Happy New Year! :O) This year, I’m writing fiction. I’m letting my greatest motivator, shame, keep me on schedule. Every weekday, I’ll post a hopefully-not-shameful word count accompanied by a few turns of Yahtzee and a song. Please feel free to follow along on Twitter or Instagram!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/auntiepesto
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Hello hello :O) Thank you for visiting! I’m getting everything ported over to this new space and hope you continue to stop in from time to time to see my progress.
Ice Cream for One
I got some ice cream!
Dailies 06/03/13
Daily Doodle: In the Middle of a Lake
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Song of the Day: Just a Short Time After (Reconstruction Pt. 1) by Javier Navarrete feat. The Landau Orchestra (from the Extended Version of the Pan’s Labyrinth soundtrack)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aRMSfltS6s
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Musical Pipe Dream: I’ve thought about this one for a long time.
There would be a show with an orchestra and performers that would dance to the live music. The cast would consist of a main female and a main male and sixteen dancers to flock them. The costumes are leotards and tutus that are a pale blue. The makeup is pasty and crusty and it even cakes and crackles on the dancers’ shoulders. At the beginning, a single, blue spotlight is on the main female dancer. When the cello is being plucked, she is on point on her left foot and extends her right leg from front to back, doing lyrical movements that match the cello. As the horn section rolls in, the lights brighten to the outer parts of the stage and have an orange glow that contrasts with the blue center. The main male and sixteen dancers move in closer and closer towards the blue light until the main male meets the main female. He holds both of her hands and she does similar movements as in the beginning with her legs, but this time she’s pushing even farther, extending her flexibility. She doesn’t fall because her hands are being held. The sixteen dancers are on their knees and follow the lyricism of the horns as they sweep the floor to and fro with the palms of their hands. They circle be on their backs and sweep the floor with the backs of their fingers. The movements of all of the dancers get stronger until they’re all moving at the same pace and in unison. The number ends with the sixteen dancers in a tight circle around the main dancers all raising their heads on the last beat. They are looking straight up into a single spotlight that shines orange.
As for me, I would love to be the saxophonist in the second chair. For the horn portion of the piece, all of us would stand up and raise our shoulders and swing our saxophones to the beat. As we keep blowing our horns until the last moment, the lights black out on us while we’re still standing as the orange light shines down on the dancers.
Do you think that Javier Navarrette, The Landau Orchestra, and a dance company would be into doing something like this?
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Blurb 1/365: I had food poisoning a few weeks ago and I threw up (and ruined) our trash can in the bathroom. I feel completely better now and we got a new trash can and I was happy about it so I danced.
I just remembered the scene in the movie Vice Versa when Fred Savage’s character with the mind of Judge Reinhold’s character took a school test. He was staring and bored when the teacher mocked him saying something like, “Are you already finished Mr. Seymour?” And then Fred Savage snapped back, “Yes! It was easy.” (Cut to a confused and appalled look on the teacher’s face.) (Cut back to Fred Savage’s impatient face.) “*scoff* (eyes roll, arms gesture outward with shoulders shrugged) Do you have the paper?”
I woke myself up by laughing out loud. I’m gonna try and go back to sleep.
Dailies 05/01/13
Daily Doodle: When I get anxious, I wish I had a sleeping bag that I could crawl in and zip up and then be magically transported to my bed.
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Song of the Day: Slam by Onyx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ADgCeYJMN4
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Musical Pipe Dream: All you can see is my head and my fingers peeking out of an enormously oversized sweatshirt. My pants are big enough for me to fit in one pant leg and the cuffs are stuffed into big boots. My limbs are flailing.
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Blurb 1/365: Dude. SLAM. 1993. Whenever there was three of anything, my sisters and I would associate one of them to each of us.
For example:
With The Chipmunks, I was Theodore.
With Duck Tales, I was Louie.
With the Brady Bunch sisters, I was Cindy.
With the Three Amigos, I was Ned.
With Onyx, I associated myself with Sonsee solely because of the fact that I constantly wore a grey sweatshirt that my sister got from a school lost-and-found and a pair of blue jeans. So it looked like one of his outfits in the music video. This song brings back memories …
I forgot my cellphone at home today. Albeit sort of ridiculous, I sort of felt like half a person without it. I didn’t have a pen or a book or a pamphlet to accompany me on my BART ride. On the plus side, I had the opportunity to see some things:
A sign that says “Ghirardelli Factory Store Now Open”
A big painted sign of the cartoon Pink Panther holding a pair of scissors
A pickup truck flatbed full of hamburger buns
A painted/decorated crosswalk (I wonder if more crosswalks could be like this?)
A few church steeples that I hadn’t noticed before
A lot of nice looking graffiti art
A lot of bad looking graffiti art
Many different types of roofs
A symphony of 7uP trucks getting ready to depart on their journey to different stores
A somewhat hidden playground with kids playing soccer in it
A man with a hairstyle reminiscent of DeBarge (I have been seeing this a lot lately)
So, it was pretty awesome. I’ll remember to do as the title of the BBC show says, “Look Around You”.
During recess, we would all have access to check out a rubber ball to play with. There were two sizes: twelve inches in diameter and five inches in diameter. The balls that were twelve inches were always checked out first because all the kids liked to play handball with them against the backboards. It had a larger surface area and was easier to hit with two clasped hands. The five inch balls were always checked out quickly thereafter for various games.
I never really did any active playing during recess. Most of my recess time was taken up by sitting in the grass, looking at bugs, or grinding walnut shells into the pavement. I had tried my hand at tetherball in the past and had either gotten hurt physically or just emotionally from the ridicule resulting from ducking from that damned volleyball on a string.
Just to give a little insight to what I looked like as a kid: At any given time, my hair was either an unkempt rat’s nest or an unkempt rat’s nest hastily pulled back into a ponytail. I had pink, translucent, plastic glasses frames that you could see the wire running through which were too big for my face. My adult-sized teeth could barely fit in my mouth and, just like any other kid, my mouth was usually open. On this day that I’m about to describe, I can’t be sure what I was wearing, but with the frequency that I wore this outfit, I was most likely wearing a Disneyland 35th Anniversary sweatshirt and turquoise stretch pants with pink dots. With my belly full of chicken nuggets and canned corn, I walked slowly along the pavement playground. All the other children were already well into their recess activities and I noticed that there was one five inch diameter ball left. I figured “what the hey” and I checked it out.
The truth is, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this ball. Any other time I thought about checking out a ball, I always thought that I didn’t want to check one out because I didn’t want to take it from one of the other kids that would actually put it to good use. Plus this was one of the smaller ones, and it was harder to play with. But that day was different, there was one left while all the other kids were already playing, like it was waiting for me.
I took the ball to an unclaimed part of the playground and started to lightly kick the ball against a short wall that came up to about the height of my childhood knee. It ricocheted off the wall and calmly rolled back to me. By this time, most of recess time had passed, and it turned out to be pretty fun. With about ten minutes left, a little girl came up to me and asked if I would like to kick the ball back and forth with her. I said “sure”, though I was a bit nervous and self conscious about my athletic abilities. The distance between us widened and my coordination was really being put to the test. We were kicking the ball and also tossing it with one bounce before catching it.
Things were going well and a few more kids came over to play. Without laying out any ground rules, we had created this game where I was the main thrower and I would call out a person and throw or kick the ball to them, they would catch it, and throw the ball back to me. There wasn’t any mystery to the game, except that I made the way I got the ball to them a surprise. I would dropkick it, roll it, or bounce it. I didn’t know any of these peoples’ names, so I started to make nicknames for everybody to call on them before I threw the ball. For example, the girl who initially asked me to play was wearing a sky blue sweatshirt, so I nicknamed her “Sky”. I explained this to her when I called her Sky. I called somebody else “Happy” and said it was because they looked so happy to be living the day and I got LAUGHS, even from Happy. I was playing on a playground with other kids, my hand-eye coordination was on point, and I was feeling the crowd and got genuine laughs that only a nine year old comedian could. I was on fire.
I never talked to any of those kids again, but for those ten minutes, I ruled the playground. I was the Queen of Recess.