"drawing is supposed to be fun! that's why we give cartoonists lithium."
Busy, busy weekend, internet. So busy. Oh god.
So, some of you may have noticed that I've been, um, how should I put this? A crazy homicidal lunatic for the past week. Er, I'm sorry. Real life stress and internet stress and Unpopular Opinions and my general ~*basketcaseness*~ all conspired against me. But this weekend I did all sorts of things entirely offline and it was great and I feel better and hopefully I won't actually kill anyone now.
Friday I had a meeting in Worcester and had to come back to the office after. The meeting was fine, the usual boring stuff, and the two hours I had to spend at the office after were also fine, as a half hour of it was lunch and a disproportionately large part of it was brilligspoons, her boss, and me making fun of the website of an acquaintance of Doug's. After work, though, I picked up mcwonthelottery and we drove up to Salisbury to see Dar William play at the Blue Ocean Music Hall.
The drive up was a nightmare, not that we expected anything less at five pm on a Friday, but it was a double nightmare because I had been wearing my galoshes and discovered I couldn't really drive in them. I had shoes in my purse, but they were the heels I had worn to the meeting/work, and I can't drive in heels either. Normally I just drive without shoes in that situation, but it was raining like hell and the wet and the grit on the floor of the driver's seat was making it difficult to drive in pantyhose. Eventually I just put my jacket on the floor and I was okay, but it was ~*an experience*~.
The venue had some food, but NO FRENCH FRIES, which was a crime against humanity. The waiter didn't go out to a diner and get us french fries after we psychically requested them, either, so that's just poor service. Also, there were no magically appearing giant gin and tonics. Really, a failure all around. While waiting for the show to begin (and during intermission) we:
a) Decided that The One They Push Off Things grows up and becomes Adam Savage
b) Irish is an STD that spread through the mansion like wildfire. ("I don't know how The Other Blue One would get the Irish. I don't want to think about [him fucking Erik.]" "Well, if Erik fucked The Blue One and then The Blue One fucked The Other Blue One, he could have gotten it that way." "I can't believe that sentence exists.")
c) We talked extensively about how Thomas Gibson would be drunkenly cheering on "Buzzer," Dar's song about the Milgram Experiments. Then we wrote some more of his Aladdin/Milgram Experiments/Stonehenge Apocalypse crossover.
Look, it was a very creative experience.
(I am constantly extremely curious about strangers around us in public. We keep up a pretty steady banter of inside jokes and nonsense no matter where we are, frequently laughing hysterically at our own wit. I mean everywhere. I mean...grocery shopping, concerts, bookstores, Michael's, family gatherings, parties, sitting in our living room after work...we apparently don't have off switches. I imagine we either look certifiable or just very happy most of the time.)
Anyway. The concert was great. Dar is just...the best and the cutest and I love her so much. For those of you ~*new to my journal*~, Dar Williams is a person whose music means a lot to me and has for a very long time. I have a lot of personal feelings tied up in a great many of her songs. I don't think I've ever been to a show of hers and not cried at least once. It's hard to explain, but I'm sure you have musicians like that, so I'm sure you get it.
Set List:
Spring Street
Beauty of the Rain
The Easy Way
If I Wrote You
Buzzer
The Hudson*
Teen For God
The One Who Knows
New Song: I Have Been Around the World
The Ocean**
New Song: This Earth***
You're Aging Well****
Are You Out There
Midnight Radio
As Cool As I Am
The Babysitter
You Rise and Meet the Day
* I have heard "The Hudson" at every gig I've been to since she wrote it, I think. It's a song that I like, but there are so many of her songs that I love that I've never heard live, that I've started becoming resentful of it. The reason I've heard it so constantly is that all but two of the Dar shows I've been to have been in the NY/NJ metro area, and it's obviously a song about that region. I saw her in Virginia and she had a friend at the show who requested it, so she played it. She played it Friday night too, and when she started telling a song about Pete Seeger I knew she was going to play it. However, being in a state of missing New York, such as I am, and having just written a fic whose title was cribbed from that song, I ended up tearing up and being really glad to hear it and really glad she played it.
** Possibly because she also played this song. Guys. This song. I can't even explain to you why I love "The Ocean" so much, but I do and I'd never heard it and when she started to play it, I may have freaked out a little. Oh my god. I still can't believe she played it. It was beautiful.
*** Reason #23904890 I love Dar Williams: She told an elaborate story about having a favorite god and writing a song about Hermes and then said, "And I thought, 'While I'm writing it, I might as well write a whole album of songs about gods. Because you know what would really sell? An album full of songs about Greek gods.' And then I thought, 'But I'll have to skip some, because you just can't write a song about some of them. Like Hephaestus, god of volcanoes and the forge. And he was kind of grotesque, but he was married to the most beautiful of the gods, and she didn't like that, so she had this affair with the god of war and Hephaestus would just make her things and--oh. Maybe that would be a good song.'" Welcome to my thought process, ladies and gentlemen.
**** This was another amazing surprise. I love this song so much, guys, and it's off her first album and I NEVER IMAGINED I WOULD HEAR IT LIVE and then I did and everything was amazing oh my god.
So, it looks like she has a new album coming out next year! And it will be exciting! And I'm sure she will tour and when she does, you should totes go see her, guys! She's amazing ♥
***
Saturday morning I got up painfully early for Boston Book Fest. The number one thing that I wanted to do was see Mo Willems' kids' keynote address, which was at 10:45 and, in theory, I was going to meet brilligspoons for coffee before that. I had done a lot of research on the cheapest place to park in the Back Bay area, but the thing I had neglected to do was check the BookFest website, where I would have learned that there was Fest-specific parking for $10. Whoops.
Anyway, I got there are a little after 10 and Margaret had a late start, so I went right to the event. I asked the woman at the door if I could bring coffee in and she said no and implied I probably wanted to get on line to get a seat. So I did. Forgoing coffee. Luckily, Mo was awesome enough to keep me awake.
So, the seats each had Happy Pig Day! pig ears and a box of crayons and some paper. He was introduced and came out and posed for some pictures with Elephant and PIggie and then asked everyone to put their cameras away. "Hold up your cameras. Now put the camera away. Now you have a free hand, right? Use that hand to take the hand of your child or the friend you came with. I want you to experience this, not record it." It was very sweet.
Dude was seriously funny. He read The Pigeon Wants a Puppy and essentially acted the book out, which is something I always did (on a lesser scale) when reading his books. He had a powerpoint with all the pages set up, but the projector fucked up leaving this weird inverse color shadow of the endpages stuck on the projector. Mo made some jokes about being at a rave and making sure we all "took our pills" to get the full experience and then, when they switched to the live feed again and the shadow was still there, he danced around and made a Doctor Who joke XD
Eventually, it worked and he got through the rest of the book. Then he taught us how to "infringe on his copyright" and had everyone pull out their crayons and paper and taught us how to draw the Pigeon.
"Where you put the dot of his eye is important. If it's up here, he's sassy. If it's down here, he's sad. We're gonna put it right in the middle because he just watched that slideshow and he's freaking out."
"This last shape is one I invented. I call it a circangle. A circle had a mid-life crisis and decided to be a triangle. It looks kind of like an ice cream cone, and that's nice. But it's on the ground, and that's sad. And there's a pigeon head growing out of it, and that's just weird."
He also read Happy Pig Day and it was pretty great and the panel wound down and he went off to sign shit. I stayed and watched the Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! cartoon, which was a mistake, because by the time I got down there the line was huge and I had a caffeine headache and was just as whiny and twitchy as the children in line. I did eventually get my book signed, however, and told him how awesome he was and then immediately made a beeline for coffee.
I wandered a bit and bought some books and chatted with the people at 826 Boston and talked to a woman about the Elephant and PIggie books and played a lot of Bejewled. When brilligspoons and sky_was_green got out of their panel, we met up at Starbucks and had lunch. sillyg joined us. We chatted for a bit while drinking more coffee and then Karen and Rachael went to panels and Margaret and I went to track down Kate Beaton's book and wait on line for her signing. The girls behind us were dipshits who we sort of half-listened to while working on our exquisite corpse fic and generally fangirling. Kate was lovely and signed our books and drew TR in mine and listened to me chatter on about TR's life and love of books and Sagamore Hill and his childhood home and all sorts of things that I'm sure she didn't care about, but she was sweet.
After that, I stopped at the Small Beer Press booth just in time to see Kelly Link, who was on her way back from something else. She signed the book I bought and the book I brought and confirmed that "Magic for Beginners" is a love letter to fan culture and complimented my Pig Day ears. Holly Black was there too, but I didn't have any more money to buy her book and I didn't bring any of the ones I already owned, so I didn't say anything. But we took our books to meet up with Karen in the line for "Far Out Fiction," the last panel we were planning for the day.
The panel was...interesting. Chuck Klosterman was hilarious in the talk he gave before his reading but the reading itself was eh. Gregory Maguire, whose work I'm not a huge fan of, was pretty good. Kate was funny, but sort of not super well planned and her slides weren't really big enough for us to read her comics. The girl who went last was just... really not that interesting and her story wasn't super interesting either. Oh well.
Overall, Book Fest was interesting, but not super well-run. It needs the kinks to be ironed out, still, and there really wasn't a great representation of kids' or YA stuff. A lot of the kids' and YA panels were running opposite of each other, which was tiresome, and there were almost no kids' or YA vendors on hand. Lame. I mean, mostly because that's my major literary interest, so there wasn't so much for me to do or see. I'd consider going back next year, depending on who the panelists are.
We left from there to pick up the car (with a coffee stop on the way) and then drove over to the Friendly's in Charlestown.
Or tried to.
Guys, that Friendly's is already closed. It's awful. When we drove up it was just like that episode of Parks and Rec where Leslie and Ron go to Indianapolis and Ron's favorite steak restaurant is closed. Like, legit, we were like, "MAYBE THE OUTSIDE LIGHTS ARE BROKEN. MAYBE IF WE DRIVE AROUND TO THE FRONT, IT WILL BE OPEN!" We were SO BUMMED. Especially since we were planning on meeting everyone else there. We went to the 99 in the same plaza instead, and while it had okay french fries, there was no grilled cheese or milkshakes. EVERYTHING WAS THE WORST.
mayatawi met us there and I went on an exciting parking lot expedition to find >, but then the group was together and we loaded into the car to drive to the Haunted Thing.
Now, the Haunted Thing that I am used to is a Field of Terror in the middle of rural New Jersey. It is literally a field in the middle of no where with a barn converted into a haunted house, a haunted corn maze, and a haunted hayride. There is a food truck. That is about it.
This place was... yikes. It was at a ski lodge? And there were carnival rides and midway games and all this shit. I was seriously not impressed. I also wasn't impressed with the drunk assholes in line behind us at the hayride. Luckily, they got bored waiting and left (after I offered a demon priest five bucks to kill them) after a bit. Hurrah!
The hayride was the longest wait and it wasn't actually a hayride. This was particularly notable as it claimed to be the only haunted hayride in Massachusetts, yet there was no hay involved. It was a haunted flatbed truck ride. Still, suitably scary and fun. We did the Haunted Maze next, which was recommended to us by a helpful devil. Somehow Kelsey and I ended up in front, inching by very slowly and reluctantly and screaming ourselves hoarse. Or maybe that was just me. I screamed a lot, and I should probably apologize to <lj user= for temporarily deafening her.
We took a break for caffeine and foodstuffs after that. Kelsey was our hero when she bought a turkey leg. Karen did not kill the dude on the midway calling out for people to play his water gun game. We talked Margaret out of her horrified, frozen stupor. And then finished up with the haunted house. That one was super short, but well done. The scary human dolls were particularly awesome. That one, according to Karen, was like a Margaret-powered ride, as Margaret was behind her and propelling her forwarded consistently without her say.
All in all, despite my misgivings at the start, I enjoyed myself and it was worth the price. I had fun hanging out with the whole group, so thanks to littledust, brilligspoons, sky_was_green, and mayatawi for indulging me and letting me drag you along! We'll have to do it again some time. Let's heckle a Christmas village!
I dropped everyone off at their houses and Kelsey and Margaret sort of talked me into maybe doing a thing, and then came home and collapsed into bed. I had wanted to go to Panera to write today, but instead we went grocery shopping and now I am pretty much done with moving. I don't even want to get up to make myself dinner, to be honest. Maybe I will have Cheerios. And then read some of Kate Beaton's book. And then maybe try and work on the Moira and Chuck fic.
WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
So, some of you may have noticed that I've been, um, how should I put this? A crazy homicidal lunatic for the past week. Er, I'm sorry. Real life stress and internet stress and Unpopular Opinions and my general ~*basketcaseness*~ all conspired against me. But this weekend I did all sorts of things entirely offline and it was great and I feel better and hopefully I won't actually kill anyone now.
Friday I had a meeting in Worcester and had to come back to the office after. The meeting was fine, the usual boring stuff, and the two hours I had to spend at the office after were also fine, as a half hour of it was lunch and a disproportionately large part of it was brilligspoons, her boss, and me making fun of the website of an acquaintance of Doug's. After work, though, I picked up mcwonthelottery and we drove up to Salisbury to see Dar William play at the Blue Ocean Music Hall.
The drive up was a nightmare, not that we expected anything less at five pm on a Friday, but it was a double nightmare because I had been wearing my galoshes and discovered I couldn't really drive in them. I had shoes in my purse, but they were the heels I had worn to the meeting/work, and I can't drive in heels either. Normally I just drive without shoes in that situation, but it was raining like hell and the wet and the grit on the floor of the driver's seat was making it difficult to drive in pantyhose. Eventually I just put my jacket on the floor and I was okay, but it was ~*an experience*~.
The venue had some food, but NO FRENCH FRIES, which was a crime against humanity. The waiter didn't go out to a diner and get us french fries after we psychically requested them, either, so that's just poor service. Also, there were no magically appearing giant gin and tonics. Really, a failure all around. While waiting for the show to begin (and during intermission) we:
a) Decided that The One They Push Off Things grows up and becomes Adam Savage
b) Irish is an STD that spread through the mansion like wildfire. ("I don't know how The Other Blue One would get the Irish. I don't want to think about [him fucking Erik.]" "Well, if Erik fucked The Blue One and then The Blue One fucked The Other Blue One, he could have gotten it that way." "I can't believe that sentence exists.")
c) We talked extensively about how Thomas Gibson would be drunkenly cheering on "Buzzer," Dar's song about the Milgram Experiments. Then we wrote some more of his Aladdin/Milgram Experiments/Stonehenge Apocalypse crossover.
Look, it was a very creative experience.
(I am constantly extremely curious about strangers around us in public. We keep up a pretty steady banter of inside jokes and nonsense no matter where we are, frequently laughing hysterically at our own wit. I mean everywhere. I mean...grocery shopping, concerts, bookstores, Michael's, family gatherings, parties, sitting in our living room after work...we apparently don't have off switches. I imagine we either look certifiable or just very happy most of the time.)
Anyway. The concert was great. Dar is just...the best and the cutest and I love her so much. For those of you ~*new to my journal*~, Dar Williams is a person whose music means a lot to me and has for a very long time. I have a lot of personal feelings tied up in a great many of her songs. I don't think I've ever been to a show of hers and not cried at least once. It's hard to explain, but I'm sure you have musicians like that, so I'm sure you get it.
Set List:
Spring Street
Beauty of the Rain
The Easy Way
If I Wrote You
Buzzer
The Hudson*
Teen For God
The One Who Knows
New Song: I Have Been Around the World
The Ocean**
New Song: This Earth***
You're Aging Well****
Are You Out There
Midnight Radio
As Cool As I Am
The Babysitter
You Rise and Meet the Day
* I have heard "The Hudson" at every gig I've been to since she wrote it, I think. It's a song that I like, but there are so many of her songs that I love that I've never heard live, that I've started becoming resentful of it. The reason I've heard it so constantly is that all but two of the Dar shows I've been to have been in the NY/NJ metro area, and it's obviously a song about that region. I saw her in Virginia and she had a friend at the show who requested it, so she played it. She played it Friday night too, and when she started telling a song about Pete Seeger I knew she was going to play it. However, being in a state of missing New York, such as I am, and having just written a fic whose title was cribbed from that song, I ended up tearing up and being really glad to hear it and really glad she played it.
** Possibly because she also played this song. Guys. This song. I can't even explain to you why I love "The Ocean" so much, but I do and I'd never heard it and when she started to play it, I may have freaked out a little. Oh my god. I still can't believe she played it. It was beautiful.
*** Reason #23904890 I love Dar Williams: She told an elaborate story about having a favorite god and writing a song about Hermes and then said, "And I thought, 'While I'm writing it, I might as well write a whole album of songs about gods. Because you know what would really sell? An album full of songs about Greek gods.' And then I thought, 'But I'll have to skip some, because you just can't write a song about some of them. Like Hephaestus, god of volcanoes and the forge. And he was kind of grotesque, but he was married to the most beautiful of the gods, and she didn't like that, so she had this affair with the god of war and Hephaestus would just make her things and--oh. Maybe that would be a good song.'" Welcome to my thought process, ladies and gentlemen.
**** This was another amazing surprise. I love this song so much, guys, and it's off her first album and I NEVER IMAGINED I WOULD HEAR IT LIVE and then I did and everything was amazing oh my god.
So, it looks like she has a new album coming out next year! And it will be exciting! And I'm sure she will tour and when she does, you should totes go see her, guys! She's amazing ♥
***
Saturday morning I got up painfully early for Boston Book Fest. The number one thing that I wanted to do was see Mo Willems' kids' keynote address, which was at 10:45 and, in theory, I was going to meet brilligspoons for coffee before that. I had done a lot of research on the cheapest place to park in the Back Bay area, but the thing I had neglected to do was check the BookFest website, where I would have learned that there was Fest-specific parking for $10. Whoops.
Anyway, I got there are a little after 10 and Margaret had a late start, so I went right to the event. I asked the woman at the door if I could bring coffee in and she said no and implied I probably wanted to get on line to get a seat. So I did. Forgoing coffee. Luckily, Mo was awesome enough to keep me awake.
So, the seats each had Happy Pig Day! pig ears and a box of crayons and some paper. He was introduced and came out and posed for some pictures with Elephant and PIggie and then asked everyone to put their cameras away. "Hold up your cameras. Now put the camera away. Now you have a free hand, right? Use that hand to take the hand of your child or the friend you came with. I want you to experience this, not record it." It was very sweet.
Dude was seriously funny. He read The Pigeon Wants a Puppy and essentially acted the book out, which is something I always did (on a lesser scale) when reading his books. He had a powerpoint with all the pages set up, but the projector fucked up leaving this weird inverse color shadow of the endpages stuck on the projector. Mo made some jokes about being at a rave and making sure we all "took our pills" to get the full experience and then, when they switched to the live feed again and the shadow was still there, he danced around and made a Doctor Who joke XD
Eventually, it worked and he got through the rest of the book. Then he taught us how to "infringe on his copyright" and had everyone pull out their crayons and paper and taught us how to draw the Pigeon.
"Where you put the dot of his eye is important. If it's up here, he's sassy. If it's down here, he's sad. We're gonna put it right in the middle because he just watched that slideshow and he's freaking out."
"This last shape is one I invented. I call it a circangle. A circle had a mid-life crisis and decided to be a triangle. It looks kind of like an ice cream cone, and that's nice. But it's on the ground, and that's sad. And there's a pigeon head growing out of it, and that's just weird."
He also read Happy Pig Day and it was pretty great and the panel wound down and he went off to sign shit. I stayed and watched the Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! cartoon, which was a mistake, because by the time I got down there the line was huge and I had a caffeine headache and was just as whiny and twitchy as the children in line. I did eventually get my book signed, however, and told him how awesome he was and then immediately made a beeline for coffee.
I wandered a bit and bought some books and chatted with the people at 826 Boston and talked to a woman about the Elephant and PIggie books and played a lot of Bejewled. When brilligspoons and sky_was_green got out of their panel, we met up at Starbucks and had lunch. sillyg joined us. We chatted for a bit while drinking more coffee and then Karen and Rachael went to panels and Margaret and I went to track down Kate Beaton's book and wait on line for her signing. The girls behind us were dipshits who we sort of half-listened to while working on our exquisite corpse fic and generally fangirling. Kate was lovely and signed our books and drew TR in mine and listened to me chatter on about TR's life and love of books and Sagamore Hill and his childhood home and all sorts of things that I'm sure she didn't care about, but she was sweet.
After that, I stopped at the Small Beer Press booth just in time to see Kelly Link, who was on her way back from something else. She signed the book I bought and the book I brought and confirmed that "Magic for Beginners" is a love letter to fan culture and complimented my Pig Day ears. Holly Black was there too, but I didn't have any more money to buy her book and I didn't bring any of the ones I already owned, so I didn't say anything. But we took our books to meet up with Karen in the line for "Far Out Fiction," the last panel we were planning for the day.
The panel was...interesting. Chuck Klosterman was hilarious in the talk he gave before his reading but the reading itself was eh. Gregory Maguire, whose work I'm not a huge fan of, was pretty good. Kate was funny, but sort of not super well planned and her slides weren't really big enough for us to read her comics. The girl who went last was just... really not that interesting and her story wasn't super interesting either. Oh well.
Overall, Book Fest was interesting, but not super well-run. It needs the kinks to be ironed out, still, and there really wasn't a great representation of kids' or YA stuff. A lot of the kids' and YA panels were running opposite of each other, which was tiresome, and there were almost no kids' or YA vendors on hand. Lame. I mean, mostly because that's my major literary interest, so there wasn't so much for me to do or see. I'd consider going back next year, depending on who the panelists are.
We left from there to pick up the car (with a coffee stop on the way) and then drove over to the Friendly's in Charlestown.
Or tried to.
Guys, that Friendly's is already closed. It's awful. When we drove up it was just like that episode of Parks and Rec where Leslie and Ron go to Indianapolis and Ron's favorite steak restaurant is closed. Like, legit, we were like, "MAYBE THE OUTSIDE LIGHTS ARE BROKEN. MAYBE IF WE DRIVE AROUND TO THE FRONT, IT WILL BE OPEN!" We were SO BUMMED. Especially since we were planning on meeting everyone else there. We went to the 99 in the same plaza instead, and while it had okay french fries, there was no grilled cheese or milkshakes. EVERYTHING WAS THE WORST.
mayatawi met us there and I went on an exciting parking lot expedition to find >, but then the group was together and we loaded into the car to drive to the Haunted Thing.
Now, the Haunted Thing that I am used to is a Field of Terror in the middle of rural New Jersey. It is literally a field in the middle of no where with a barn converted into a haunted house, a haunted corn maze, and a haunted hayride. There is a food truck. That is about it.
This place was... yikes. It was at a ski lodge? And there were carnival rides and midway games and all this shit. I was seriously not impressed. I also wasn't impressed with the drunk assholes in line behind us at the hayride. Luckily, they got bored waiting and left (after I offered a demon priest five bucks to kill them) after a bit. Hurrah!
The hayride was the longest wait and it wasn't actually a hayride. This was particularly notable as it claimed to be the only haunted hayride in Massachusetts, yet there was no hay involved. It was a haunted flatbed truck ride. Still, suitably scary and fun. We did the Haunted Maze next, which was recommended to us by a helpful devil. Somehow Kelsey and I ended up in front, inching by very slowly and reluctantly and screaming ourselves hoarse. Or maybe that was just me. I screamed a lot, and I should probably apologize to <lj user= for temporarily deafening her.
We took a break for caffeine and foodstuffs after that. Kelsey was our hero when she bought a turkey leg. Karen did not kill the dude on the midway calling out for people to play his water gun game. We talked Margaret out of her horrified, frozen stupor. And then finished up with the haunted house. That one was super short, but well done. The scary human dolls were particularly awesome. That one, according to Karen, was like a Margaret-powered ride, as Margaret was behind her and propelling her forwarded consistently without her say.
All in all, despite my misgivings at the start, I enjoyed myself and it was worth the price. I had fun hanging out with the whole group, so thanks to littledust, brilligspoons, sky_was_green, and mayatawi for indulging me and letting me drag you along! We'll have to do it again some time. Let's heckle a Christmas village!
I dropped everyone off at their houses and Kelsey and Margaret sort of talked me into maybe doing a thing, and then came home and collapsed into bed. I had wanted to go to Panera to write today, but instead we went grocery shopping and now I am pretty much done with moving. I don't even want to get up to make myself dinner, to be honest. Maybe I will have Cheerios. And then read some of Kate Beaton's book. And then maybe try and work on the Moira and Chuck fic.
WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS.