click your damn heels, Dorothy.

and, as Jarvis Cocker said, everybody hates a tourist, especially when it's all such a laugh and the chip stains' grease will come out in the bath.

The guys decided to leave to have cocktails at about five minutes to two. in the afternoon. cause, what the hell. first they thought about going to Dirty Frank's, then Woody's (wondering if it still existed), and then Uncle's. They finally settled on Dirty Frank's.

I hope they remembered to bring cash, because Dirty Frank's doesn't take American Express.

I'm still working on my game project. The AI programming language has kind of grown, though. I have become rather enamoured of it and am making it more of a general purpose language. Once I can rewrite the game engine itself in SAI (which is what the language is called) I will return to it.

Right now I'm working on interoperability with Javascript, which is the hosting language -- SAI code is transpiled into Javascript code that does the exact same thing, which can then, because it is Javascript, be run just about anywhere.  

I don't know if I can really justify what I'm doing. It seems these days everyone's got their own framework or preprocessor or whathave you. I'm doing this mostly for me, and mostly because whenever I go to use Javascript I become extremely frustrated not only at its syntax but at the abuse that other people perpetrate upon the language and other programmers using it.

It's like Javascript is just this wide open sandbox of "hey you can redefine anything anytime go nuts!" and then people do, and suddenly no one knows what the fuck is going on any more because all the fruits mean wibble mustang dope run-on sentence and good luck charlie. Kapisce?

I'm not saying I'm locking it down, but I am saying that a little bit of rigor and formalism would not be inappropriate. And if defucking the syntax further encourages clear and straightforward coding, then maybe it will be a useful tool for others too.

This is a public service announcement. Or something. What it isn't is your author bragging about some mental disorder. I promise.

I had an anxiety attack today - my first in a couple years. I was grocery shopping and had an overwhelming, all-encompassing, and utterly irrational urge to stock up on paper plates immediately. "If you don't purchase paper plates right now," my brain explained, "everything is gonna fall apart. Lives will be ruined, the time-space continuum will shatter, Limp Bizkit will release another album." This was serious. I was fixated, I was in a loop, and the only prescription was more paper plates. 
​

                                  This guy knows what I'm talkin' about.

I put several packages of paper plates in my cart and strolled over to the tea aisle, figuring that was the end of that. But while searching for Red Zinger, I realized I my pulse was racing and my breathing shallow - I was as tense as an unarmed Ted Nugent on a Disney Animal Kingdom safari ride. Now Red Zinger can be tough to find, but it's hardly worth that much stress. That's when it hit me. "Holy cow," I thought, as I'm apparently a character in 50 Shades of Gray. "I'm having a freakin' anxiety attack. Where the hell did that come from?"

At first, the I found the dichotomy hilarious - after at least 18 episode-free months, here I am panicking in the Safeway! I texted Jill "xtingu" Knapp to let her know what was going on, but she didn't have her phone handy, so she didn't get the message (if she had, she would have immediately walked to the supermarket and driven me home over my objections, because she's Jill). So I stuck to my task of buying up our snow n' ice storm supplies, even as the supermarket started to take on a nightmarish (but still amusing) funhouse-type atmosphere. "I'm buying butter during an anxiety attack," I thought. "I'm buying Fruit Loops, honey, Peppermint Patties, Bugles, and James Dean Pancake Batter-Wrapped sausages while I'm having an anxiety attack. This is kind of punk rock."*

But soon, it was more GG Allin than The Ramones. Consternation replaced my good humor. The tension in my spine, my quickening pulse, my utterly distracted mind, and my rising apprehension made shopping - and especially being around people - more and more impossible. This wasn't funny anymore. I finally stashed my cart in the corner where no one goes (where they store things like raisins, Lunchables, and balut**) and ran out to my car, where I listened to 50s doo-wop for 30 minutes or so and breathed deeply, desperately trying to bring my epinephrine levels down.

Okay, this post is gonna get even duller if I stay on this "and then I..." path. Suffice to say, the Diamonds and the Five Satins calmed me enough to get back in the store and finish shopping (ice cream > panic), check out (thank Cthulhu for those self-scan checkout stations!), and drive home. I unloaded the groceries, hung up my new sports jacket***, and said hi to Jill, who took one look at me and said "To the bed. Right now."​

            She still hadn't seen my text, but this is pretty much what Jill saw.

A dose of Xanax later, I thought I was doing on the mend. I was still physically tense - it was a struggle to get myself out of the fetal position - but my mind was calmer and perspective was returning. I was having rational conversations (for me, anyway) and joking about the whole paper-plates-as-mashed-potatoes-in-Close Encounters fiasco. Plus, a couple hours had passed, so I smiled and sat up - 

- and then came the waterworks. Uncontrollable shaking and crying. 

Bottom line: four hours passed between that first text to Jill and the last of my tears. A short time after that I was perfectly fine (as fine as I get, anyway), ready to conquer great viewings of YouTube and maybe scratch out another verse in a new song probably I'll never finish. But four hours is my longest attack yet - they used to be 90 minutes, tops. 

I don't care for morals (clearly), but if there is a moral, it's this: these things happen, and it's not shameful or necessarily tied to unhappiness. Something misfires in the brain and next thing you know you're stashing your cart and running out to your car in the rain. Granted, these attacks first started when I was unhappy, when my life was a mess and getting messier and my attempts to find happiness were becoming increasingly damaging - they were outlets for emotions I refused to deal with. And when I finally did start dealing with them and tried to get my life back on track (with many stumbles and mistakes, of course), the attacks grew less frequent. And now? I'm deleriously happy. I'm not sublimating, I'm not swallowing, and while not everything is perfect, I'm living a wonderful life, and I'm madly, deeply, hopelessly in love with someone who brings me more joy than I ever thought possible. Sure, I have problems and issues, mostly (but not all) health-related, but the good far outweighs the bad. Shouldn't these episodes be in the past?

Nope. That's not how it works. Today, there it was: a tough little anxiety attack waiting to absolutely blindside me with a poke to my brain.

I swear I'm not trying to aggrandize myself as a courageous figure who must carry a monumental burden. Not even close. My worst attacks are quite mild compared to what many people experience - for them, panic feels like massive, paralyzing, terrifying heart attacks. In my case, it's a more of a glitch, a little misfire, a mini-zap to the brain that finds me no matter what my state of mind. It's no one's fault, and according to many informal surveys, it doesn't make me deep and interesting. ("Hey, am I deep and interesting because I -" "No." "Can I even finish the question?" "No.") But it sure can add a little excitement to a mundane day. 

If this has ever happened to you, please, please tell doctor. When these episodes began, I hid them for months before finally, reluctantly, shamefully admitting to my doctor's PA that I was too weak to face these attacks down and probably needed therapy and pharmaceutical help. She said something wonderful: "Stop beating yourself up. People get sad, they get overwhelmed. You're a human being with emotions, and it isn't a weakness to feel emotions. It's a strength." I do my best to remember that when I need to. Life is beautiful, but sometimes it's a lot harder than it should be, and if a tiny dose of Alprazolam and a good cry can help you through the rocky moments, make it so. And let yourself marvel at what a piece of work is the brain and the body.

By the way, if anyone can use a few paper plates, we've got enough to cater a Duggers' family reunion. (Which I will never, never do, because fuck those guys. I hope they never get to experience anxiety attacks.)

* QUIT JUDGING OUR SHOPPING LIST. It's...for the homeless, okay?

** If you're having a fine day, do not Google "balut." All will be lost. 

*** What, your supermarket doesn't have a Men's Clothiers section? Right next to Haberdashery and Shepstery? Weird.

My house is so still. One child has gone to work, one still sleeps and the other is in his room quietly doing his math. 

I can hear the hum of the fridge. The pur of the outdoor spa. I I hear the dial tone on my neighbours phone, the relentless beeps as she dials and redials a number no one ever answers  and the sighing  as she gives up trying to call whoever it is she is reaching out to. I can hear the key in the door as she locks it behind her and the car splutter to life as she heads off, wherever it is she is going. Noise travels well in stillness. And next door, they are raw, pulsating noise. 

This morning was the shrill screams of a 12 year old not wanting to brush his teeth. The snippets we hear, the language, the fights, makes me think that perhaps these children have some kind of issues that create the daily multiple meltdowns. We've even had soiled toilet paper thrown over the back fence to land in our yard.  You could say these neighbours of ours are what the rest of Australia would derisively term as "Houso's". 

But it's the stillness of these moments, when my children are quiet and hers are at school that I hear pieces of her. The persistent cough she seems to have had for the past four weeks. The constant dialing of a phone that is never answered. A kinder person would go over there, introduce themselves, ask if she was okay or needed a hand. I am not that kind. I just listen. And I know when the working week is done, there will be cars parked all over the roadside and more noise and extra people and more rubbish that finds its way onto my lawn. 

I like the silence, even if it does seem tainted with a kind of sadness. 

Last night we went out for dinner because we had cabin fever. We went to our favorite pub. It was mostly deserted. 

One table away from us were three people, a woman and two men. The woman and one of the men were a couple, and the other man was talking, very, very loudly, about how he would never even joke about wanting to sleep with her, because, of course, they're just friends. She was echoing the same sentiment back to him. He was talking about how even if he finds someone attractive, once they're married, he no longer finds them bangable, because the "no" switch flips and that's all there is to it.

It was totally a "methinks the lady doth protest too much" situation, because the guy was talking so loudly that it was like he was trying to make a very public declaration. It was like the very bad first act of a police procedural tv show, where, 24 hours later, the character that is me should go down and answer the doorbell to find two police detectives on the doorstep, holding a photograph of the woman and her husband, asking if I had seen the two of them lately.

When the noisy guy left, they said to him, "it was nice meeting you." I thought holy shit, it's your first time meeting these people, and you're having the "of course I'd never want to sleep with you" conversation?

Archer told Hunter he was crushing his head (a la Kids in the Hall).

Hunter immediately puffed out his cheeks and inflated his head.

Because of course that's what you do if your brother remotely crushes your head ... why didn't any of us adults think of that?

Too tired to type. 

Imagine Into The Woods, except instead of a forest and palaces and towers and cottages and a village, imagine a library, or a curiosity shop, or both, a magical shelved room with a piano and harp in one corner. And a string quartet just beyond the shelves. 

And everyone's dressed in thrift shop clothes. And lit with strings of fairy lights, and small table lamps. 

The cow is a gently contemplative young man with an accordion. 

Now, if you're a hard core Sondheim fan, imagine "No One Is Alone" in this environment. 

I bawled so hard that Ted put his arm around me. 

I'm not getting sick.
I'm not getting sick.
I can't be getting sick.
Please no.
No.
NO.

UPDATE: My body told me to F myself. Woke up with a fever and swollen glands and unable to swallow. Thank goodness today is Day 3 of class and not Day 1 or 2.  

UPDATE #2: Oh goodie. Delta just canceled my flight home and rebooked me for tomorrow. Uh, no. I'm not staying over an extra night. I want to go home and be sick in my own house.

Today is not my day.

UPDATE #3: Well, at least now I know I can't be angry at Delta... it's not their fault Atlanta (my connecting city) was shut down because it doesn't know how to deal with 8+" of snow. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/NWS_Southern_US/status/570986372053356546?s=09

So instead I bought a direct flight home on USAir and I got home 3.5 hours earlier than I would otherwise have. So it actually worked out... Sick Jill was in bed by 8pm.