I'm afraid to go for a ride on my bike alone in my neighborhood. 

I'm afraid of drivers, unsafe routes, potential muggers and bike thieves. 

I'm going to go drive to run errands now, and it makes me feel like a jerk to burn gas to drive about 5 miles round trip. 

What's your favorite font?

I'm giving this queue thing a try. 

It's very late on Monday or early on Tuesday, and I'm as awake as I can possibly be. I cleaned the kitchen in an attempt to tire myself out. It didn't work. 

dark night of the soul confession: I think Bill Hader is funny, but the Stefon routine isn't as funny as NBC would have us believe. 

I kind of want to make out with him doing his Julian Assange (which in no way resembles Julian Assange) thing, though. 

I like Stefon. I swear that I've been to half the clubs he describes (The Absinthe Drinkers experience was one giant Stefon joke). I love that he and Seth Meyers had that wild love that was more than a love. 

But I really don't like "midget" jokes. Also, if you watch enough of the Stefon routine, it's pretty transparently a Mad Lib. 

On the other hand, I'm glad that New York nightlife knows it's jumped its own shark (I suspect that happened in 1928 when Arturo Finzarelli and his lovely wives, Laverne and Shirley, powered his Henderson Deluxe over the giant tank at Big Al's Aquarium Of Wonders in Coney Island). 

I'm going to have to just power through and reset my diurnal* clock the hard way tomorrow. 

*things that sound dirty but aren't 

Last night I stayed up until 3:44 am, reading Gillian Flynn's Dark Places and Sharp Objects. They were as compelling and painful as a very bad hangnail you have to worry away at all night. Serious nail biters will understand. 

There's a lot of talk about Flynn's work lately (particularly Gone Girl) as anti-feminist, containing Men's Rights Activist language, misogynist, or a combination of these. 

What I like about Flynn's work is the notion that evil exists and women are capable of it. I don't think that's anti-feminist. 

When I was working on Fox Haven, I included a scene between the two adult women in the play, talking about the effect the main event of the play had on the larger community. I was criticized for including the scene, claiming that it slowed the play down, and that was actually fair. But I finally confessed to my director that it bothered me that the play didn't pass The Bechdel Test. In fact, the scene itself barely passed The Bechdel Test, because it started with, "Where's Tim?" 

There were a lot of points where the play told me I was being a bad feminist, for, say, having a teenaged girl with eating disorders be a major part of the plot, or having a mean lady be a mean lady. Then I finally just threw up my hands and went back to square one, which is that if you don't have fully-rounded female characters who sometimes do bad things, and have female characters who only do good things, you're as bad as writers who put in women as set dressing (like Courtney Cox in Ace Ventura). 

So, yeah, kudos to Flynn for shining a light on a kind of evil we didn;t want to think about. 

Whenever I drop V off at the train or at work or one of us leaves the house for some reason, I always think of the xkcd cartoon about considering your last words to everyone. I think the punch line was something like a couple saying something to each other like, "pick up some fucking milk on your way home, would you?" and what if that was the last thing you ever heard from them?  So I always worry too much about making sure I say, "I love you" to him and giving him a hug or a smooch or whatever. 
Usually when I drop him off at the train, as he crosses the street to the steps, I'll roll down the window and shout, "I love you!" and he'll get the slightly embarrassed face you'd expect on a kid whose mom is dropping him off at school and yelling it in front of all the other kids. he'll say, "I love you too," but it's with an air of "jeez, lady, do you have to shout?"

Considering that our neighborhood has a near-constant mantra of shouted cursing rolling from end to end of the district like an ocean wave, passed from junkie to alcoholic to nut to junkie to alcoholic to nut and so on, the result is that people who have their brains in order just stay as quiet as possible. My response to this is that maybe there should be more positive shouting. 

For example, when I call the dogs to come inside, I yell, "Hey ladiiiiieeeees!" or "What is up, my bitcheeeees?" 

if they refuse to come inside, they get, "Madam? Your Majesty?" until they give up.  All of this is always followed by enough "Good girl! Good Girl!" to make it sound like I'm advertising a dog food by that name. 

After two years of having lived next to Ant'ny and The Octomom's constant fighting, shouting, beating their dogs and calling their kids "motherfucker," I feel like I have to make a joyful noise to counteract their audiblebile (like that? see what I did there? "Audibile" would have been even better but autocorrect wouldn't let me do it without capitalization and quotation marks).

This morning, I rolled down the window to shout, "I love you," to the hastily departing Vincenzo, and I could already see his shoulders rising against the oncoming tide of embarrassment. I knew the rail trestle over my head would echo madly and make the whole thing worse, so instead, this is what came out of my mouth:

"What do we want? PEACE!
When do we want it? NOW!" 

He looked at me like I was insane, but he was laughing, so it was a good thing. 

Begged, actually. 

Tomorrow I'm at home. A guy is coming to fix the holes in our siding, so that we don't endure Winter #3 of Bedroom Ceiling Roller Derby: Squirrels vs Pigeons. It might sound hilarious, but trust me, it's not. 

I invite you to harrass me to write tomorrow. Use the media of your choice. I should be writing, working on podcasts and not fussing over distracting minutiae.

Or rather, hold me accountable. 

I need ideas for podcast sketches. Give me, in the comments: 

-an object 

-a character

-a catchphrase 

-a genre (ie., noir, sci-fi, romance, historical drama, Shakespeare, etc.). 

GO GIT EM, TIGER! 

Then again, isn't everything? 

I am really tired. I was on my feet at work for most of the day. Thought about going to bed early, but I'm hungry, which means I have to cook, which means I have to clean the kitchen. I could order out, but I'm trying to keep an eye on my sodium levels and calorie intake BUT I BURNT 988 CALORIES TODAY SHELVING VIDEOS and that's worth at least one cheeseburger but I'm also thinking about how food affects one's mood. 

So, I'm going to go downstairs and listen to podcasts and clean the kitchen and try to make something to eat. 

Things I did today of which I'm proud:

Responded to an e-mail from an agency, sent a cv and bio, got rejected. so, I'm proud of myself for risking rejection.  

Shelved a lot. Walked a lot. 

I don't feel like that's enough so that's why I want to clean the kitchen. 

I think scrambled eggs are going to be dinner.