i would curse and curse and curse

while back i decided i wouldn't curse in my blog. i'm not real sure why. it just seemed like the right thing to do. i curse a lot in my day to day goings. there's just something about publishing something that anyone can find and witness my little potty mouth. not down with that.

well,

if i hadn't imposed that on myself, i would curse until my eyes exploded.

i'm having problems with several big institutions, some related to the gov't. and it all hit me right after getting back from China.

i overdrew my bank account (see below). "$6 dollars a day" fee while i was out of the country and naive to the fact that the money had evaporated. i owed them money until de bebe covered me today. mad props.
i owe the IRS lots of money because i was employed as an independent contractor for several months last year. i was under the impression that i was an employee and even if i knew i was a contractor, i still wouldn't have known what that was and that it means about twenty percent of my money is taxable and that i'm responsible for calculating that and sending into the feds. no one explained that to me.
the neighbors upstairs are louder than they used to be.
the trash company gave us a new trash can in the alley. but it blocks me from getting out of the garage most of the time. so, i move it out of the way and one of my stupid neighbors moves it back so that i can't get in and out of the garage. it's the most annoying thing in the world. i'm all primed to pull into the garage and there's trash in the way.
the kitchen light burnt out while we were in china and my landlord hasn't called me back about replacing the bulbs, which i don't know how to do. it's very complex. i've been cooking all my ramen in the dark. i grilled some burgers on the forman grill but couldn't tell if they were done because it was practically pitch black. not even opening the fridge provided enough light. i just recovered from SARS and now i have to worry about mad cow, too? i'm pissed off.

AND, the post office lost my fucking mail.

merry fucking christmas.
through rain, snow, sleet, hail. SURE.
but they can't handle a simple hold. i have made three trips to the post office for the past three days trying to locate my mail. it just fucking disa fucking peared. paychecks that would have helped bail me out with the bank and who knows what else. totally gone. how am i supposed to get my food dehydrator if the fucking post office doesn't know how to deliver mail. i need jerky. i have all this frozen deer ready to be dehydrated and consumed or resold for rent money and no means to dehydrate it.

i could not be more pissed at all these fucking establishments.

being poor sucks.

i will say that even though i'm cheesed at almost everything including paying two dollars a gallon for gas when exxon made more profit last quarter than any company has ever made in the history of the world, that i have an eery happiness about me. i still feel okay even though the world is going to shit. by the way, i saw bush's live address to the press after his 911 commission "discussion." what a fucking idiot. he can't even form complete sentences. what is he doing running the world?

anyway, i'm still optimistic for the future, near and distant. i think going overseas for a month put this country into perspective a bit. everybody says that but it's true. i'm able to tolerate a little more after all the crap i saw other people tolerating in a borderline 3rd world country.

feeling good, just weathering a shit storm at the moment. all right. no cursing from now on. couldn't help myself.

b

bad, jet laggy day

i spurn you jet lag. get out, now.

so, the day was going swimmingly. got up around 6:30am due to jet lag, but I felt great. Really refreshed and crisp. The weather was gorgeous today. Went to breakfast with de bebe, enjoyed it immensely. unpacked, listened to new cds i bought in china for super cheap (list forthcoming), went to the bank.

bad call.

never go to the bank when you're having a great day. but i felt invincible. little did i know, i am not. i had overdrawn my account whilst in china. well, actually my landlord overdrew my account because he held my rent checks for so long they accumulated into a little pile on the floor of his squeeky new envoy. when he cashed them two weeks ago, my account dry heaved (coincidentally, i was also dry heaving into a hotel trash can in beijing around the same time, recovering from food poisoning.) so the bank charged me $64 for overdrawing the account twice, and has been charging me $6 a day ever since the incident occurred. excellent.

well, the only thing that can cheer me up about being poor, as i always am, is improvising, as i always am.

so, i put on my spiffy new shoes that i got in china for five dollahs. they're all white except a little blue streak around the sole and a silhouetted karate man on the side. then on the back it says warrior in chinese characters. very choice and designed to make me look cool. i started to get really tired from the lag around 6:30 but i knew that improv would bring me around if not just for a couple hours. i was blocked trying to leave my alley by emergency vehicles. no problem, threw it in reverse and was on my joly way to prov bliss.

however, when i arrived at the Playground, i was informed that the power had gone out and was still off. as a reminder, this is the show that was to make up for the last playground show that was cancelled because the theatre was shut down by the city. and now this one was in danger of being cancelled, too. i scrambled for interesting things i could do when the audience showed up. my show was just going to be part of a three group set and i was going first, so i had to come up with something gangbusters to impress these other troupes. this show was actually more about showing my stuff to the other improvisers than to an audience. i know the audience likes me, but i need the approval of my peers to feel like i'm doing something worthwhile. this is a whole other topic for a later date. back on track: just as i was polishing off the idea in my head which involved going to the walgreens and buying flashlights to light the show, eight o'clock arrived and there was no audience. show cancelled. a wave of relief, frustration, and disappointment came over me. here i had diverted sleep to come out to pick-me-up with prov, been derailed, saved it with a pretty good idea, and then complete derailtion, Fugitive style.

i moped back to the car that i had filled up with $30 worth of gas this morning before i knew about the bank's fee fiesta. i pictured them all dancing on the warnings they had mailed to me that were being held at the post office in sombreros and hitting pinatas shaped like my head. undercooked pork dumplings would spill out onto the suits and they would catch some in their mouths, feeling exquisite delight, unknowing to the power of the trichs inside their stomachs that would cause them to wake once an hour later that night spewing forth my uncashed and undigested rent checks until they turned into husks and were sold in an open air market in shanghai, stretched over a rudimentary cross of round sticks, dried and ready for any chinamen's gamey delight. the chinamen would digest...
oh sorry.

back in the car i was. sighed. started her up and headed for home and bed. i was stuck in the traffic jam caused by the power outtage. i ducked onto a side street to avoid going through a lightless intersection where every guy and their brother wants to be the next person through the light, and everybody and their dog is out trying to cross the street.

got diverted onto a one way street by means of poor urban planning and cruised up to the place where all the people were on a wednesday night. now, i realize, not a lot of people are looking for things to do on a wed. night and clearly ZERO of them wanted to come to the playground. but every jagoff in chicago was outside the blue man theatre, just two blocks from the playground. they were on a waiting list, i'm guessing, for the eight o'clock show which had already started. if we could have somehow persuaded them to walk down to our show, they could have had the best dark theatre show of their lives. they weren't even going to make it into the show, i bet.
actually, maybe their power was off, too. anyway, the point is there about a hundred people chillin outside a show they weren't going to get to see, and probably half of them would have come down to see a much cheaper show because they were psyched about seeing a show on a wednesday.

i turned in an attempt to avoid the same blank intersection as before and found myself blocked by three fire trucks at sportmart. i waited and waited and finally figured out how to get around them. on the way home i planned this bitchy blog entry. i would be asleep if it wasn't for you people.

so, i hope tomorrow can be a little brighter. i hope i can make progress booking shows for "bigly," and i hope when i go into the bank tomorrow to pay them money i shouldn't owe them that they are all carrying around little trash cans, just in case.

already asleep in the brain,
b

preliminary bloggage

here is some prelim. chiner stuffs.

i want to give you a transcript of one of the scenes i did in China for the English Video Project. This is primarily what I did in over there. I did as many as seven of these scenes in one day in various locations around a hotel/conference center in the rural outskirts of Beijing. Some were as short as this ode to shouting but some were much longer. It was a load of work but a good experience for sure. For the duration of the project I played Peter Lang who is described in his bio as:
Peter Lang age 19, height 5' 10" high school boy .
Very good joke, Friend with everyone easy to talk.

Nothing has been changed for the original script. The typos are not my doing. I wash my hands of all typos. Ever.

Scene 3H 7-2
emotion_shouting
Blame and Complaint

EMOTIONS - EXPRESSING TOPIC SHOUTING LEVEL 3
Peter Martin
Mike Mr. Lang

(Mike, Peter, and Martin are fifteen years old boys who like sports very much. One Saturday afternoon there are at Peter's house watching a soccer game on television. The television is in the living room and the boys are sitting on the sofa and chairs watching it. Martin has his head down and looks like he is sleeping. They tease each other good-naturedly.)

Mike: Hey Martin! Wake up!

Martin: Stop shouting. I am awake. Why does everyone always shout at me to wake me up? Can I help it that I'm tired?

Peter: O.K. Guys. Stop shouting. The game is starting.

Martin: Yeah. Mike is always shouting. Can't you guy talk normally?

Mike: (sarcastically) Right. Look who's talking - "Mr. Shout It Out".

Martin: Me? I can talk without shouting.

Peter: O.K ! O.K.! Look at that play! Where's the referee?

Martin: He's blind! Look! The keeper's shouting at the referee! And the referee is shouting back! He's shouting that the goal counts.

Mike: He's shouting to warn the keeper to get back in the net.

Peter: The score's one to zero after only one minute of play!

(The boys watch the game eagerly, occasionally shouting out comments like "Look at that play!" and "How could he miss?" and "Oh, no! It hit the crossbar!". Mr. Lang, Peter's father, walks into the room, carrying a tray of snacks and drinks which she has just prepared.)

Mr. Lang: Boys! Boys! Stop shouting! I thought you were all angry at each other. Now I see you are shouting because of the soccer game. Here are some snacks to give you more energy. At least eating will keep you from shouting for a while. Remember you can't shout when you have food in your mouth.

(He puts the tray of snacks on the table and starts to leave the room.)


Now you see what I was up against on a daily basis. We were also instructed to speak slowly so that the Chinese kids trying to learn English won't have such a hard time.

That's all for now, be back shortly. We're going to the post office to pick up a month's worth of mail. So much mail. It's going to be like Christmas opening all that mail.

Happy Holidays,
b

back

beardedlamb and de bebe are back safe and sound in chicago. i have many souvenirs of china (or as chinese who learned english from The English say, Chiner) and many stories to tell. how to tell them is an enigma. i think i will reverseenter things in day by day adding things as i can remember them. the trip was wonderful in so many ways. more will be be divulged when the coast is clear [and when i am not so jet lagged i am losing my balance and vision}

time for lots of sleep. this should make tomorrow's show at the playground interesting if nothing else.

good night, be back soon.

b

last day for shooting

ahoy, last day for shooting in china. i'm sitting around waiting for my scene to begin.
i'm working on a documentary that i'll be showing at my show in austin if i can get it done in time. it's tentatively titled "warter beck." the title comes from one of the crew guys i've been working with on the film shoots. his name is zhung kun and i think he's around 20 years old. he's the boom operator. anyway, he only knows about five english words so one day in between scenes it was just me and him in the room and he turned to me having never said anything to me before and said, "warter beck." i looked around and said "what?" he gestured to the bed he was on and swayed a little. "warter beck." i realized he meant water bed. so i tried to teach him that it was "wah ter bed." he couldn't get it and kept saying warter beck. it was amazingly funny and i wish it was on film.

have to go finish story later.

b

tipping is rude in china

no music: in china

faithful blogateers,
china is muey excellent. or as they say, gua. i'm learning lots of new words like shui, xie xie, yu bay, ka sher, and many more. china is an amazing country. i actually went to the place pictured below, the forbidden city. de bebe danced and i filmed it. a documentary is in process and will be ready for my trip to austin.
i play basketball with chinese high school kids almost every day. it's funny that they have no idea how to communicate with me, yet we can play a team sport and run plays and crush our opponent just as if we were all americans. i can also curse loudly without any reaction. they're also roughly my height or shorter, so i have a natural western advantage there.
there's so much to write about. the lambs, the dirt, the food, the poverty, the chesy ilming i'm doing. the english videos i'm doing are supposed to be part of an online course for chinese middle and high school kids to learn english. i'm hoping people in the states will be able to access it. i'm actually doing some really funny stuff. i'm having a great time and i wish i could spend a month out of every year in a foreign country. pictures are on the way as well as more stories about said shenanigans.
sorry i haven't been around blog land too much lately. my schedule is mad crazy fat super fresh busy.
until then,
b