"Don't just pussyfoot around and sit on your assets..."

Sooooooooo how about, I just got off the phone with Muse for the first time in roughly forever (which, of course, for eternal beings like Muses is really not much time at all, but that doesn't mean we didn't miss each other terribly :-P) It was highly exciting especially because she let me in on a nice little secret........a secret which I can't share too much detail of but it's plenty exciting.

So, my further work drama......
So, when I left work Saturday I printed my schedule like I always do. It said very neatly (and I'm reading this off the paper as I type this):

Shift # of Hours
Sat 9/29 12:00p-05:00p 5.00
Sun 9/30
Mon 10/01
Tue 10/02
Wed 10/03
Thu 10/04
Fri 10/05 05:00p-11:00p 6.00
Sat 10/06 05:00p-10:00p 5.00

So imagine my surprise when I emerged from my Sunday night rehearsal to find a very nice voicemail....
"Hi Graham, this is Alyssa from Abercrombie. I'm just calling to confirm your shift tomorrow from 11 to 4."
And of course, it's 11pm, way too late to call anyone at the store on a Sunday (the mall closes early on Sundays).
So, the next morning at 8:30, while I'm on my way to class I call and who answers but our store manager. Now, I want to clarify first: I love my store manager as a person, but as a manager I really want her to eat shit and die.
Anyways, she answers and I say "Hi, it's Graham. I've got a question. See, I printed my schedule and it says I'm not working until Friday but Alyssa left me a voice mail saying I work today at 11. Which is it?"
"We need you to come in today," she tells me.
Okay, you stupid little bint, I plan my week around three things: class, rehearsal and the schedule that I print on Saturdays. Do not change it after Saturday! "No," I said.
To her credit, she was good. "You can't?"
Actually, yes, I could have worked it out. I just didn't want to deal with her. "No, I can't."
She sighs. That sigh where she's mulling over if she's going to have to write me up or not. I don't know what she decided but she said "Okay."
I replied with a cheerful "Bye!"
And she hung up.

"No matter how cloudy the sky gets, the sun always comes back out." -Jesse

I was writing a Pretty Person of the Week about Matt Damon but...

I realized I missed a very important date. And in some ways that's good. But in other ways it's not so much.
I feel kinda like an asshat for missing this. But it's alright. Muse was late too. Only six days but that's beside the point. The point is we had the same excuse: we were living, which is what Jessee wants us to do. We weren't spending the day grieving for her, which I'm sure is exactly what she didn't want.

We weren't grieving, but we remembered her. As we do every day. The most important part though? We weren't thinking of her tragic passing, we were thinking about the lessons she taught us while she was alive.

Oh shit, now I'm teary eyed. It's been like three sentences! Those waterworks...can't get a break...

I think the biggest regret I have about June 13 this year isn't that I didn't write about her. It's that I didn't log onto Utopia Skye or Yahoo! Messenger at all. Utopia Skye was the online community that she, Muse, and I (and several others) formed out of our shared addiction -- however geeky -- of MMORPGs. I should have seen that everyone else she knew and loved was doing the same. More than that, I should have sent an IM to Al, her fiance. He's a strong guy, but I know how much he appreciates the support we give.

Now, I'm sure some of you remember the last time I talked about Jessee. I won't repeat that story. I have one to share...I just adore telling it.

As I said, she and I were sick at the same time and we helped each other through our rougher days. We had a lot of ways we cooked up of escaping reality and just being happy, free, fun-loving people living life when in fact both of us were very very sick and death was really a tangible thing for both of us. We had different approaches to dealing when we were apart -- she tried to make a difference in the world with the time she had left (and she succeeded) while telling us about what fun things she would do when she got better (some of which she did despite not getting better), and I pretended like I was immortal and this was just a stumbling block (which turned out to be true).

We learned quickly that this morbid fact was not the only thing we had in common. We had friends in common, online anyways. We had our online games in common. Most importantly, we had dessert in common.
We frequently talked about life -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.
More often than not, we went on adventures. We would create stories about she and myself in our desperate search for the perfect cake. Thus was born the adventures of Jessee the Cake Bandit!!!
Yes, it sounds weird, but remember: both of us were ridiculously heavily medicated pretty much all of the time. It explains a lot.
Of course, such adventures were sometimes too good not to post on the Utopia Skye forums...so they are preserved for all. I was going to post one such adventure, but I can't decide which to do....
There was the PB&J fiasco -- one of many where we actually were rivals.
Or there's the entire episode of the thread on the forums that had no topic.
And there was the time we went shopping for new bodies...
And when we tried to go an adventure, but couldn't think of any ideas which led to an adventure in and of itself....
Or the time Jessee tried to get me to play There which was kind of a disaster -- at least for the elephant.
Then there was that time Jessee accidentally got me abducted by evil aliens.
And when Jessee thought my birthday was on June 7th....which was actually good because she got to say happy birthday and she didn't get to say it on the real day. :(
And there was that epic battle of me vs. Jessee over the waffles, a battle which ultimately cost Aunt Jemima and Little Debby their freedom.
And we can never forget that time we made a fairy tale...The King Who Lost His Emu. A classic.

I'm gonna let you guys decide which story you want me to share.

Anyways, there's some pictures that Jessee drew scattered throughout this post. Yahoo! Messenger has a Doodle thing....she loved it. :)
And some other significant pictures too.

She always told Muse (and later on, myself and our friend Tony) about this beach she would dream of, where she still had her long beautiful hair that had been ravaged by her chemotherapy. She was so peaceful there, it was her favorite place to go.
Of course, it wasn't a physical place, it was a fantasy dream world....a nice little paradise to escape to. I know that's where she is now, and she's probably brushing her hair, and eating cake, ice cream, donuts, pie, PB&J sandwiches (the way my mother makes them, not hers! :-P) and drinking soda (not pop!) and milk with cookies -- all without gaining any weight. I hope she's also getting a nice swim in between bites (cause I know she doesn't have to wait to swim at this beach, what's the paradise in that??)!

PS Muse, I'm sure everyone would love to celebrate any number of things when the radio is running for MuseCon this year, I hope Spider's recovery will be primary among them. :)

Across the Wires

Warning: Parts of this post are probably going to be super emotional. I might even cry...but keep that on the down-low for me. :-P
Also, I'm really Attention Deficit today.

Today, and yesterday, there was a rumble going on in this particular niche of the blog-o-sphere that I seem to have placed myself in. It's a very comfortable niche, I have to say. If it were a room, we'd have expensive, cushy leather couches, I think.
Anyways, the point is...there was a rumble. That's my word for -- no, not for a gang fight, that's West Side Story -- for an event everyone talks about. You know how when everyone is whispering to each other in one place and you don't know what they're saying (yet) it's kind of this rumbling noise caused by the voices? That's why I call it a "rumble".

I've lived through a lot of rumbles. Oddly enough, I usually have a feeling that a rumbling is going on before I hear anything about it. I mean, just for instance, the night of Station Nightclub Fire -- probably the biggest tragedy to happen in Rhode Island in...well, possibly ever, was a definite rumble for months afterwards. The night it happened I couldn't sleep, so I went downstairs to get a drink and discovered my dad had turned on the news. It was about 11:00. He and I watched the news for another 10 minutes, discussing our mutual inability to sleep even though we both had to be up at 6 the next morning (I can't for the life of me remember why). At about 11:10 the news switched to live coverage of the fire.
"Oh," I said, "I wonder if that's why we couldn't sleep."
As it turns out, we weren't unique. From the people I talked to about it, it seems like most of Rhode Island couldn't sleep that night.

Anyways, enough of my off-topic story telling. The blog-o-sphere has had a rumble. And when I logged onto Blogger yesterday, before I opened anyone's blogs, I had that sort of feeling. I've had it before, you know. When someone you know isn't totally alright and you know you're about to find out. You've had that nagging feeling all day, and you know you're about to find out because the feeling just jumped from the back of your mind to the point where you can't think of anything else.
So I went down my blogroll. It didn't take long before I found out who it was. Everybody who's reading this, please keep Spider in your thoughts and prayers.
(I particularly like this spider in this picture because, yes, it's still a spider, but it's actually not ugly.)
Anyways, I've read about this event in Spider's life on, I think, four blogs (five counting this one...) and each one has had tons of comments from other bloggers, many of whom I can only assume are talking about it on their blogs which I haven't read.

It reminds of me of something. I bet Muse is already thinking of it. The episode I'm about to tell you of probably had an even bigger effect on her than it did me. It's a lot more serious than what happened to Spider (not that I'm minimalizing what Spider's going through, I'm really not!)
See, the moral of this event I'm about to describe is that the people we talk to online, even though we've never met them, have a profound effect on our lives. And we, in turn, have a profound effect on them. Even though we've never seen each other face-to-face, we are friends, acquaintences, and in some cases enemies in a very real sense.
And much like the real world, it can sometimes take something unfortunate to prove that. The number of people pulling for Spider right now seems to support this idea too.

Anyways, this story will bring together everything that I've talk about in this post. I promise.
See, the online community Utopia Skye (which used to be much more active, and which I used to be much more active in when I had more free times) began in the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs). And, as sort of silly as a ton of people think it is, our starting point was in the game The Sims Online (TSO).
As an aside, I'd like to point out that when I played the most was during my Crohn's flare ups and I couldn't move and stress made the pain worse, so I'm forgiven from the extreme dorkiness of playing a MMORPG where you don't kill things. :-P
Back to the story though...one of the members of the Utopia Skye community, and a fellow player of TSO went by the name of Jessee (or Jessi). She was terrible at typing and, at first, annoyed the hell out of me because she just couldn't type anything right sometimes. She grew on me though, and she was always giving me advice and words of wisdom and so on and so forth. She was also always a lot of fun...like in this picture where our friend Tony trapped Jessee on the toilet? Or the one below, where Jessee is cheating at pool? Yeah, amazing. Good times, good times.
So one Thursday I had that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I was talking about earlier. I went through the whole day without hearing anything. I got home from school, hopped online and found out immediately what was going on.
Jessee, as it turned out, had only told a few of us (not including myself, unfortunately) that she had cancer. That day she had gone into a coma. I was told that the doctors weren't sure whether or not she'd come out of it. (And here come the tears...geez.)
Her fiancee came online from her hospital room and let Utopia Skye know. At the time, Utopia Skye also had an Internet radio station so we did a two day long radio broadcast in honor of Jessee, and her fiancee played the whole thing in her room. Her family was there too. We all listened, we all posted our well-wishes.
She was back to us by the end of the weekend. Later she told me that she could hear the whole thing, although it sounded like it was underwater.

There's so many more stories about Jessee and so much more to say buttt, we'll save those for other days.
The point is, the way everyone is pulling for Spider in his time of need right now, despite the fact that most of us have never met him, reminded me of that. I mean, like I said, it's not as serious. Spider's still awake, and cheery from what I've been hearing (which is great!) and if we were to do a radio broadcast for him* (and he had a computer with him in his hospital room) he'd hear it like everyone else would.

*Hi, that's not a bad idea. Anybody or able to afford a radio station?

"Forget what we're told, before we get too old..."

And just think, if I owned a camera I could have that very same picture!

That's right, today I was in the gay area of Philadelphia. For about an hour. That's like a fifth of the time we spent getting to and from Philly, but oh well.

Well, let's start from the beginning because it was a busy day. First my alarm went off. I stumbled over to it and hit "snooze". Next thing I know I'm waking up again. So I lie awake for a second and then the alarm goes off again. So I went over and turned it off.

So, later on I head off to breakfast. I get there, I eat, nothing special. On the way to my car, I run into my friend Elyse. We begin to chat, most specifically about our romantic lives. She tells me she's heard that people saw Anthony making out with someone other than me at a party on Friday night. Okay, so I know he did that, he told me so I was cool with it. But at this point, that means there's a rumor going around school that I'm being cheated on. How do I nip that in the bud? Well, easy way is the same easy way to deal with his trust issues -- dump him. But I kinda don't want to.

Anyways, that's neither here nor there.
There was an Eagles game tonight. You know what that means? THREE HOURS FROM LANCASTER TO PHILLY! Justin, Danny, and I were not pleased. But getting there made up for it, that's for sure! The streets were filled with music, laughter, happiness, the occassional lesbian catfight (okay, one, and the bitches nearly landed on me :-P). Full of life and vibrance.

Also there were haters, drag queens, and the occassional person dressed as a zombie or a Pacific Island cannibal...but what can ya do? :-P

So, we zooooooooooomed back to Etown so I could be in time for auditions. You see, I'm directing a one act play in our one act festival. Unfortunately, I was still late. Fortunately, my stage manager Keith was there. He is such a life saver.

Anyways.......a whole lot's gone on since I started this post. And now I have four hours between now and my first class of the week........so I'll relate it all later.

In the meantime, my thoughts and prayers are going out to my Muse, my friend Matt in Massachusetts, and Pete Ross. May your days get brighter.