becky haycox

Month: February 2011

  • space-time continuum, the musical

    Professor Genghis Whitehead and his colleague Ursula Crakunschtuff were close to perfecting their major opus — a formula that enabled the consumer to be a “fly on the wall” inside someone’s mind — reading their thoughts and controlling their actions.

    Finally, a tweak here and there, and it was done. Before thinking about it too much, Genghis consumed the formula. It worked! His first order of mind control was to get inside Ursula’s head and force her to perform dance moves from the 1960s.

    The perfection of the formula is what Ursula had been waiting for — their plans for world domination were one step closer. They could control millions! They could be rich! Privately, Genghis began having second thoughts about using the formula for evil.

    There was a knock at the door. Sharon, a young ingenue from an extremely dim-witted family, had come to the laboratory to answer the “help wanted” ad for new lab assistant. This is how Ursula came to find out she herself had been fired. She vowed to get revenge, before she was dragged by security from the office.

    Genghis, immediately smitten with Sharon, took another dose of formula and got into her head. Sharon was horrified and fled. Meanwhile, Ursula, completely unhinged, sang her own praises before heading to Sharon’s hometown, to enlist support from Sharon’s parents to get her to quit the lab.

    Sharon collected her thoughts at a local park. A young man was sitting nearby and introduced himself as Bill. Bill was also able to read Sharon’s thoughts! They sang “Get Your Mind Out of my Head” before Sharon fled — again.

    Ursula Crakunschtuff made it to Sharon’s parent’s house. As she described the situation Sharon was in, Wilhem (Sharon’s father) recognized Ursula — she was of the Krakow Crakunscthuffs! They were an infamous Polish family known for creating deeply traumatizing science experiments in their neighborhood.

    Back at the lab, the love between Genghis and Sharon was inevitable, and growing. As Sharon sung the praises of the formula as something with potential to heal the world, Genghis forced himself not to use it for nefarious purposes, as he realized he needed to be a good person to earn Sharon’s love.

    At this point, Bill, Ursula, and Sharon’s parents converged on the laboratory. Genghis revealed in a shocking twist, that Bill was his son, and that Bill’s telepathy was due to Genghis’s earlier experiments with earlier versions of the formula.

    Once all was explained, Sharon and Genghis were free to be in love, Ursula was thwarted, and all was well.

    – – – – –

    This is the plot to last weekend’s improv show. The format is called Spontaneous Broadway. Each of six improv performers make up a short scene and song on the spot based on titles provided by the audience. The audience then votes for their favorite scene/song. In the second half of the show, the improvisers present a 40-minute, Broadway-style musical based on that song.

    This was my setup. The musical was called “Space Time Continuum,” and the song was “Get Your Mind Out of my Head.” The audience voted on it, so we fleshed it out to the interesting, albeit imperfect, plot that is recapped above. I played Ursula. It was pretty fun, and the audience really loved it — we got a standing ovation. Usually, what we create onstage gets forgotten pretty quickly (such is the ephemeral nature of improv), so this is a little record of a night to remember.

  • sharing the pain

    I’ve been reading excerpts from Joyce Carol Oates’s latest book, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, in which she lays her soul bare in the aftermath of her husband’s unexpected death. Her writing is so good, sad and sweet. I look forward to reading the book in its entirety. If you’re confused by this, after all my complaining about my reluctance to read a book a month this year, don’t be. I can consume nonfiction like nobody’s business, especially when it comes to death stuff.

    As I continue (and continue and continue) to probe my own grief over the deaths in my own history, I get comfort from other peoples’ mapping of their own grief landscapes. To wit, Oates’s observation:

    Is this grief?—such exhaustion, melancholy? A feeling of dazed dizzy not-rightness, like the sensation you feel before acute nausea? A sensation of being off-balance—both spiritually and physically—as if something has worked its way loose inside my head?

    Oh, yes, I know that feeling. I remember that off-kilter, hanging-off-the-side-of-a-cliff feeling.

    I remember finding myself in the drug store, a day or two after my mother’s death, waiting to pay for whatever I was buying. I had a sudden rush of self-awareness — suddenly, I was afraid to look down, at myself, because I had no memory as to whether I had dressed or not before leaving the house. I seriously had no idea if I wearing pants at that moment.

    I can laugh a little at this memory. Processing grief took my mind to absolute limit — but I live to tell!

  • WFMU gateway

    wfmu!

    pointing at my shirt, that is what i am doing.

    I have mentioned WFMU plenty in this here blog but have not really devoted a post to it, even though WFMU one of the reasons my world goes ’round in such a happy, twirly way.

    It’s one of the last independent free-form stations and has a really interesting history. The DJs offer up a bizarrely wide variety of aural stimulation and really, you have no excuse not to listen, if you like new and different things, and have any kind of internet connection. Oh, and ears — you need ears, too.

    I have a close connection to this station, thanks to my friends J. and A. getting married in the mid-ish 1990s. There at the reception, I met Mr. Finewine and Tamar of WFMU and Becky’s-personal-history fame. I don’t think Tamar was a DJ quite yet at that point, but Finewine was and I remember going to New York in 1995 (I think?) and accompanying him to FMU’s old Upsala College location for his show. I also was on Tamar’s show way back at the beginning of the millennium.

    Well, then Tamar met Rich, another FMU DJ, and they kind of hit it off, and a couple years they got married in New York — by me! So either I have a rich and rewarding connection with WFMU or I seem to have a problem with only making friends with people who are DJs. And then marrying them.

    So, what’s the upshot of this story, apart from the attempt to give myself hipster cred by aligning myself with the coolest radio station in the world (and the people that make it awesome?)

    It’s pledge time for WFMU, and boy, do they need you, being entirely listener-supported and all. The swag you get when you lay some cash on them is beyond compare. Fifty bucks nets you a tee-shirt design by Tim Biskup. The DJ premiums are excellent (look for Rich’s), and it only gets better from there. Glow in the dark poster of New Jersey? Yes, please.

    I need and love WFMU. I need it to be around. I plan to give still it stings like a tennis ball to the face.

    C’mon, you guys. Give a little.

  • bittersweet fruit of the sea

    It’s the Fourth Friday Challenge for February. My friend Paul and I, both posting daily in 2011, decided to challenge each other once a month to keep things spicy. In his words, “we want to push ourselves to do something more interesting than we might otherwise.” I will put his challenge to me at the bottom of this post — it’s your choice to read the challenge first or not.

    – – – – –

    When I was 25, I went to Southeast Asia. For the first few weeks, through Singapore and western Indonesia, I traveled with my friend Tracy; for the last few weeks, I traveled alone through the eastern Indonesian islands. I was lonely and uncomfortable on my own, but in Candidasa, Bali, a beautiful beach town, I encountered two San Franciscans, with whom I spent a few blissful days.

    We agreed to go to dinner one evening, and met on the beach in front of my hotel. The low sun made the ocean gold and shimmering. A local man herded his geese along the water’s edge. My new friends and I were awestruck by the beauty, the smells, the other-worldliness of this place. After a day of sun and sea, we moved languidly, in a dream-like state.

    A couple of fishermen brought their small boat onto shore, right next to us. They were hauled in a heavy-looking bucket. As they passed, we asked to look to see what they had. In the bucket were two huge, fierce-looking live tunas. We asked what they were going to do with them. They indicated they were going to sell the fish to a nearby restaurant.

    My friends and I were not stupid. We followed the fishermen to the restaurant, marched in, sat down, and ordered tuna.

    It came to us, steamed with rice inside banana leaves — very simply and quickly cooked, with a splash of coconut milk and a bit of salt. It was intensely, deeply delicious. Flaky, rich, full of the flavor of the ocean, of life. I felt like I had never understood seafood before, until this moment.

    It was a beautiful meal on many levels (it also happened to be my birthday, and I’ll tell you more about that another time) and very poignant, as well — not too long after that trip, I started developing an allergy to shellfish, then seafood. I haven’t eaten fish for years, so the memory of that tuna — the freshest food I’ve ever eaten — is so sweet, and and so, so piquant.

    – – – – –

    This post was in response to Paul’s Fourth Friday Challenge to me, February 2011:

    Write about a food you love. I should be able to taste it through the monitor.

    – – – – –

    Read Paul’s response to my challenge

  • we need to talk about kevin

    Another monthly challenge to myself: read a book, and report on it here (to keep me honest.) These will not be terribly in depth or insightful reviews. Here’s February’s.

    We Need to Talk About Kevin was rough to read on many levels. On the technical side, it was so damn long. For those of you who have ever attended a film with me, you are unfortunately aware of the fact that I cannot take long movies. Cannot take them. Same applies to books. I will make the occasional exception, but not in this case. Another technical issue is the format of the book; it’s written as a series of letters from a woman to her husband, which doesn’t work for me. I understand the intent, but who would write letters in incredibly verbose, chapter-size chunks? And the dialog is so so clunky. I have no idea if it’s a stylistic choice or not, but there’s a false, flat, David Lynchian quality to everything everyone says.

    Apart from these issues, this is an insane, horrifying book of vast scope. It centers around this woman’s son, who commits a Columbine-style school massacre. I found the son and woman absolutely hateful in their own ways — which is the point, I guess, but page after page of horrible and unsympathetic descriptions and behavior just wore me down. There’s also underlying mysteries and detailed descriptions of atrocities that recall the murder/horror books of my youth, like The Other.

    Both main characters do have an absurd and sardonic sense of humor that occasionally I can get behind (I’ll bet the author could be fun at a dinner party), but I felt nothing but relief when I finally finished this beast tome — which I only could force myself to do last night, because I left my laptop at work.

    Okay, all that said, this is a major opus. The author threw everything she had into this book, and I acknowledge that. And the subject matter is very ballsy; she really goes in-depth into the hows and whys our American society (and genes) can create monsters. I would’ve considered a more glowing review if this book were half as long, which may be my own failing. But this story was just much too much for me.

  • feed frenzy: binge/purge

    This is a multi-parter post, as I am de-cluttering my Google Reader feeds. This is part two. Part one is here.

    I have culled my blogs down. I won’t lie: it hurt. But I went from a bloated 252 feeds down to a svelte 155.

    Hacking away the lifeless feeds was easy — there were lots and lots of outdated and dead feeds (including one that hadn’t updated since 2006!) I just clicked, clicked, clicked them out of existence.

    Making the first pass of clearing out the living feeds was pretty easy, as well. There were a lot of blogs of limited interest to me, and a whole lot of tech gadget and/or BoingBoing-esque sites that were pretty redundant. Also: coding and web design blogs? No need for feeds — I seek out info on an as-needed basis, so out they went.

    Making the second pass was hard. There were quite a few craft/lifestyle blogs that, while interesting, often didn’t pique my interest enough to click through to read. A lot of nouveau-domestic-type bloggers seem to be running out of steam; maybe real life is getting in their way, and meanwhile, I’m getting Hipstamaticked to death. I tossed a bunch of music blogs and boring, information-free blogs about nonprofits.

    Then, I got tough. I got rid of a lot of feeds of friends whose blogs haven’t been updated in a long time. I was holding out hope that they’d come back, but I was also feeling a little bit like a sad, stage-door Johnny — waiting, perhaps in vain, for a new post. Some people I love too much to cut away, and I still hold onto hope that they’ll return to writing (ahem, Evany, Regina, Toni.)

    Now that I’m as shorn and vulnerable as a just-styled poodle, I have fear that I’ll MISS OUT on something good, that there are shiny internet objects that won’t be called to my attention. But I shake off that feeling, trying to feel secure that if the object is meant to get to me, it will get to me.

    And in terms of managing my blog-reading time, I do not ever hesitate to click the “Mark All as Read” button as much as I want.

    I’m hoping this streamlining will make this info stream a little less turbulent.

    More later.

  • banned

    Oh, boy, there’s a man from my past that I have been absolutely, strictly forbidden to have anything to do with, anything at all.

    The people that forbid me from Mr. X are my key girlfriends (especially Tamar, who knows exactly about whom I am writing) and I rely on them to keep the borders safe.

    It’s not like I’m stalker-y, or harbor a desire to restart things with him, or spend a lot of time dwell-dwell-dwelling on him. It’s just that he and I had a profoundly complicated and mutually-needy relationship, and he often did things that made me suffer. Just the fact of his continued existence causes me unease, and I need to have barriers in place so that I feel safe, and normal, and done with him.

    Mr. X and I have mutual friends, so occasionally I hear of his where and what-abouts. I have evolved enough to not get too bothered by this, and to even feel sympathy for the latest woman in his life (oh honey, good luck with that mess). That’s about as much goodwill as I will ever have for his rotten soul. I sound awful, but trust me, he was really awful to me.

    For the friends that know me, flesh and blood-wise, please: no guessing games. You may know or remember him or you may not. Leave it alone. For the key girlfriends (who know who Mr. X is for sure), I am sorry I’m bringing him up, I know I’m not supposed to, but the latest news about him is setting my teeth on edge. And that’s all I can say.

    I have no idea why he still stakes real estate on a portion of my .. what? Heart? Nethers? Endocrine gland? His pitbull soul latched on to part of me, and won’t shake loose.

    Booooo. Poison Man. At least, at least, there’s only one of him.

  • things i fear

    I scare off predators

    • the rat with whom i share an office
    • dentists
    • making someone cry
    • cult members
    • being mocked by teenagers
    • going down in flames
    • razors
    • blindness
    • Nazis
    • sporting goods stores/electronic stores (tie)
    • raging toddlers
    • inevitability of the fact of the death of my loved ones
    • a bird attacking my eyes
    • being pranked/punked
    • poverty
    • a debilitating injury that will derail my fitness regime
    • getting depressed and derailing everything
    • black ice

  • great beyond

    A bizarre bunch of people have died recently. Not that they were bizarre themselves, just such a random grab bag of folks! Edna Babish, the butter-Brando lady, the chopped-off-ear guy!?

    Rest in peace, you guys.

    … and yes, I subscribe to Celebrity Death Beeper. Why wouldn’t I?

  • two typos and one gaffe

    TYPO

    Many years ago my roommate had a job doing paste-up (yes, that long ago) for Macy’s. One weekly ad she often handled was the huge one that was always across from Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was a very popular page in a very popular newspaper, back when that stuff was relevent.

    She did not happen to paste up that infamous men’s fashion ad, within which the copy declared the “latest knit shit.”

    TYPO

    I was at a workshop last month, which amounted to a four-hour presentation on needs assessments. I know, it’s a glamorous career I have. The Powerpoint presentation was rife with low-contract colors, erroneous capitalization, and jaggy graphics pulled from the web.

    Just when I thought there was going to be nothing of interest, a bullet point appeared, urging us to “engage the pubic.”

    GAFFE

    I was on the radio last week, being interviewed on things related to my (glamorous) job.

    I meant to say the word “party” and I said “farty” instead.

    Twice.