DIVA

I've been TOtaLLY in diva-listening mode lately (musical theater AND mainstream radio) and was listening to Bernadette Peters the other day and was like "how old is she/what does she look like now?"  The answer is 64/THIS. Cray Zee. She's aged like 4 years during the course of my entire life (using Annie as a starting point, naturally).

meta-concerns

Today one of my friends was talking about how they were really excited because they are going to Burning Man for the second time next week, and they were all "dude, you have to experience it at least once in your life, it's like nothing you've ever seen or done!" And I started thinking about it, and how I probably will go one year just to see what's up and say that I did in fact go back when I was young and reckless (even though i'm slowly realizing that people like me are never young, not one day in their entire lives).

It was at the point that I realized something--I don't ever participate in anything. Ever. Even when I am technically "participating", I am always there as an outsider, and an observer. I remember in girlscouts, sitting on the periphery wondering what everyone found so fucking fascinating about the pet rocks that we were painting. Don't get me wrong, I was painting one, but I was really interested in the weird activity in which we were participating from a sort of anthropologic point of view. And i was like, 6 or something. I can watch someone totally engrossed in something, lost in their own world, oblivious to the observation and judgement of others, but I have never been able to actually emulate that person in any real way. I envy them.

Anyway, this is my first memory of this particular state of being, but it has totally permeated my life since then. From everything, from sitting in the student section at football games, to wandering around people-watching at LEAF year after year, to sneaking peaks at fans during concerts, to the very culture in which I grew up and spent the first 23 years of my life immersed--I will participate, but only in the most marginal way possible. I can't turn off the observer, and sometimes she drives up the fucking wall. She makes me feel like I am actually watching my life passing me by, even as I am simultaneously living it.

Gym

I wore this outfit to the gym today without once stopping to consider that I might look like the adult version of those five year old girls who want to dress in flowered stretch pants, a tutu, and a tiara every day

i hate facebook

I am facebook friends with a girl who posted a 5 paragraph status yesterday with the following events in their correct order of apparent importance: 1. an accident in which her daughter fell off the porch and bumped her head at grandma's house 2. her kindergartener's first day of school 3. the violent shooting murder of her brother's best friend and the friend's father by their next door neighbor, evidently instigated by mutual dislike of one another's dogs. I'm not kidding. This girl is self-centered, dramatic, and awful. And I don't even know her. I think she was my sister's classmate in elementary school or something like that. So facebook has basically required me to take a unwanted journey into this girl's festering id, a girl who I would otherwise probably never see or talk to again for my entire life. Something must be done.