I am not in the worst mood. The temperature is coming down. Things are not that bad. I'm tired, but not unhappy. It's like bubble wrap. 

Yesterday I was walking west on Arch to go get some lunch. I saw a Buddhist monk walking ahead of me. He was an older guy,  had a shaved head and a worn yellow robe, over jeans and sneakers. I walked behind him for a block or so, and noticed he would smile at passers-by, try to engage them, and they would wave and smile a little bit, but keep going.  I thought, "Buddhist Monk! Paragon of perfection! I'm happy to be walking behind this guy!" I've seen Buddhist and Jesuit monks in the area before, but never engaged with them. 

He turned and saw me, then let me catch up with him. He offered me a wooden bead bracelet, and this shiny gold card. 

I thanked him, and then he handed me a pad and a pen, with a little spreadsheet, indicating that I should write my name and "peace" on it, and give him twenty bucks. 

I reached into my purse and pulled out some cash. I had a five and three or four ones folded together, and I handed them to him. He wasn't happy. He said, "Twenty." I said, "This is all the cash I have." He said, "Ten." I said, "This is all the cash I have." He said "Ten," and I repeated the statement. It wasn't a lie. 

He shook his head and walked away. 

I did a google search for "kai guang amulet," and found that apparently monks giving tokens of peace in exchange for suggested donations of $20, $30 or $50 is commonplace in New York. Whether the items are blessed or not, and to what the money goes, is up for debate. 

So, now I have a wooden bead bracelet on my wrist, and a golden ticket in my purse. I'm trying to work the placebo effect as hard as I can; wooden beads on elastic around your wrist is a gentle reminder. Am I feeling more peaceful? I don't know. 

Here is my elaborate system of alarms to wake myself up in the morning. 

I started sleeping through songs such as Bowie's "The Stars Are Out Tonight," so now I have songs alternating on different days. The 5:15 alarm is just to cut through heavy sleep, and make sure I actually hear the 5:30 alarm enough to get up. The 5:45 alarm is in case I sleep through the 5:30 alarm. The later ones are to keep me from forgetting that I have to walk out the door at 6:30, dressed and packed or not.

Here's the playlist of tunes: 

Abigail, Belle of Kilronan 

Mozart's Concerto for Piano & Orchestra #23 

Sh-Boom 

When The Saints Go Marching In

Mr. Sandman (lyrically counterintuitive, but peppy) 

Say It Again 

Alyda 

Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying 

Needle In A Haystack 

You're No Good

Come And Get Your Love 

Zig Zag Wanderer

A song that I have promised never to use as my alarm ever again is the Postmodern Jukebox bluegrass version of Blurred Lines. It opens with a shout of, "EVERYBODY GET UP!" 

Which sends both Vince and me through  the roof. Not in a good way. 

We'll see how this works out. 

Added, only for Friday at 5:30: Peg, by Steely Dan. 

Stick a toothpick in me.

I'm done. 

What was your last name before you were married?

Lynch. No, Gray. No. I don't remember. 

So... when you were a child, in school, what last name did you use? 

I'm not sure. 

I need this application for this document expedited it's an emergency I'm going to Jamaica on the 12th

(really? Because you need a liver transplant and the only place you can get it is at the world-renowned Montego Bay Hospital, under the care of Dr. Hurricane McRum? That IS an emergency!) 

we can have it for you in five business days, on June 5th.

no that's not soon enough I'm going to Jamaica on the 12th it was a super cheap package I just had to have it

the 5th is before the 12th

they told me you had same-day service here

we have same-day service in Scranton

why does Scranton have same day service and you don't? 

The population of Scranton is 75,281. The population of Philadelphia is 1.56 million. We get 200 applications a day.

but I can get same day service in Scranton 

ok, here's your application. 

*tsh* I can't go to Scranton

I guess  you're not going to Jamaica either.

Here are the seedings Madeline gave me. 

I transplanted 3 into larger pots, broke open the compost bin, and mixed that nasty stanky liquid in, gave them a soak. Vince had offered me cocktail hour before I went outside to re-pot them, and for some reason, Maslow's Need Hierarchy made me say, "in a minute, I have to play in the dirt first." 

Clearly, I need more pots. And dirt. And plants.

Today I communicated with a deaf person and a person from Mali (who spoke French; not at the same time) via a translation line. I'm living in the FUTURE.

Sometimes when people start to write something (this is something I've heard  many, many times), "I hesitate to get started because I don't want to compromise what's in my head." 

I worked on Jarnsaxa Rising for a while yesterday. I printed out my outline and carried it to bed with me, re-read it, and re-read it again while the coffee brewed this morning. I have a clear idea for the next scene, but it's not going well.  I took the page for the scene I was working on and rewrote the outline in what I call "turns:" X wants Y but hits obstacle A, D wants N but hits obstacle Y. And then I write short sentences of how those stumbles toward goals over or around obstacles succeed or fail. 

As I was scrawling this, I came to what I thought was a weak end. In my head it was this:

ERIC: Why didn't you tell me?

SIF: You had to find out for yourself.

(Cue "Somewhere Over The Rainbow." It's the Wizard of Oz all over again.)

As I was scribbling, it cleared up, and I was pleasantly surprised. This came out. I'm transcribing my scribbled notes. 

ERIC: Why didn't you tell me? 

SIF: I can only make you grow, but not change, either you choose your form or something else chooses it for you. (Jarnsaxa has to learn this.) When a tree grows, its leaves turn toward the sun and bend with the wind, roots go to water. 

The line, "its leaves turn toward the sun" came from a theatre design class I had as an undergrad. We were talking about how if you design a forest, you have to consider that the sun will cause that forest to look a certain way, you have to take science into consideration, not just "what looks cool on a stage." 

My point is, you might think you know in advance every detail about your story, and that's good, you should. But there is a lot of room for discovery in the process of pencil, paper, scribbling and time, and those discoveries will improve what you think you have now. 

EDITED TO ADD: Sassy thinks that if she sits in my lap while I type, my job is to gently pet her. If I type, she bites my hands. BYE SASSY.

I am grateful for union-mandated breaks that allow me time to use the toilet, drink water, stuff half a protein bar in my face, and go outside to fart. 

FART JOKE! WOO HOO!!!!!!!!

The Internet needs an "is this worth it?" calculator. Buzzfeed needs a quiz. 

The learning curve continues. 

This is the first time I've knit anything that wasn't based on a square, rectangle, tube or triangle, so you can imagine how this is burning some new neural pathways. The other odd thing is that the pattern calls for a total of 12 petals or points, and then sewing the last row to the first. I have a hard time believing this will be a flat disc and not a cone. 

Today we went out for brunch at The Grey Lodge, my favorite local pub, but my patience for people was so thin I almost had to Force-choke someone. Remember when jukeboxes had actual records inside them? You put in your quarters and punched some buttons, with a satisfying KERCHUNK, KERCHUNK, KERCHUNK, and when your selection came up in turn, you'd get to hear it?  Now The Grey Lodge has one of them Intarweb connected Touch Tone machines. Takes up less space, provides a wider selection of music. Sounds good, right? I've never had a reason to complain. If I want to put on Dave Brubeck, me and my hard-earned dollar can make that happen. 

Now, Touch Tone machines have an app. So, if you have the app and this is your financial priority, you can control the jukebox from the comfort of your bar stool, shoveling your musical taste down the throats of everyone in the bar for as long as you like. 

These 30-year-olds were playing with their phones, talking about how "old" they were for liking Blink-182 and early-2000s "punk." When some girl started squawking about the band Poe, a guy admitted that he thought "poe" was the Spanish word for paella. They were controlling the jukebox, and you like what you like, whatever. But when the music stopped for a minute, I got up and shoved my $4 into the machine, so I could hear something different for a couple of minutes. 

I put on Thelonious Monk (I don't remember the name of the piece), and Nina Simone's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." Monk played through, a bright, complex yet palatable piano instrumental that made my chilaquiles seem much less like soggy nachos. My mood improved. Unfortunately, it was immediately followed by, not Nina Simone, but more of the early 2000s punk and "OMG this is the best song EVAR." 

Which means some knucklehead paid extra to bump his selections ahead of mine in the queue. 

I said to the bartender, "if everyone in the bar has the app, and everyone can pay extra to bump their songs higher in the queue, what happens?"

He said, "The music selections get pretty crazy in here. Personally, I think you should have to walk up to the jukebox and punch it in, if you're gonna play "Barbie Girl." You have to own that shit." 

KERCHUNK. KERCHUNK. KERCHUNK. 

I'm trying this knitting pattern for the first time: 

I've never knit anything with short rows before, so this is a good learning experience. 

So far, so good.

I'm having trouble staying asleep because I dream about work.  Not fun. So hopefully this will give me a new fixation pattern. 

I was going to write this as an email to Tom, but this message (seeing as this is a week's worth of hypergraphia exploding in a Saturday blast) is probably better living its life as a One Post Wonder post. So, if anything else amazing happens today, I'll add it at the end. 

Ever since the Dead Milkmen's album Beelzebubba came out, I have loved the (song?) piece of whimsy that is Stewart.  if you're not familiar with it, this is it.

I don't know why I love it. It's hilarious, contagious, and picturesque. Do I need another reason? It's a satirical exploration of narrowminded xenophobia, even more necessary today than it was when it was originally released in the era of George Bush I. 

When I went away to college, the Beelzebubba album made my homesickness for the Greater Philadelphia area easier to cope with. My friends and I used to sing "Punk Rock Girl" at the tops of our lungs, walking around the Frasier-Crane-esque Back Bay area, wrapping our lips and tongues around those South Street vowel roller coasters as a way of pushing off the stifling snobbery of cold, concrete Boston. 

Flash forward to a couple of years later when I worked at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. One of our dialect exercises was to take something we already knew by heart and "translate" it to Renfaire language and dialect (I say Renfaire because I'm 100% positive there are huge differences between 16th century English language and what gets used at faires, no matter how historically acurate they may try to be, I just can't cite those differences right now). One of the characters in the summer of 1991 was named Stuart, and my friend Gina and I used to rant a translated version of "Stewart" to him. he would look at us like we were completely insane. We asked him, "Have you e'er heard of those bards of the Shire of Brotherly Love, who name themselves after the ghosts of dairy farmers?" He said in that in sooth and faith, no tale of such bards had ever been introduced to him.

To this day, 25 years later, when I don't feel well, and especially if I'm nauseous, if I need to soothe my brain, I occupy myself by trying to remember the Renfaire translated version of "Stewart," that Gina and I would tell to this poor guy when we had gate duty together on hot summer afternoons.  We never made it much further than the burrow owl business. I seem to recall it was something like this:

Know ye, Stuart, well I love thee. Thou are unlike all others in this shire. 

Misunderstand me not, sir, they are fine people, good English stock, but they are content to recline, enjoy a Punch and Judy entertainment, quaff a mug of ale. But they do not know, Stuart, what the Spaniards will do to this shire! 

Know you young John of Wurster? He delivereth messages throughout the Shire and rings the town crier's bell. This youth hails from another land, and some say he inhaleth the smoke of the poppy, but this I believe not. When the day came that he had ten years passed, he begged old Wurster for the gift of a burrow owl. "Father," he said, "nothing more could my heart desire, for all the years I might live." 

Some nights past, I ventured out at half ten, to find young John of Wurster staring into the moonlit branches of the birch. "What brings you hence? " I asked, "No youth should be out this late, hath some madness gripped you?" thinking of the tales of the poppy that dog this lad's heels. "My burrow owl," he cried, "I seek it in the night."  "God's hairy butt," I cried, "know you not that a burrow owl liveth in a hole in the ground? For what reason else, in heaven, on earth, or in the fires below, would it be so named?"

And so, good Stuart friend, do you think such a lad would know what the Spaniards wil do to this shire? 

And, yeah, that's about as far as we got. Mostly because the poor guy would find a reason to run away from us. 

A few years ago, during a particularly bad bout with a virus, I started trying to translate it into actual Shakespearean sonnet form.  Iambic pentameter is hard. I had gotten up early feeling lousy, showed up for work on time, tried to hang in there for an hour, and made it to the toilet just in time to vomit up my entire viscera. They sent me home, but I had to take the train. The gentle swaying of the car and blur of the outside did not help things, so concentrating on translating Stewart into iambic pentameter gave me something to hang onto so I wouldn't become another SEPTA vomit statistic. I don't think I made it past the first two lines.  

Since then, if I feel sick or crappy, this is my thing to concentrate on. That and translating this into Spanish:

This is really hard, because the word for "female dog" in spanish is perra, which has two syllables, and "mom" is mamá, also two syllables. 

HEY, I DON'T TELL YOU WHAT TO THINK ABOUT WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO PASS OUT BECAUSE YOU FEEL LOUSY. 

When I'm tired and frustrated, Stewart pops up in my brain, as I'm sure Pavlov's dogs could hear phantom bells ringing when they were hungry.  It's not going away. When I have a long day of repeating the obvious to people who just don't get it, in the back of my mind, a voice is screaming, "THEY'RE GONNA BUILD LANDING STRIPS FOR GAY MARTIANS, I SWEAR TO GOD!!!" 

My point is, one of these days, I really want to sit down with Tom Boutell (for his experience with iambic pentameter), a copy of Charles' Onions' Shakespeare Glossary, 3rd Edition, and translate Stewart into the Shakespearean poetic saga that I've been craving since 1991. That is a bone my brain wants to chew on.

I wonder, if I wrote a really carefully-worded letter on letterhead in real ink to Rodney Anonymous, he'd read a proposal allowing me to adapt Stuart into a 45 minute Shakespearean play for Fringe production? 

Shit, he'd probably say yes if I tweeted it, but I don't tweet-propose.

(Why 45 minutes? Come on, there's no point in dragging that story out past 45 minutes.)

But it can't be Spaniards that the narrator is afraid of. It would have to be queers or whatever they would have been called in that time period. I think it has to be that the narrator is in love with Stewart, but can't deal with it because of his own internalized homophobia. 

OK, that's enough out of me for right now.