Happy birthday! To me!

Now I'm older, just like every day, every minute. But today we get to mark this aging in a meaningful way. Today I am twenty-three years old.

I've got a fair amount going on--a move to a new state in a few weeks, a reasonably new income-source, funky medical diagnoses that have hopefully stopped rolling in (still waiting on results from the endocrinologist, who ran over a thousand dollars worth of tests on me based exclusively on my family history of hypothyroidism).

But this is a critical moment. In a rather abrupt fashion the moving will come to an end, and my medical care will become routine once again. Poker, being the fickle beast that it is, can surprise me and become as ordinary as the weeds. I could suddenly wind up with dullness in place of vivacity, giving in too readily to my reclusive tendencies when I have no close friends nearby but Danielle. That would be a drag.

So I must act now, dear hearts!

Watching some old episodes of The Show (see L'Awesome in the sidebar), I was reminded of the evils of brain crack: the insidious good ideas that fester in your mind, the ones you always refine and dream about, but never implement. I am a brain crack fiend, sadly. I think this is in no small part due to my personality. I am very adept at starting interesting little projects and letting them fizzle out after spending very little time on them. I suppose that isn't pure brain crack since I do start actually working on the ideas, but the real rub is that I'm not letting my plans truly see the light of day--whether they're just in my head or very barely begun in a place where only I can see them, I still imagine the perfect, finished product, with rainbows and waterfalls, and paparazzi and dancing clowns and complete strangers all celebrating this beautiful project I have completed. (Here's a link to the episode in question, which explains brain crack more eloquently, and which I rip off not-too-subtly.)

I think I need to wean myself off of this brain crack. It'll be good for me, especially since the stuff is most pernicious when you have nothing better to do.

So what ideas do I have? Not many, to be honest. I think the most promising one is to try some stand-up comedy. Sure, it might wind up completely sucking, but I definitely have the skills to write and memorize a routine. The hard part will be writing it well. And the timing. My timing is pretty atrocious in day-to-day life, but I think that when I have everything scripted out and practiced, and I have an audience to feed off of, I'd be funny.

The second-best one is to really unleash nowedidnt.com upon the world. Buying the domain name was my silly little way of embarking on a project but otherwise leaving it unfinished. Finishing it would be very sweet indeed, but I worry that it may be impractical. I have little interest in actual reporting, and I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what I'd write that would look much different than Hasta la Byebye. Sure, nowedidnt.com might actually do well if I polished up, wrote about things other than myself and actually marketed the site, but doing it that way seems kind of cheap. One thing I will absolutely need to make it work, though, is help. So I ask again, if any of you 1.6 readers might want to join me in this project, the project might actually start rolling.

The third-best idea is to go in an even more derivative direction: video-blogging! This actually could be the format of nowedidnt.com, or it could be a new site altogether. The biggest obstacles to this would be technical: I'd probably need a better camera, I'd definitely need some decent editing software, and I'd have to learn how to edit. And let's not forget the creative element. What the hell would I talk about? Politics? Would I try to count on some magical Ze Frank effect, where I find direction in variety and quirkiness? The initial difficulties in at least developing some skills with editing and technical aspects of framing, lighting, etc., will be difficult to overcome. But something cool could come of this.

I think I had other ideas too, but I don't know what they were anymore. All I know is that I can't sit here simply sharing ideas. I have to actually put them to work. As the great Mr. Frank said in another one of his shows, the biggest challenge is that first push, from zero to one.

Hasta la Byebye, honey-bunnies.

Flaming cunt!

I don't know why I chose that title, but it felt right. I'm sorry if I got anyone excited. Ah, just writing cunt makes me think of one of my not-so-favorite monologues from The Vagina Monologues which was called, of course, "Reclaiming Cunt". A somewhat interesting message, but the attempted hotness of saying cunt's various phonetic sounds just didn't strike a chord with me. I remember being so utterly bored during that monologue. But cunt seems to be a much more preferable name for the female genitalia than vagina in amorous situations. They pointed that out in The Vagina Monologues too.

Talking about the word cunt also makes me think of something that apparently happened when I was younger, perhaps three or so: off somewhere in Ohio, where I used to live, my dad was driving happily along with me. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, someone cut him off. My dad is very good at yelling things at drivers he doesn't like, usually doing it in Turkish. That day he called the driver "amcik". I'll let you guess what that means. I was very supportive of my dad and I was very small, so when my grandmother was driving me somewhere the next day and a similar incident happened I yelled, "Amcik!" with my squeaky three-year-old voice, causing my grandmother to become incensed. And that's why my dad doesn't say amcik anymore.

Oh, and that reminds me that I finished Middlesex over the break. I have to admit that I was expecting the ending to be different. Maybe going on more into the middle part of the narrator's life instead of stopping short. Except for the disappointment at being confronted with fewer and fewer pages left to go while the ones just passed did not reveal what I'd wanted, the book was very well-written. I'd recommend it to just about everyone except Turkish nationalists, who probably wouldn't like it.

It Can't Happen Here (which I finished reading a month and a half or so ago) had a similar quality to the ending, and a comparable amount of awesomeness within the writing. It was definitely not as free-flowing as Middlesex, but it was quite detailed.

To break the stream-of-consciousness topic-choosing, yesterday was my birthday. I am now 21 years old, and legally able to consume alcohol. That won't be affecting me much, but when I went to CVS I did take time to stare at their paltry selection of beer with the knowledge that, if I wanted to, I could just go right then to the counter and take some home with me. It was a cool feeling, but I walked out of CVS without having bought anything.

However, my dad is in town, and he will be for a while. Something about helping a Samsung semiconductor factory (apparently the only one outside of Korea) install a Honeywell system or something. So since he was here, I found someone to take over my weekly two-hour post-dinner cleanup and we went to dinner at Pappadeaux. It was quite different to be sitting there, being served instead of serving. I had my first Shiner there, which is far and away the best beer I've tasted, though beer still isn't really my thing. Our waiter reminded me a lot of myself: nervous and slow. He wasn't as bubbly, and he was considerably bigger than me, and he patted me on the back when he wished me happy birthday, but he also apologized for every little thing and was behind enough that other people did things for him like delivering our fried alligator. Naturally I insisted that we leave him a nice tip.

Afterwards we stopped off at Target, where I picked up cereal in bigger boxes and at much lower prices than could be found at CVS. I also picked up Sam's Town, which was on sale, but which I haven't listened to yet. At present, I am listening to Badly Drawn Boy. It's weird the memories that you associate with music. I don't have any specific memories for this album (The Hour of the Bewilderbeast), but a lot of the sounds I've heard in music recently which sounded familiar were indeed first heard in this album. It's kind of surreal. Sometimes I half-expect the melody to veer off and change to something I remember from another song by another band. Or half-expect something else to happen. I can never recall the songs or the something-else that might happen, but I know they're there. It's a pretty nifty feeling. And I appreciate The Hour of the Bewilderbeast now more than when Eric first gave it to me. But thanks, Eric.

And that's more than enough rambling for the time being. I have to remove clothes from the dryer now. Happy flaming cunt, everyone!