The Quotidian Ones

Quotation of the Day/"Bling is Stoopit" Edition

"Beware of the "golden handcuffs." Beware of a profession that pays you so well in money that you enter into a lifestyle (house, cars, a great deal of stuff) that traps you. You may end up in a vicious cycle of trying to earn more in order to maintain the material things that give you less and less pleasure." , John December, on taking care of your money, in his eBook Live Simple

Quotation of the Day/"If You Can't Stand The Heat" Edition

"Funny always wins out. I always think that women who complain about people who say women aren't funny are probably not funny. Because, really, who gives a shit?" , Sarah Silverman in an interview with Jenelle Riley in Back Stage, the actor's newsweekly

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Blog! Scribble! Type! Go!

/ Get your juices going. Get the crap out of your head and onto the page/screen/sand.

To do it anytime is good. To do it often is great. To do it every day (to paraphrase Julia Cameron) is transformative.

What are you looking for?

I have gotten well, gotten happy, gotten love, gotten clarity. Writing is the reason, or one of the big ones.

Stop reading this right now. Go pick up a pen or a pencil or your keyboard and write about how reading this makes you feel, or about how it doesn't make you feel, or about anything you damn well feel like.

And prepare for your life to change.

xxx c

See more progress on: Write every day (posted spur-of-the-moment from 43 Things)

Quotation of the Day: c-trix mission statement edition

"People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new." , Daniel Quinn (from Beyond Civilization), via Dave Pollard's How to Save the World blog

Exchange of the Day: "Well, You Asked" Edition

"So...you still have that blog?""Uh-huh." "Yeah? How often do you post to it?" "I try to post twice a day. One post, one quotation. But today I didn't post." "How come?" "Uhhh.... Well, my boyfriend just got back from five days out of town." Beat. Beat. Beat. "We have some, um, catching up to do?" "Ah." Beat.

"So you'll send me that Crohn's information to pass on to my, "

"Yeah, yeah. Just shoot me an e-mail."

, part of an actual conversation the communicatrix had today at an audition with great actor and way-too nice guy, Clint Culp

Quotation of the Day: Share-Alike Edition

"Someone asked me recently, 'Meghann, how can you say you don't mind people reading parts of your book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?' "I replied, 'Well, it seems to be working for Jesus.'"

, author Meghann Marco, in a conversation with Jason Kottke, on why she has no problem with Google Print indexing her book

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Quotation of the Day: GFY Edition

"You're right! This is taking so much time away from my brain cancer research project! I hereby declare all arguments over and this website closed!" , Ryland Sanders, author of the blog A Boy And His Computer, responding to a comment questioning the sense in "wasting" time creating a review of a rotten movie BONUS "Great-Minds-Think-Alike" LINK! The communicatrix wastes her own high-value time trashing Elizabethtown in an uncannily similar fashion

You've got (A FRIEND IN) LinkedIn

The interweb is littered with the detritus of my greed and/or optimism: user names from quickly discarded affinity programs; the brokerage account I set up to score 50 MyPoints; ancient reviews I stubbornly refuse to take down from epinions because they are the last remnants of what used to be a useful tool created by a vital, interesting community before it was taken over by the twit parade and made an appropriate commodity for the likes of eBay. One of my long-lost doody deposits emailed me back the other day. I can't remember exactly why I signed up for LinkedIn, or, as I like to call it, that classmates-dot-com sibling who put 2,000 miles and a 4-year degree between it and the trailer park, but still isn't fooling anybody but itself; probably one of my caffeine-fueled attempts to get serious about "networking" and "growing my business" (which, as you can guess by the elaborate portfolio I have set up on the left sidebar and cleverly named "Photo Albums", is working like a charm).

But LinkedIn dangled an irrestibly orange and well-formed carrot in front of me: the name of a long-lost friend who apparently had added himself to the LinkedIn system, too.

What's more, they helpfully wrote that tricky reconnect email for me, all I had to do was point and click:

Linked_in

14 hours later, the interweb worked its magic and I received this communiqué from my long-lost pal:

I'm confused.

Are you working for Amway now?

Please do not contact me again.

Signed,

[Name redacted for reasons of privacy.]

Well, color me corrected! LinkedIn works! It really, really works! I mean, maybe we're not sitting down for coffee and a long jaw yet, but it's a start! And all thanks to the infinitely interconnective, completely customizable meet-up of science and commerce.

It is truly a great time to be alive.

xxx c

Cubs: the thinking artist's sports team

cubs fans

Let's be upfront about this: I don't give a crap about sports. You can have your football, your soccer, your precious curling, with the exception of one strange season in college where I was possessed by the magic that is hockey, up close and personal, I don't get it.

So this whole World Series hoo-hah eludes me entirely. And I'm from Chicago, current home of GO,SOX!!!WOOFWOOFWOOF!!!! All I know is that King of the Hill was bumped for too fucking long and can we all please just get on with it, already?

And yet.

And yet, while I care nothing about sports or the athletes who play them or the fans who cheer them on...

cubby radio

...while the Super Bowl was, when I was forced to watch it, made tolerable only by the unbelievable Italian beef spread laid out by my ex's aunt and uncle, and hopefully, a football pool win...

...while I could live my entire life without seeing or hearing about another sporting event...

...there's something about the Cubbies.

Back in my ad days, we'd get offers of free (box) seats for all the major Chicago sports franchises. I got to see Michael Jordan from the 12th row, and yes, it was beautiful. I got to meet Michael Jordan, when he acted in a delightful batch of Wheaties commercials I wrote (hideous proof to be uploaded to Flickr soonish). But the best graft, the most coveted of all tickets, were to the Cubs games. Even when you didn't get the fabulous box seats with the high-end booze bar and the off-duty Hooters waitresses who'd roll the dessert cart by.

Maybe it's because Wrigley Field is so old and glorious, springing up 50 yards from the Addison "L" stop, surrounded by post-war brownstones, in the heart of a fully residential district.

cub kids

Maybe it's the rich history, so few wins, so many beautiful, beer-soaked afternoons in the sunshine for the fans.

Maybe it's the way they've inspired my old friend from ad days gone by, Tim Souers. I'm mad for his art. Mad, I tell you. He's been doodling these strange and wonderful illustrative observations with pens and Doc Martin's Dyes between coming up with brilliant commercials for some 20-odd years now. A few years ago, he started documenting his love for the Cubs in a personal journal, a few pages of which he scanned and sent to me recently (god bless the interweb!).

So if the Cubs are what it takes these days to inspire Tim, then color me royal blue and red and slap a giant "C" on my forehead.

More baseball.

More Wrigley.

More Tim Souers.

Cubs in 2006!

xxx
c

Paintings © 2004 - 2005 Tim Souers

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Quotation of the Day: "Reason #1067 why advertising sucks" Edition

"I think my own addiction to narrow distractions while writing is a hard wire left from my days in advertising; if you aren't coming up with an idea, you check email to see what other crisis looms. I have found this a terrible and difficult habit to break." , former advertising creative director and current novelist Jeff Abbott, in the comments section of Paul Ford's 43 Folders guest post about "Amish Computing"

Keeping it in the 323

From the time I decided to become an L.A. actor, my life has been one telecommunications nightmare after another, a hellish mix of pagers, cell phones, forwarded voice mail, forwarded home phone, dedicated fax lines. (And a P.O. Box, because yes, even Gapâ„¢-casual fake moms have stalkers.) This year, my descent into the Hades that is the Los Angeles telecom megalopoly accelaterated sharply when I started spending copious time at The BF's pad, a.k.a. my country house, a.k.a. that place dead-smack in the middle of The Silver Lake Cone of Silence.

Apparently, the wealthy folk whose million-dollar homes ring the Silver Lake Reservoir do not like tatty cell towers cluttering their views or mutating their DNA. Which is fine for them but sucks for me, since it takes my brilliant telecom workaround, forwarding my land line to the cell, and metaphorically drops it on its head from a 15-story window.

And even if I wanted to forward my phone to The BF's land line (which I most decidedly do not, a girl has her limits), I couldn't, since the BF, self-employed in the VFX world of film & TV, is doing the same forwarding between cell-and-home dance I am. Nothing like having your best corporate client ring your boyfriend's pants while they're on a bell.

Anyway, about a month ago, in utter frustration over shitty cell reception when there was some, missed calls when there weren't and a few really scary races to auditions, I gave up my main land line (the other is for the fax/DSL) and ordered Vonage.

Holy-fucking-crap! My number rings at home! My number rings at my country house! And it really is my number, my one and only number, because Vonage lets you port your old landline number to your new Vonage account!

There are a few small kinks I need to work out. Hauling the Vonage router around with me is gonna get old, I can see right now; I'm looking into the possibility of a second router or at least an additional power supply (the heaviest part of the gear). There's a little dropout now and then, thanks to less-than-perfect DSL.

But for anyone splitting their time between two places, especially two places with crummy cell reception, or fearsome of losing their actual, memorized phone number in a cross-town move or another area code split, Vonage might be just the ticket.

xxx c

Transparency is key, except when you have spaghetti burn on your nose

rezshotYou eagle-eyed regulars who haven't just stumbled onto the c-trix (ouch!) by accident, fodder for future issues of our regular Friday feature, Searches, We Get Searchesâ„¢*, will notice the new decoration on the sidebar. Yes, it's the communicatrix, out from behind the grease pencil (see right), for all the world to see.

It's a fairly accurate photo; in the world of headshots, it's positively uncanny how much the damned thing looks like me. I've had casting directors clutch me and weep with joy when I show up looking pretty much exactly like my picture. Well, not really. But there have been comments that some of my brethren might do well to stay within 10 years and 100 lbs. of their current "look." Caveat actor...

I'm still sustaining a gravy-related accident from last week**, and am currently sporting what is quite possibly the worst haircut I've sustained in years, so it doesn't look exactly like me. But it's damned close on a good day, with the right lighting and some piece of perfectly-hued clothing near enough to bust out the blue in my eyes. (Did I mention I own a lot of navy blue and red? I do.)

Anyway, for a year, I fretted over the horrible message I'd be sending about superficiality and the inside not being the most important thing and women-shouldn't-be-objects blah blah blah.***

Then I remembered how I've made my living for the past 20 years, and uploaded the damned thing.

A hoor is a hoor is a hoor.

But at least I'm a transparent hoor.

xxx c

*Sorry, but the searches have been almost overwhelmingly of the blue variety lately, and I'm getting weary of finding the #1 URL bringing people to the blog is 'filthy horny XXX butt sex chicks' 'who used to be in advertising'. I mean, I'm a good sport, but even I have my limits.

**During an extremely Lucy moment last weekend, I burned the exact tip of my nose with boiling-hot spaghetti sauce, a.k.a. "red gravy", a.k.a. "The Red Lead". As The BF said, it looks like I have a target on the end of my nose. Or, as my ex-boyfriend who was over meeting with the BF and I over a new creative project said, "There was no way I was going to bring up that THING at the end of your nose."

***Also, freaks. Let's face it, there are a lot of you out there sporting serious wood over the thought of a CHICK BLOGGER. Even a pre-AARP model like myself, we're just BILFs to you.