What an exciting week! I made tuna casserole (aka, Tuna Helper) the other night. And now I put a new post on my binary logue!

I have been busy doing stuff and still being not rich. Instead of just writing/being in shows, I have started directing shows, so now I get to tell people what to do and why they’re not being funny. It’s kind of like my classes, except fewer assignments and more humiliation. Actually the cast is very funny, which is great because I can take credit for their abilities. That’s the main function of a director if you’ve ever wondered. Oh, the show I’m currently directing is an orginal Christmas show, and next up I believe is a musical based on the Salem witch trials and then a three-person vaudeville-style sketch show. I will ruin all of them with grace and vigor.

I am also about to embark on a 50,000 word journey through November as part of National Novel Writing Month. Quantity over quality! Speaking of which…  http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=6119059&page=1  Just kidding, Manuel! Congratulations (on the weight loss, not the wedding)!

I need to send a fax now.

Holy shit, does this movie suck.

The Happening was so terrible, in fact, that it made me want to start writing a script for the worst possible premise for a movie someone could pitch to me. Even if it doesn’t make us a boatload of that dirty Hollywood money, then at the very least you’ll be giving me a good writing exercise. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I totally regret seeing the movie. There were moments that were quite funny. Even if M Night had intended to elicit something other than laughter. That seemed to happen a lot for me. I had a different reaction than what I’m guessing he wanted from his audience. Another example: in spite of what I think his intentions were with the film, it actually made me kind of hate the environment. Isn’t that wacky? Like instead of wanting to be more frugal with my water usage or curb my carbon emissions, I rather was filled with a desire to cut down a tree, shove it up an endangered panda’s ass, strap the panda to the hood of a Hummer and drive to an Arby’s parking lot to give away free nuclear bombs to obese children. But I don’t blame the environment; I blame The Happening. So send me those ideas, and let’s get moving…pictures that is!!!

What I’m more immediately concerned with, however, is the impending frequency of his and/or his mother’s back porch use with the late-spring onset of fair weather. I have been trying to write all night and am constantly distracted by voluminous backdoor chatter. And I still can’t say with certainty if they are for or against the Wendy’s at the end of our block. I guess it’s time to buy an air conditioner and close the windows.

The wrestling show is almost over, which is good because each Saturday morning I seem to be sorer (more sore?) than the previous Saturday. I think George might try to kill me come closing night. If I do live, I hope that this video project we’re writing goes well. I think I have a funny idea, but I don’t know. Maybe I’ll run it past the neighbor kid and see if I can’t get that youngster to smile. If so, then I’ll know to defer to George’s “city hobos” idea.

That’s me.

Yesterday’s dietary adventure makes me a bad 1980′s housewife cliche or else a six-year-old child. First I stop off for my morning coffee before a really important focus group meeting. The meeting is really important because there are free cookies. So I fulfilled my duty and ate my free cookie at the meeting.

Later, the ladies from the office and I headed over to the student union for free ice cream, a university-wide treat in honor of Administrative Professionals Day. Which used to be Secretary’s Day. But that was back when secretaries were still slender and congenitally feminine. Now they are Administrative Professionals with cankles and hopeless attitudes and are sometimes even men. At any rate, now that the secretaries are all wretched beasts, the higher-ups toss frozen milkfat down their soft pitiful gullets. Including mine. So cookie for breakfast, then ice cream for lunch. 

Later on around teatime (4pm-ish for you non-anglophiles), I crack open the box of candy the associate dean gave me for being so very lovely. So I have a fat piece of chocolate candy. At home I find that a trip to the grocery store might be a good idea. I have a fistful of corn chips. So: one big chocolate cookie, one bowl of chocolate ice cream (with fixins), one piece chocolate candy, one (ok, maybe two) fistfuls of corn chips. It’s like my body is trying to squeeze a pitcher of mango juice from a dog turd. A sweet, creamy dog turd.

Let it be said here first: I vow to sometimes try to go to the gym slightly more often, plus I will cut out candy/cookies and any other undeserved desserts and replace this crap with real food, the kind that’s been deep-fried to a golden brown. And I will eat more salads. Taco salads. Deep-fried, possibly chocolate, taco salads with sour cream dressing. So feel free to leave your favorite healthy recipes, and bon apetit!  

So instead of seeing this play (Intrigue with Faye, I believe be the title), we streetwalked into the Landmark Century theater (movie-style theater) for a little documentary, Young at Heart.  It chronicles a chorus of septa- and octogenarians called Young at Heart who sing contemporary rock songs to sold-out auditoriums and inmate-filled prison yards. It’s not a documentary with a political agenda or a particularly urgent social conscience. It’s just a look at these old people singing Sonic Youth and James Brown songs. It will make you laugh, and then it will jerk your tears right off. Unless you are some kind of sociopath, in which case it will not make you laugh whatsoever.

Let’s face it: in today’s society, people just straight up like stuff. And I’m no different. Stuff like unicorns. But not fake unicorns: real ones, from history. And if you go to the Field Museum, you can see the Mythic Creatures exhibit where you can see true-blue evidence of unicorns in the form of a horn. Long, white, pointed at the tip. I touched it. It was real. Except unicorns were really whales. Or something like that. While I like unicorns, I don’t like so much all that reading of the little tiny museum placards. And boy do they go overboard on those things. Hey, Museum: the dictionary called, it wants all those crazy words back!

So the horn was rad, but there are some recommendations I have to improve the musueum experience. Number one: Less reading!! I can’t stress this point enough.  Number two: More buttons and levers. Pressing buttons and pulling levers results in something happening – namely, me having fun.  Number three: Make the floor less flat and more bumpy and hilly for that adventure feeling.  Number four: Free Steak’ums and Pepsi with admission.  Number five: log flume ride.

So I encourage you to visit museums. While you are there, be sure to sign my petition requesting the above recemmendations be enacted asap.

The heaviest thing we moved was actually an item of our new neighbors’. They’d bought a used, vintage jukebox that was up the first flight of the back stairwell. We arrived with our second truckload just in time to help finish hauling it up to the third floor. Now our neighbors have a jukebox and we have no furniture to sit on, which is O. Henry-style irony, because we obviously have the best dance floor in the building.

 While you’re surfing, stop by amazon or the link on this page or some other bookselling website and pick up Refresh, Refresh by Ben Percy. A short story collection not to be missed, friends.

 I would also like to sing the praises of my local speedway gas station. I’ve been patronizing almost daily for my fix of sweet cola tinctures and snack food treats. I’m going to visit before Monday Night Football starts. I love the fanfare that precedes the game; my own personal taste of Americana.

How? Come see Blind Stinkin at Donny’s Skybox Theater, Piper’s Alley, Chicago, IL… it’s there, that place, on Saturday night, last time 10/20, yeah. Or…

…listen to me on the radio-wave radio box. When? Sunday morning at 10am on Chicago Public Radio. What? Me reading a dumb piece for a show called Hello Beautiful. The name of the piece is Hello Beautiful, as per my orders. Since the show itself neglected the direct address comma, I also neglected it, so the meaning is changed, but nobody gives a shit about stuff like that except me and a handful of other like-minded dicks. If you don’t get Chicago Public Radio in your locale, you can hear it on their website at some point, maybe before 10/21, maybe after. Anyways, its at wbez.org. You now how to find your way around, right?