tavie.com

I suppose my humiliation wouldn't be complete until someone blasted it for everyone to see:

I beat Tavie at Scrabble! I BEAT TAVIE AT SCRABBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!! Woo HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

260 to 178!

Today, I RULE!

I will never get over this humiliating defeat. All I can think is, I lost some VERY important brain cells during my trip to Montreal. (Oh my god, they were RIGHT!)

Not only did she defeat me, but she kicked my ass. REALLY badly.

I've never felt such shame.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 8:02 PM | shower me with attention

Saturday, July 28, 2001

sarahsaid:

query: did any of you ever get around to burning a KITH tour2k slideshow music mix? just wond'rin...

I burned a few copies before my CD burner died. I think I might have one copy left somewhere in the bottom of a box.
I wish my CD burner lived.

Oh, Gina and I just got back from seeing Planet of the Apes, and it was so very terrible that I can't even post about it right now. It was just godAWFUL. More later.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:25 PM | shower me with attention

(Also, amusingly, I'm 56% compatible with Dave, which is actually 8% more compatible than Crissy is. Hee hee hee hee. Oh, biorhythms. Funny.)

Why are you in Tavie's head? 4:04 PM | shower me with attention

'Cause all the kids are doing it, I went and found my supposed best celebrity matches:

Tiger Woods 99%
Simon Rex 98%
Carson Daly 98%
Vince Carter 96%
Joey Fatone 95%

My response:

{small, tinny voice} But why? {/small, tinny voice}

I don't know who Simon Rex or Vince Carter are. I'm not a Carson Daly fan in any sense. I think Joey Fatone is a Backstreet Boy or something. And Tiger Woods has the most frightening teeth I've ever seen; plus, I hate sports, and I think golf looks boring.

So much for dating celebrities. I'll stick to dating no one for now.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 3:56 PM | shower me with attention

I'm at Mint Manor now, jiggety jog.
There's DSL here. My life is almost complete.

Has anyone else seen that magazine with Marky Mark on the cover and thought he looks like Patton's little brother? He does. He looks like he could be Patton Oswalt's brother. It's true, it is.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:23 AM | shower me with attention

Friday, July 27, 2001

Oh! Shit! Almost forgot!
24. The Newest Little McKinney has arrived, and it IS a girl! I don't quite know why we wanted it to be, but we all did. Emma Jane, such a pretty name, such happiness for such a nice family. +

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:26 PM | shower me with attention

Well. I've been away too long. Disney World was a blur next to the confusing mass of emotions (+ and -) that was Montreal. Time for a numbered list?

1. The Documentary. O my good sweet Jesus that was good. +
2. Getting tickets for Documentary involved calling people. Crissy + Himelfarb -
SURPRISINGLY, however, Himelfarb = not that scary. I felt like Jimmy James after, saying, "Bad Bart? I ain't afeared of him."
3. I spoke of this proudly after Scott's show one night, with Dave and Crissy. "We're all afraid of Himelfarb," he reassured me. +
4. Of course, later that night... - But I'm over it and have grown as a person. Honest. Honest I am.
5. Holy fuck! Scott's show! HOLY FUCK! +
6. I been eatin' good, whole trip. +
7. Of course, since I been home.... -
8. Oh the goils. +
9. Not have Gina present at these moments was very -.
10. MY MONKEY! MY MONKEY! MY MONKEY! +
11. Tired nights. Mistakes made. Wrong comedy show? Bad comedy? -
12. Rites of passage involving heroes. +
13. Naomi is so, so funny. I knew Ade and Kit were funny, but spending time with Naomi was a treat and a half. +
14. Good Mexican food. +
15. Nice buggy ride. +
16. Leftover sunburn. -
17. Industry events. -
18. Crissy, Crissy, Crissy. +
19. Bellini, Bellini, Bellini. +
20. Scott, Scott, Scott. +
21. Dave, Dave, Dave. + - +
22. Tired, tired, tired. -
23. Home, home, home. +

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:16 PM | shower me with attention

Thursday, July 12, 2001

Quickly:
Tonight I saw a screening of The Mists of Avalon at the Museum of Television and Radio. The hair and costumes alone made the film worthwhile. (I thought it was a very well done adaptation of the book.) The coolest thing was the free hard-cover copies they handed out after the show. Awesome.

Also:
Tomorrow I have a 6 am (oh boy) flight to Disney World. I probably won't have proper email or web access for the next two weeks. I'll be back on the 26th with tales of Montreal mayhem. Gazzizza!

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:25 PM | shower me with attention

Probably a few who read this remember Jess. She's a friend of mine that I met through the KITH and NewsRadio newsgroups. She hasn't posted in a long time and appears to many to have dropped away from online fandom, but I'm lucky enough to hear from the old fashioned way (snail mail) and through the occasional email. She's terribly bright and creative, and, like a disproportionate number of my friends and peers, suffers from depression and low-self esteem. She lives in Connecticut, which isn't that far from me, but I've only met her in "real life" a couple times. I miss her.

The thing about her is, as bad a gift-giver as I am, she is a great one. Her greatness equals my suckiness. She's sent me some extraordinarily wonderful gifts to me. (I don't think I've ever sent her anything. Maybe a dubbed video or something. Pathetic.) The last one was a home-made "Wrong Guy" mug, which, before I had a chance to drink from it, was tragically placed in the dishwasher by my well-meaning, bumbling old father. It was quite a terrible tragedy, and although Jess offered to replace it, I never mustered the energy to send the defaced mug back to her.

Guess what just arrived in the mail.

No, even better than a Wrong Guy mug. The Holy Grail.

The Ultimate Goal of every Newsradio fan is to own an official WNYX mug. These are extremely difficult to come by (hence their Holy Grail status), but Jess managed the next best thing. She's sent me her own version of the WNYX mug, a perfect blend of the "old style" first-season tan ones and the "new school" yellow-and-blacks. This one is pale yellow with a tan-and-black logo; inside the rim, in tan letters:

Gazzizh, good-looking!
Nothing quite like a cuppa joe to keep your feet
stinky all night, eh?
Enjoy the upstate prison flavour!

On the bottom of the mug in a cast photo of the WNYXicans, to be slowly revealed as I sip at the home-made instant cappuccino from the canister that Jess thoughtfully provided.

The crowning touch is the "warning" on the underside of the mug: (c) A Walking Technical Difficulty,
Ltd. Please do not put me in the dishwasher!

To which I can only add:

Dizamn!

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:23 PM | shower me with attention

Wednesday, July 11, 2001

There is no excuse for being 22.
21 is still sort of young-sounding, you know, it's okay if you're slacking because it's still so close to childhood, but 22, 22 is an adult. No excuses. There is no excuse for being 22.

Oh, well. Kirsten and I exchanged gifts last night, and she LOVED hers. Which is really cool, since I am a notoriously bad gift giver. She gave me a big blue bar of soap. A REALLY big blue bar of soap. It smells really good and she says it's from some designer boutique, but I still say she's trying to tell me something. ;) She says there's another gift on the way. Party, man. All I got her was the DVD. Graveyard of the Fireflies, the only anime movie I've really loved. Made me cry. We watched it in English last night just to see, and the English actors were BLOODY AWFUL. Japanese from now on if you please.

Wow, I have me some really good friends. Now, I'm going to go take a bath with my BIG BLUE BAR OF SOAP.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:45 PM | shower me with attention

Tuesday, July 10, 2001

Cheryl sent me WATER JOE!!!!!

I LOVE HER!!!!!

(I loved her anyway, but... WATER JOE!)

Why are you in Tavie's head? 8:07 PM | shower me with attention

Monday, July 09, 2001

Don't tell Linn I've been using her bathrobe.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:57 PM | shower me with attention

Uno: The FedEx guy never came. I'm home now. Gina was on hold with the FedEx people for half an hour. They hung up on her. First they get the wrong address, then they say they're coming today and I wait and wait and wait, and then they say they're coming at night and we both wait and wait and wait, and then they hang up on her. They won't even tell her WHEN the giant tv is coming, and she can't miss work and I can't be there to wait for it now. No one use FedEx, ever.

Dos: Tara-cookie is a doll and a doll plus a doll. Not only does she HappyBirthday me early, thus extending my birthday two days already, but she mentions the best commercial ever in the same entry. That commercial makes me miss Linn dreadfully; when she was a Mint Manor inmate the three of us would cheer whenever that commercial came on. It's even better than the one for the "lucky coin".

Tres: although I am not a Bjork Dork (lovingly, lovingly, appreciatively, lovingly said), Matt's mention of shower songs puts me in a pleasant frame of mind, and allows me to open up the question to all: What are your favourites? I, too, tend towards Aimee, and also Sondheim's "Into the Woods" (my favourite musical), and lately "The Wiz". Someone as white as me singing from the Musical With Soul is something to hear. Sometimes I do it as Julie Andrews just to spice things up.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:50 PM | shower me with attention

Something momentous happened yesterday. After much painful deliberation and soul-searching, I let Gina trim my hair.

She did a good job. Just a nibble. Less than an inch, only on the very bottom. Barely anything at all. It's the first pair of scissors I've let someone else take to my head in many, many years. I may let her trim it again one day. But only her. Trust no one!

It's so hot in here that my formerly nice clean hair is now something like a sweatmop. When will the FedEx guy get here so I can go upstairs and watch the Game Show network in air-conditioned peace?

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:58 PM | shower me with attention

Matt-duck, my sister loves Bjork. I myself am most intensely fond of Matt Besser's impression of Bjork.

I couldn't sleep much last night but I got up early to wait for the tile guy and the FedEx guy. The tile guy's come and gone but the FedEx guy has yet to arrive. It was the first time all summer I've forced myself to get up before I was ready and man, did it stink. But all for the love of a Big TV. (And the love of a Huggy Thuggy.

I'm seeing Kitana next week. Who's jealous?

And, I'm more fucked-up than all of you, Personality Disorder-wise. I consider it a point of pride.

Tomato stems are poisonous.

I was thinking: I go to college on the Upper East Side. It's not a terribly good college (my favourite description of it is erin's "what kind of ghetto school...??"--although it does its job, and there are some might fine folks there, and one of my favourite people in the world went there and she's a Goddess), but it is, ostensibly, in a good location.
It occurred to me today that there isn't a good coffee shop anywhere near it. Not even a Starbuck's. (Actually I think there is a Starbuck's a few blocks away, but I've never been.) There's an expensive little espresso bakery with no seats, and an overpriced Coronado a few blocks away, and a good coffee cart inside the building, but no good coffeehouse nearby for me to take my books and drown in latte and literature. It really makes me wish I'd tried a little harder, lived my life a little differently, gone to Columbia for keeps. There are a million good coffee places within two blocks of that fucking school, and a damn good coffee counter in the caf there.

It's all about the coffee, you see.

You college-bound chillunswith your eyes bright and your futures shiny and crisp and unpeed-upon, as you're shopping for your yet-to-be's, make sure to pay close attention to the availability of good coffee and a good place to drink it.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:47 PM | shower me with attention

Sunday, July 08, 2001

After reading Gleebs' entry, I went to take the Personality Disorder test myself. The results are not surprising:

Paranoid: Low
Schizoid: Low
Schizotypal: Moderate
Antisocial: Moderate
Borderline: Very High
Histrionic: High
Narcissistic: Moderate
Avoidant: Very High
Dependent: High
Obsessive-Compulsive: High

Wow, at least I'm not very highly dependent, and, surprisingly, only moderatelynarcisisstic. Good times.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:55 PM | shower me with attention

Saturday, July 07, 2001

Today we went to Petco to get some food for Riley and I wanted to get a little water reservoir for Progo because I don't trust Kirsten and Dad to sustain his life while Mom and I are in Disney World. So there are these little bowls, too small for him to climb into and poop in, with a bottle of water that gradually leaks into the bowl so there's always fresh H20. They didn't seem to be popular sellers because they were dirt cheap and, incidentally, full of dust. I did a very intelligent thing: I picked one up and blew the dust out of it, right into my eye.
Then my eye started watering and itching and swelled up. Gina became very Nannylike in her concern and had to keep ordering me not to rub it. The face around my eye grew all itchy and bumpy and I started sneezing. I think I probably had some sort of Poisoned Fairy Dust in there, or rocks or something. We drove over to the supermarket, raided the shelves, ripped open boxes of Visine, Benadryl and Kleenex until the problem was taken care of. An hour or two later I was all better, and Gina and I relaxed on our lounge chairs in the driveway with diet Cokes, books and rockin' good tunes.

The end.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:03 PM | shower me with attention

I was going to go home today, but I'm going to stay here until Monday so I can be here when they deliver Gina's new big tv. Yay!

Gina inches ever closer to beating me at Scrabble. Which is what makes playing with her so fun.

Gina and I have been addicted to The Sims. Dangerously addicted. It's so fun.

What else?

Disney World soon! Woo hoo!
22 soon. Eh.

Oh, this guy called about a typing job I'd applied for at this company that does translations of something or other. Of all the jobs I sent in resumes for, this is the one I wanted most, because it's just straight typing-- and not typing numbers, but words, glorious words. Mindless, menial typing. The guy seemed interested in me, but it's a full-time job, he said, and I said my classes this fall all start after 5:30. He said they usually work 'til 6. Oh nooooooooo. He said he'd speak to his manager about it and call me back.

Phooey, phooey, phooey. This working stuff's hard, especially when you don't have any. I clocked my typing speed recently at 119 wpm with 95% accuracy (at my fastest). This seems pretty good to me. Should not people be banging down my door? :P

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:21 PM | shower me with attention

Thursday, July 05, 2001

How amusing that Matt mentions the merits of Boston's fireworks display. Last night, Gina and I were watching the Brian Wilson special on TNT and she was antsy because she was missing the fireworks, but couldn't really motivate herself to get up and actually go to them, as they're quite a walk away. So I said, "Let's just go", and so we went. And it was pleasant indeed.

I whistled most of the score of 1776, which was on yesterday (and Gina didn't complain, bless her soul) as we walked. We decided we need to walk more. The fireworks were very nice. Pretty spectacular, actually. Anyhow, during the display, after a nice bout of appreciative silence, Gina suddenly turned to me and said, "I wonder what Matt is doing tonight. I wonder if he's watching the fireworks."

As for myself, I was lost in the music in my head (mostly "Golden Dream (Theme from the American Pavilion)" in EPCOT), and

I had some trouble with the goodbye
I checked my roman candle supply
and watched the vapor trail in the sky

which, for reasons known to some, made me wistful. But in an okay way. Not bad.

We came back after and ate an assload of taco salad.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:16 PM | shower me with attention

Wednesday, July 04, 2001

Still at Mint Manor. Been singing this a lot:

Today's the fourth of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
"What a waste of gunpowder and sky"

But I'm allowed to sing that. :P

Soon I'll be 22. Soon I'll be in Disney World. Soon I'll see Ade and Kit and Scott.

I woke up this morning thinking of past fourths of July. Some good ones. Two years ago Kirsten and I went to Williamsburg together. It was our first trip alone. A wonderful trip. And of course I thought of EPCOT's special 4th of July "Illuminations", which really is spectacular, dagnabbit. It is. They know what they're doing in the pyrotechnics department over there, I tells ya. Now, I wish I had a copy of 1776 here. We have it at home. At least a copy of the CD. Oh, well. It just means more singing. {g}

So that's today's memory lane
With all the pathos and pain
Another chapter in a book where the chapters are endless
and they're always the same
A verse, and a verse, and refrain...

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:59 AM | shower me with attention

Sunday, July 01, 2001

1. Thank you Tara! Now if only I can remember to tape it. Someone remind me to tape it?

2. I saw Matt Besser's show, "May I Help You, Dumbass?" at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre last night with Gina and erin and erin's dave and Kirsten and Erica. It was hilarious. I think I laughed pretty much nonstop. After that we saw the next show, "Feature Feature", in which a troupe of extremely funny people improvise two movies on the spot. It was an evening full of hilarity. I highly recommend it. If you can see anything with Matt Besser in it, do it.

3. Canada Day was a bust. I think I'll make up for it by going to Canada in two weeks.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:18 PM | shower me with attention

Happy Canada Day, you hosers.

Five years ago today I saw Paul Bellini perform in honour of Pride Day, and Canada Day, I guess. I don't really remember, it was five years ago. What I do remember is that Bellini was weird and wonderful.

One year ago today I saw Tragically Hip in Central Park and met Captain Canada.

Today, I am sweaty and will watch Jacob Two Two and the Hooded Fang, featuring Mark.

Good times, eh?

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:25 PM | shower me with attention