based on stories that were true when they happened

Foregoing a fetish cocktail party to stay home and play with writing excercises, I end up writing vocab smut. Vocab smut. I fantasize about sand and polysyllables. Clearly, I will die alone with cats. And as I hate cats, that is saying something.

In other news, I am being made to impersonate a ninja in this Saturday's ninja/pirate party. A pirate disguised as a ninja, but still. I explained that I mix with ninjas like my star char mixes with earth signs to no avail. Possibly I will strangle Zorikh.

And I am drinking Australian amontillado. Which considering my ignorance of amontillado may be either simply terrible or exactly as it's meant to be. But GAVIN and Poe are impacting my Wednesday night indulgence.

If I tell my life to get a grip, will it do it for me?

Barnes & Noble stocks the Pirates Periodical (and, yes, there is a Pirates Periodical) under Spirituality. I feel this is a Sign of Great Things to Come. This will be better than the Jedi religion in Australia.

That is all.

*Ring!*

Me: NYU Registration. How can I help you?

Student: I haven't been going to my classes. Is that a problem?

Z: Anne, we need you in fatigues for Wednesday's photo shoot. Go buy some.

Me: OK, but don't make me buy a costume for the next one.

Z: (quite taken aback) But...these are things you can wear every day.

Am amused.

Classes start tonight! So excited. Yay, Super Grammar!

Am back. Am alive. Trip was good. Black Rock Desert is amazingly gorgeous. I would gladly go camp there when there's no massive event going on. (Lisa, start packing.) But massive events are good, too. I would spend the mornings building a costume and the time afterwards wandering around in finery and seeing what befell. Ended up watching Fight Club, taking a pole dancing class, climbing the giant, tippy pendulum of death, cheering for the motorized muffins, riding in the topless bike parade, listening to several really good bands that never would announce their names, marching with the Brazilian drumline, helping to tear down the info booth (power tools!), setting a new lifetime record for most days without shower, dancing until the last timber of the Man fell, thinking deep thoughts as the temple burned, thinking, "My fucking gods, that's a lot of fire," as the Belgian Waffle burned, considering the possibility that performing aerial trapeze suspended from a giant mechanical venus flytrap might be the proof and culmination of a full and glorious life, and spending a lot of time out on the rim of the city with the peace and sun or the stars in a sort of semi-retreat.

Saw almost nothing of anyone I knew. Never did find Diana. Fortuitously did see Basil's fire conclave performance (yay!), but very little of Basil for purposes of hanging out. More of the other Bostonians, actually. And of random, fun new people: Fritz, the mad German painter-psychic-DJ-actor-Indian sausage vendor; Monica, The Friendliest Person in the World; Tom, the drunken bar tender of whom I inquired, "So can you not trust a sober bar tender the same way you can't trust a skinny cook?" and whom I totally heard using this line later without attribution; Michael, who gave me an excellent idea for a cocoa casino theme camp; Al, the Georgian English professor who was generally both chill and cool; and Green-Haired San Franciscan, who told me I reminded him of a hairy gay man. Granted, this last might have been because I was in fact covered in hair at the time. See, the goodness of the trip did not extend to the return journey, I ended up spending 13.5 hours in the car to accomplish a normally 2-hour drive to the airport (naturally missing my flight), and it seems hacking off mass quantities of hair is sort of becoming my stock reaction to interminible automotive incarceration. The good news is...it's in remission. Actually, the better good news is that provided I manage to some sort of rest and reduce the current level of haggardness, the hair has the potential to look more cutely Sinead-ish and less chemo-y. Further good related to the travel debacle -- 1) people at the office seem determined to believe or pretend to believe I was really sick, 2) used airport's business center to straighten out all my registration woes after NYU rescinded its promise to let me out of work for an early class (am now registered for this crazy comp lit course, Intersections of Poetics and Cultural Theory: An Intensive in Joyce and Beckett), 3) bought Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell from the airport book shop and am quite entertained so far. The bad, of course, is: 1) entire fucking day in the car, 2) entire day and night in the airport, 3) all happy peaceful refreshment of days in the desert rather eclipsed right now by grimy exhaustion of sitting in the office knowing I have lost time just when life is getting more, not less, busy. Also, other things are weird now which might be less wierd if I were just rested and un-cranky.

But I will be going back. Oh, yes. Going back and doing things right. None of this getting in late on Thursday and leaving in the mad crush of cars on Monday. Full-out, full-time, real-camp burning next year. Bwa-ha.

Have totally hit a new low in office life. As loud, obnoxious tests are being run on the fire alarm system, the mysterious higher power that controls such things has cranked the air conditioning so very thigh that I am forced to linger over stuffing registration calendars into interdepartmental envelopes, drawing what warmth I can from their freshly Xeroxed pages.

Meanwhile, two people are out today in this, the Week of Forbidden Illness. I had better not hear a word about Thursday and Friday.

Yesterday I trekked out to campus (the 2 is my new least train) to get my student ID card and my MMR booster. And my tuition is paid as of last week. I am so official and not-able-to-be-kicked-out now. Yay! Going back to school! I'm excited for the motivation to swing my brain back into Clever Thinking Mode after its very long stint in Manic Random Firing Mode. So all is well, even if my ID photo makes me look like a chipmunk, See, that was random firing.

After the academic loose ends tie-up I headed to Jolie and Zorikh's (can I mention again how much I HATE the 2?) for a DoomMaidens photo shoot. Had fun posing with chainlink and graffiti. Need to aquire an intimidating length of chain; punk and cermonional daggers are odd together. Punks and ninjas are odd together too, but, hey, we're an eclectic posse.

You know what is not as cool as either legitimate academic standing or wrestle posse photos? Using a cell phone for an alarm clock and forgetting it's set on vibrate. I had plans for this morning, damn it.

So the family reunion in Pennslyvania could have gone better. It was great to see everyone, of course (all immediate, nuclear Maases in one place at the same time (all of two hours) for the the first time in two years!), but I have had fewer weekends more fraught. First, the train breaking down, the extensive waiting for a new engine to be attached, and the truly disheartening revelation that once we were moving again, we still had to detour around this section of track that maintenance crews had ripped up. Presumably, had we been on time in the first place, they would not have ripped up the track YET. Ended up quite late with Dad miserable about having to do station pick-up duyt after his bed time. Then there was the hotel, which was terrible but not so terrible that anyone would have cared if only Mom had felt less guilty about booking it and bemoaned and apologized less. Also we managed to get lost en route to every single place we drove. Every time. I believe there is an evil Vibe of Harrisburg at work; I got horribly lost the last time I was in the area as well. And considering that this is the bit of PA containing Intercourse and other smuttily named towns, I'm not sure whether it's more appropriate to quip, "Oh well, getting there's half the fun," or "I demand satisfaction!" One of the other towns is named Blue Ball, so perhaps the latter.

And the weekend's masterpiece of inconvenience was my forgetting my purse at the restaurant Saturday and thereby losing my money, phone, train tickets, and all forms of ID. The place closed before we realized the problem, opened after I had to catch my train back in the morning, and was located several towns over from our hotel, in the opposite direction my parents had to drive to get home. There was an elaborate plan in which I would get the train only to the Town of the Restaurant and get Lisa's locally located friend to drive me on the purse pick-up mission, but Amtrak asked for ID for the first time since ever I have dealt with them, and Mom and Dand ended up driving me. And I ended up getting the train 4 1/2 hours later than the one I had intended. I am getting downright fucking superstitious about my long distance travelling luck. I've already gotten a message from U.S. Airways saying my flight out to Nevada next week's been pushed back, and there's another message telling me to call regarding schedule changes to my return flight lurking on my phone. Am rather afraid to call.

Anyway, whining aside, the good bits of the trip: the family, Mom briinging me homemade zuchinni bread, Lisa bringing me good organinc beer, Skip loving his birthday present (but then how hard is it to please a 9-year-old with a video game?), the Hershey factory (well, Skip loved it; it was a little frightening, in my opinion), getting my photo taken with a hedgehog garden ornament so that all might exclaim over our striking resemblance, excellent Amish food in quantity, and my awesome new hat. Seriously, Amish farmers' markets turn out to be the place to acquire really quality leather cowboy hats for little money. And why would I need a black leather cowboy hat? Just because it's awesome, really.

[ETA: Scratch that. I have just discovered the Gothabilly movement on Tribe. Clearly, the hat was a foresightful purchase.]

I feel like I ought to be all behind in news since my last post, but nothing really specific has been going on. Last Wednesday, the DoomMaidens met with Ed of heroinewrestling, and all agreed it would mutually beneficial to work together. It turns out the way heroinewrestling works is that every girl gets a superheroine and a supervillianess character to play, which will be developed with the company and are sometimes based on fan requests. So I shall be amassing new personas in addition to the ridiculous punk rock one. And the truly wack bit is that upon development of a character, Ed sends away to his seamstress in China for a way old-school spandex suit. The resulting aesthetic is, well, intensely spandex-y. All this is on hold, however, until after Pennsic and Burning Man.

The weekend turned out to be far more entertaining than expected as Basil called Saturday morning and decreed, "YOU ARE MEETING ME AT THE HUMANWINE CONCERT TONIGHT!" Which I could not do what with having plans to meet Courtney and Carter at the hookah bar (was first one there, bar was empty, bartender decided was good idea to hit on me, danced to Arabic pop music, now get free wine in addition to free baklava), but we all met up after the concert and proceeded to discover the most amazingly posh late-night bordello diner in the city. Hung out on Sunday, too, doing nothing in particular, and ended up at another bordello bar, less posh and possibly more haunted. Felt a trend developing, but then made next stop at a wannabe-Australian jazz bar, which might have been trying for bordello-y judging by the bead-covered seance lamp but wasn't quite sure how to do it judging by the stuffed and mounted deer's head. Always fun.

Otherwise, I've generally been planning to get tons of useful stuff done and, oh-so typically, lazing about and accomplishing a quarter of it. WILL get the damn costume done before Burning Man. WILL. And I did just reserve my airport-to-desert transportation, which turned out to be affordable for a change. That, at least, rocks.

And another thing thing I have managed to successfully, if less affordably, complete is all of my fall shopping. I was lured into a fabulous store where everything is five times more than I can afford by a "Sale" sign meaning that everything was temporarily only three times out of range. Then proceeded to my eternal shopping nemesis, Rugby, where I'd been waiting for certain things to go on sale. Found they were instead now sold out. Ended up paying more to have items shipped from the Charlottesville store. Managed to translate fall wardrobe acquisition into the purchase of four shirts. They're really fantastic shirts, though. Also a completly impractical punky skirt because of this at-the-mercy-of-the-80's thing I'm curently doing. Belatedly recalled I was going to be thrifty so that I might be able to replace disgusting apartment carpet within the month. Then recalled I have not yet cashed in my commuter's compensation at work. Crazy cushy union perks. Bwa-ha!

Have been doing a fairly good job of going to the gym lately. Am planning to skip tonight so as to brew beer and rearrange all the furniture in my room. Figure slinging about 6-gallon fermenters and structurally unsound dressers counts as a workout. Wonder what happened to the pronouns in this paragraph? Killed them. Killed them all.

Yeah, and I didn't have anything to report. Well, actually, I didn't; I just blather readily.

http://jellowrestle.com/gallery/brianvan/ -- for photos of punk rock jello wrestling. I'm the one who...well, I'm probably recognizable.

Oh, and there of pictures of Hawaiian jello wrestling from May here:
http://www.danrod.net/photos/jellow/
and also here:
http://maytriks.com/pg/index.cgi?mode=view&album=/jel_521

So last night was fairly hilarious. It was a very, very good jello wrestling night. Jolie and I showed up in full (though slightly inaccurate and anachronistic) punk regalia, posing as Jenny Rancid and Sally Nasty of the The Screw Rifles. Zorikh played Malcolm, our manager, and Diana was the Hillbilly Hussy, our country music nemesis. We had a whole storyline worked out in which the band broke up over Sally's heroin-like french fry addiction, complete with a fry flinging intermission show and rancorous sabotaging of each other's later matches. Highlights of the night included providing the DJ with our own soundtrack to play, shouting British obsenities at all and sundry in horrific accents, and telling the Purple Passion that she looked like a bloody disco queen and posed no threat to me. Of course, PP was rather pissed at me over the beating with inflatable guitar incident and heartlessly demolished me. But whatever. The very best bit of all was this conversation from after the show:

Random British Girl: So what brings you lot to New York? Are you touring?
Me: We live here.
RBG: But you're obviously British!
Me: What?! Those were fake accents; this is how we really sound.
RBG (quite crushed): But you sounded so close to home for me! No, really, where are you from?
Me: Originally, the Midwest.
RBG: No! Say something in a Midwestern accent.
Me: Umm, this IS a Midwestern accent.

Poor girl didn't seem too drunk, but I wonder now if she wasn't close to unconciousness; they were really bad accents we were doing.

So, yes, mad wild fun. Which is as it should be as I spent the day before doing nothing but watching Lost on DVD and chainmailing in preparation for Burning Man. And I am spending today rather exhausted with a sore foot that I don't remember injuring in the ring and a new appreciation of the fact that one can only shout "Bollocks!" and "Anarchy!" for so long before losing one's voice. Still, jujitsu tonight.

And to be totally non-sequential, the demo on Friday was good. Unremarkable, but good. Then after the presentation bits a guy approached us who badly wanted to know how to get into wrestling/meet wrestlers. We offered him a few two-minute trial bouts right then. Jolie got his contact info and emailed explaining session wrestling. Now he is proposing taking me out to dinner. Only he is proposing it to Jolie because hers is the only contact info he has. So now she is talking business and he is talking social outings, and I uninterested in accepting or giving him my number. It is convoluted, silly, and annoying.

The end.

The band of superheroines is to be known as the DoomMaiden Posse, name courtesy of me. We now have weekly jujitsu training sessions set up, an appearance scheduled for this Friday assisting at a fetish club's erotic wrestling demo, an elaborate storyline about the glory days and bitter break-up of the Screw Rifles (featuring my punk character, naturally) to bring to jello wrestling on Sunday, and a business meeting with the heroinewrestling.com video guy next week. Meanwhile, Karen thinks she can loan me a bunch of SCA armor, so I should be doing actual armed combat training by the end of the month, I have the prospect of at least two more paid wrestling sessions with Steve, and I should probably take Zorikh up on that offer to produce trading cards for me.

The one negative here -- misconstrued retroactive networking.
Jolie to me: "Oh, you know a sub who's into wrestling? That's a great contact. Tell him about our thing this Friday."
Me to Chris: "Hi, so it's been a while, but I'm doing this demo Friday..."
Chris to me: "OMG! You called me! What are you doing tonight? Wanna get drinks?"
Me to self: "Fuck."
Yes, trading cards. Would add an air of professional distance. And Chris very much inspires me to want to keep men on the other side of cash transactions.

And now the sheer surreality of my having no news but that pertaining to professional wrestling causes me to ponder: What the hell else is going on in my life? Um, school soon. Need to pay for classes and get an MMR booster because I appear to be the only person in modern America to have slipped through the undergraduate vaccination regulations. Burning Man sooner. Costume is not so ready. Must chainmail like a fiend these next few weeks. Then get busy with feathers.

Oh! Soonest of all -- Family reunion when my parents drive Lisa back to Dickinson. I shall get the train to Harrisburg and join them. Ahh, I have just realized this means that I don't have to mail Skip his birthday present but shall rather be able to hand deliver it. Excellent, as the only post office remotely convenient to me is indefinetly closed due to computer failure. Ramble, ramble, I'm done now.

Jujitsu last night was tons of fun. Highly entertaining people, very helpful instruction, and the occasional cry of, "Stop, we must test that move for dramatic effect!" interrupting drills. Also I kicked ass, which was pretty great.

Afterwards we watched a bit of Who Wants to Be a Superhero, discussed how Jolie could totally have made the cut if she'd gotten the application tape in on time, and played with costumes. The decision reached seems to be that I shall be a manic punk rock superhero. With power bolts. Who does not shout 'shazaam!'(tm) but something appropriately similar. Ahh, this haircut - more 80's than having '80's' shaved onto my head.

Eventually I shall have exciting trip pictures up. But not today. And not tomorrow. I renounce promptness and all its works.

But speaking of photos -- tonight is the first ever club meeting and photo shoot of the brand new All-Female Superhero Posse, which my friend Jolie is organizing and of which I comprise one-fifth. Costuming, weaponry, combat, stage names...and most likely a better name for the group. I just hope we don't end up calling it Zorikh's Angels -- and it's doubtful we would as Zorikh would rather have paratroopers than angels any day. Anyway, we think we can eventually get video, photo, and booked performance work through this. Tonight shall be mostly meeting and brainstorming characters and looks, but also playing with the camera and jujitsu practice. I am ever so delighted about this.

And yesterday was my first session wrestling appointment. Sort of. It was actually a mini history of session wrestling + basic moves class put together by a guy who's been a long-time client. Still, I got paid for it. Paid, for taking a class. Slightly baffling, but pretty great. What might have been the lowlight of the night but was actually pretty funny was being told, "Your schtick would be the girl next door act. For people who aren't body builders, and aren't martial artists, and aren't models." In retrospect, I could literally have kicked Steve's ass for that, but truth and tactlessness amuse me too much.

To follow up on my rather obsessive previous post -- more Pirates stuff. Just checked IMDB, and it is as I hoped. That whole thing about Keith Richards playing Jack's father that was supposed to happen in the second movie then didn't? Is happening in the third. Giddy happy. So delighted. The original clipped-out news story (with pictures, of course) announcing the second movie casting is still pinned up in my room back in Indiana if Mom hasn't cleaned and scrapped. On some topics I'm way too proud to be geeky.

I am back, and though an accounting of my travel-ventures might be appropriate at this juncture, there is a whole massive photo compilation project currently underway, and I shall offer up the whole Australian package when it is complete.

Instead may I direct your attention to Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, a most promising-looking site, which I have just discovered. I may need one of tee-shirts -- "All Your Aquitaine Are Belong to Us," most likely, though the vowel shift and Dylan lyrics in Middle English ones are also tempting. The feature article, at the moment is "A Pyrates Lyf for Chaucer."

That reminds me, actually, that I have been negligent in posting rant/review/scary thing about Pirates II. Should have found an Internet cafe and done that the moment Lisa and I saw it in Random Small Australian Town. So...( Yo ho ho and a bottle of spoilers! )

A message for all my beloved friends, adoring fans, creepy-ass stalkers, and random disinterested people who wonder why they are now bothering to read this:

Today at 5:15 p.m. I will be on a plane, and that plane will be taking off for Papeete, where it will connect with a flight that will take me to AUSTRALIA!!!! Possibly I shall post exciting updates of my travels as I go. Possibly, as accomodation plans for this trip involve knocking on ranchers' doors and asking if we can pitch a tent in their pasture/pitching a tent and hoping we are not seen and shot for trespassing, I will be prevented from posting by either a total lack of computers or death.

In any event, back in three weeks! Ta!

Love,

- Anne

So today my inbox contained a message which read, in summary:

Hello, I don't know who you are, but I found your email address in my wallet and assume I acquired sometime when I was too drunk to remember it later. If you have been to any of these parties: (list of parties), I probably met you there. I would like to invite you to my own party this Friday in which I will liberate all the lighters I've been stealing from people for years by handing them out to all the guests. Please come, and do not set my apartment on fire.

Happily, I do remember the circumstances of the email exchange -- this was Kevin from Gnome Love, and he was supposed to hook me up with a gnome to take to Australia for photography purposes. Would totally go to this party if I weren't going to be on an out-of-country flight at the time. As I would meet Tony and Rosanna for jujitsu training earlier that night. The one thing I don't like about fantastically awesome adventures is the inevitable trade-off effect. There should be, like, TiVo for life -- I will be off galivanting from Date X to Date Y, please record all spiffy events taking place within that period so that I may experience them at my convenience upon my return. Would rock. I could have done Pippin at Oberlin. Yes, all of you, sneer if you like; it's still my favorite musical.

Anything else? Ehm, fighter practice was fun last night, though attendance was low and I have yet to acquire armor. I sat and kept Jolie and her broken foot company, and we watched Zorikh (well over six feet) thwap Lee (shorter than me) about the head for a while. We made plans for renewed mayhem when I return and Jolie's foot is healed, which should be more or less concurrent.

So due to the general coolness of the event and a slight dread that wrath would descend upon me from a Bostonly direction if I missed it, I made my way tonight to the Gnome Love party at the Love club. Courtney accompanied me, and we had a most excellent time painting on the gnome mural, posing for gnome photos, listening to gnome erotica read-alouds, and watching gnome strippers. Also dancing, watching and trying hooping, chilling in the giant people-sized cat climbing thing, and drinking dandelion wine, which turned out to be not wine at all but a shady dandelion syrup cut with tequila.

I got a gnome hat and a promise from Random Guy Kevin that Gnome Camp will provide me a gnome to take to Australia for photography purposes. The best and wort part of the party was how uncrowded the dance floor was -- all those swirly lights all to myself, yay! But sad there was not better turn out. Need to find that bar again -- I really liked the brilliant climbing room.