Still alive

I'm still alive, despite my recent lapse in posting. Unfortunately, I'm still insomniac, still working both a part-time job and making stuff to sell on eBay, still busy attempting to finish fixing up the house and still gestating. So needless to say, I haven't had a lot of spare time recently and when I do, I often don't feel like typing.

We spent the weekend in Champaign for the first time in several months. It feels like it had been too long, but at the same time we had needed a break from traveling after our December and January. It was good to catch up with the gang again and we got a bunch of sewing done for our Acen sketch. I won't reveal our concept in a public post, but suffice to say it involves a vile pun and dressing me up as a ten-year-old when I'm 8 months pregnant. I would say that we're going to Hell for that, but that ship already sailed in 2001 when we dressed strephon up in a battle bikini under a tearaway suit (one of my fondest memories is of the first time he tried the tearaway - there was a great rip of velcro and then the sound of panicked cats stampeding through the house).

( Home improvement musings )

Slow day

Work has been unbelievably slow today. Two people have come in since I took over the desk at 2:00 and one of them just wanted to read the newspaper.

Not that I'm complaining at all, mind you. The pace here is fitting my mental speed just about exactly.

I watched the first two episodes of Princess Tutu last week. It's a wonderful fairy-tale style anime about a story that has gone out of control and leaked into real life. The main character is a klutzy ballet student who discovers that she is actually a duck that was transformed into a girl so she could rescue a prince whose heart shattered. And in true anime style, she turns back into a duck every time she does something ducklike, like quacking, and has to find water to transform back (dragging her clothes along with her, of course). And in the perfect surreal touch, her dance instructor is a human-sized cat who threatens his students with marriage if they don't dance well enough.

I was watching the Independent Spirit awards last week (so much more amusing than the Oscars - where else could you see a Best Picture nominee introduced by having an actress get up and sing about it to the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas?") and I saw Laura Linney and thought, "She's who I would like to play me if they made a movie of my life."

I really couldn't say why. We don't look much alike, and while I've enjoyed her work, I'm not really given to actor/actress crushes. It might have something to do with how much I identified with the characters she played in You Can Count On Me and Love Actually, or maybe there's just something in the way she carries herself that either appeals to me or reminds me of myself. But that thought got me thinking about two questions:

Who would play you in the movie of your life? I.e., which actor/actress looks most like you? We're grading for looks here, not personal appeal. You don't have to like them at all, they just have to have somewhat similar features to yours. If you have the misfortune of looking like Carrottop, you'll just have resign yourself to cruel fate.

For instance, for myself the answer would probably have to be Tracey Gold of Growing Pains. While this doesn't please me much, we have the same sort of hair and facial features, and while my bangs never defied gravity, if you look at her in the first season of Growing Pains, you'd have a pretty good picture of me at thirteen. Emma Watson would probably play the teenaged me.

Who do you want to play you in the movie of your life? Here's where you get to pull out your favorite actor or actress. They don't have to look like you or be the right age, race or even gender. It's just the actor or actress who appeals to you most whom you would love to have portraying you.