There is just something about the twitter medium that has always bothered me, but I never realized it until now.
I miss the long form of writing an actual journal entry. The ability to digress on a topic longer than 140 characters. It’s a great exercise in editing and being concise, but there are a lot of topics that are just not suited for the format.
Sometimes, I just can’t fit the snarkiness into 140 characters, and that bothers me.
I played another open mic last Friday night. It was pretty good.
Open mics are terrifying experiences for me. I am fraught with worry. Did I practice enough? Will I forget what I’m doing once I’m up there in front of everyone? What if someone picks the exact same song as me? Do I just not have the chops to perform live? Is my hair okay? What if I break a string?
In addition, I am gripped by the most harrowing feelings in the pit of my stomach.
Nerves.
So when I started into the first chords of my performance, what I specifically did not worry about was a certifiably crazy woman making her way into the performance area, precariously sloshing a cup of tea, standing in front of me, and starting to sing a different song.
Naturally, this is exactly what happened. Continue reading
Honestly, I don’t know why I have the crazy iPod with the whopping 16GB of space if all I play is Lady Gaga and music from Glee.
I’m sitting in the fifth pew on the left side of Sacred Heart Church in Coronado. I’m in the third grade, and in front of me is the younger classes, all neatly seated boy girl boy girl. To my left is Adrianna Serrano. To my right is Alexis Hartweil, and I have a crush on her.
My navy blue uniform cords matching my polyester sweater, which is slightly too big, but I’ll grow into it. It’s St. Blaise day, one of the more obscure holidays that we’re celebrating.
And this time, it’s important to me, mainly because St. Blaise is the patron saint of throat maladies. As we get up to get our throats blessed, I think about all the times that I’ve had issues.
I remember my babysitter, shocked at the kitchen counter as I cough up a large pool of rice and sinigang. In my memory, it takes up the entire length of the counter. I remember pain in my throat and then coughing much more soup and rice than I had actually put into my mouth and I wondered if she was going to be mad at me.
I think of every time my mother made roast chicken covered with Campbell’s Mushroom Soup, the tightness in my throat. The inability to eat.
The fear of taking pills.
So this day is important to me. It’s another mass in the middle of the week. Midway through, similar to the communion celebration, we form lines pew by pew. I stand up, hands folded in front of me and we slowly move single file towards Father Gregory.
He holds two long white candles in his left hand, in the shape of an, “X.” Each congregation member approaches and lifts their head. Father Gregory touches the candles to both sides of their throat while making the sign of the cross.
The candles are cool, and I return to my pew.
That night, a piece of chicken gets stuck in my throat and I push my plate away.
I’m done.
As much as I would love to wax poetic on the critical path analysis and the project plan for the new direction for Lots of Monkeys dot com, I decided that a more hands on approach was necessary to get a feel for WordPress 3.0 before I made a decision on what I could do in terms of importing my twitter feed and deciding on content types and page types.
But wow.
Shiny.