July 15, 2008

okay, XM, I'm guessing it's on purpose...

...because this morning after you played a "30 Days of Coldplay" promo, you went right into Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)."

Posted by pamie at 12:55 PM |

July 13, 2008

Dear XM radio:

I can't tell if someone working there is an idiot, or a complete genius.

Do you know that you're starting your "30 Days of Coldplay" promo with six seconds of Radiohead? Because you are. It's a shiv to the tummies of Radiohead fans. You're playing "Paranoid Android," and then moving into "Viva la Vida." If it turns out it's an idiot making these promos, please make that person quit.

But if you're some kind of subversive mastermind, quietly telling the Radiohead fans out there, "I know, I know, it's just not right, but I have no choice, so all I can do is play Radiohead for weeks without anyone noticing the difference because they are a Radiohead rip-off band," then... well, I guess you win.

I'd like to think there's a genius at work, but I fear it's the idiot. So let me tell you before you start your next promo: Coldplay didn't make "Pyramid Song," either.

Viva la Vida Loca,

-p

Posted by pamie at 10:46 PM |

July 10, 2008

An Open Letter to My Cat.

Dear Cal,

Are we currently starring in some kind of romantic comedy together? Or are you planning on auditioning for a Will Ferrell movie or something? Because our time together lately, if montaged with a kicky Katrina and the Waves song in the background, looks like something Touchtone Pictures would proudly present.

Maybe you're mad about the other night, when I moved in my sleep and it scared you so much you fell off the bed. Obviously I didn't mean to wake up with such a start, but I probably shouldn't have pointed at you and laughed. I don't even know if my finger was anywhere near you, since it was so dark I couldn't see anything. But if you could have heard what I heard -- me gasping out of a nightmare, you gasping in a kitty sound, and then thunk-BUNK! -- you would be pointing and laughing, too.

I know you've got a dark side too because you have recently developed a craving for my flesh, and seem to stop at nothing to get some of it. What was with you taking a bite out of my arm the other day when I was typing? That's not cool, man... cat. [I know he's a cat, everybody. Gah.] That's not cool, cat.

And I get it, you have to puke, so you do it wherever I'm going to see it the fastest, like on my clothes, or the first step into the bathroom or in my purse. I know people think you're stupid, but I'm onto you. It's all an act, and you've been waiting to have enough power and street cred that you could eat me alive and have everybody think you accidentally swallowed me while you were busy being so damn cute.

I'm not buying it.

So the latest move in our romantic comedy is the fight over how we spend our evenings. I like to spend them sleeping, as in the morning I have to get up and go to work, so that you have food to puke in the afternoon. This contradicts your plans for the evening, which can easily be called Shetland Pony Hour, where you run full-tilt around the place while making a sound that goes: Whrr-mrr-mrr-WHRR-MRR-MRR!! I cannot believe the police haven't arrived yet, with the amount of noise that you make.

I know you think that suddenly walls grow in our home, and that's how Shetland Pony Hour stops, but I'm gonna let you in on a secret. When you're practicing weighing a million pounds and running, I actually have to get up, go into the closet, find two pieces of canvas from a failed art project I did that Anna Beth hates, and use them like baby gates to block your running path. I'm lucky that as you've gotten older you've lost the ability to leap three feet into the air, although it is clear from your caterwauling that you haven't lost the desire to MJ up to the deadbolt, just like you used to years ago.

I have never been as angry with you as I was the other night, when I got up to see what you'd knocked over (the large basket that holds the blue twigs that AB made me buy), only to step on one of your toys that you'd strategically placed so that the little metal jingle ball would jam up into the tenderest part of my foot. Cal, I haven't seen you play with that toy in years, and now all of a sudden it just happens to be in the doorway when it just so happens that you "accidentally" knocked over something big and heavy?

Oh, yeah, buddy. I know what's going on. Let's be honest. We're in a romantic comedy, and you're in love with me.

Neither of us know what to do about it, or how to speak about our true feelings. We'll go to our friends, our families, we'll go to other countries. We'll make bad decisions, questionable choices, and obsess about each other to the point where we will come close to hating one another. Because that's how much we love each other. Hopefully we will resolve this within ninety minutes, and not have this be one of those two-hour dealies with way too much story and not enough funny.

Act two.

I lock you out of the bedroom, because after that little prank with the jingle ball you certainly aren't getting to sleep on two-thirds of my pillow while I wake up with allergies because you're just a "helpless little puddy-tat who is just so sweet." Uh-uh. You sleep out there in your canvas playpen and try to think about what you've done.

This morning. I wake up. FEED YOU. And then go to put the wet clothes from last night's wash into the dryer. And that's when I found your latest scheme.

Cal. How did your tennis ball get into the wash?

How did your tennis ball get into the wash?

That thing bounced out of the washing machine like it was on its way to tell you, "Cal! We did it! She totally washed a tennis ball! Ha-HA! What a sucker!"

Do you have thumbs that you put on when I'm not looking? Did you hire someone to do your evil bidding? What are you doing to me?

If you're in love with me, Cal, let me tell you: this ain't the way to woo me. I prefer the sweet and cuddly. Maybe you could learn to drink wine and say things like, "Oh, I can't believe that happened. And then what?" Maybe you could find a way to be into trying new things, like going on trips or eating in different restaurants, instead of always wanting a can of tuna/salmon, and sleeping right up next to my face. If you want to be with me, please don't act like you want me dead. Because it makes me angry, Cal. And it makes me laugh when you fall off the bed in fear. And I don't want to laugh at you when you fall, Cal.

Everybody else might think you're the cat who's just so cool and fun. And you can even somehow charm Anna Beth, who chanted along with me: "Cal for Slenator!" But I still remember when you tried to kill me so you could have Eric all to yourself, and I won't forget that you somehow got a tennis ball into the washing machine. (Speaking of, not a time goes by when I see my family that they don't bring up the Exact Change story and laugh and laugh and laugh. These are the two stories they ask me to tell people: Exact Change, and AB with the fish.)

Cal, if our romantic comedy continues, as we race towards act three there will be nights when I'm sleeping on the couch, and you're sleeping in a strip club, and our friends will try to tell us that it's over and we have to move on, but you'll be drunk and wandering around animal shelters, looking at all the other possible owners out there, trying to find the hottest one, and I'll give Taylor all kinds of toys he couldn't give a shit about, and you know he won't let me pick him up and put him in a hoodie sling and hold him like a baby.

Act three. Time passes. I'll find myself washing your tennis ball just in case you come home and want it, and you'll find yourself in some girl's lap and she'll be petting you all wrong, and you'll want to call me but you left your secret thumbs at home and I'll tell everyone you didn't run away, you just got lost and it was all my fault and i should have been nicer and you'll get a tattoo that nobody can see because of all your fur and find some nice girl who wonders what bad lady made your tail fall off. Life goes on, tasting oh so bittersweet.

Six months from now we'll see each other across a crowded veterinary clinic, and I'll lift my head a little like I do when I see you, and you'll lift your head a little back like you do, our secret hello. And maybe, just maybe, you'll Shetland Pony right back into my arms.

But we don't have to go through all of that. Not if we don't want to.

How about instead you just stop biting the shit out of me, and I will try to play more jumping games with you before we go to sleep so you stop going to the kitty-gym in the middle of the night. Deal? Please?

Thanks, Cal. You're the best. I mean it.

Love,

Mrr.

Posted by pamie at 9:04 AM |

July 8, 2008

Shameless Pimping: For Reasons Unknown

Andi Teran and Jeff Long wrote a play and got into the NYC International Fringe Festival!

It's called For Reasons Unknown and it's fantastic. Don't miss it, because you're going to feel really stupid when you skipped out on the best thing happening in NYC.

Posted by pamie at 9:53 AM |

June 27, 2008

my hands are thai'd.

I have had a rough time lately. Consequently, my shoulders have been resting pretty much at my earlobes twenty-four seven. So on my way home today, I decided to treat myself to a massage. It turned out to be more than the soothing Swedish touch I was expecting.

Shortly after it began I did that thing where I worry the massage won't be as hard as I need it to be, and will feel like someone kind of making sure my skin got stroked instead of my muscles worked. "You can go a little harder," I said.

She chuckled. "First five minutes, warm-up," she said. You guys, she wasn't kidding.

Five minutes later, I'm sweating. "Yo," I involuntarily say as she's got her elbow jammed under my scapula. "That is intense."

"Yes," she says, not letting up. "Yes, um-hmm."

I've had a couple of deep tissue massages before, but I stopped after someone told me the only reason they feel good is because when someone hurts you, it feels good when they stop. Endorphins kick in, and you're so grateful not to have someone digging into your fleshy parts that you feel sweet relief.

This massage had gone well past Swedish. Sweating, breathing like I'm in labor, using everything I ever learned about relaxation from theatre class, back when we were forced to get "manipulated" with the Alexander Technique, I try to keep my eyeballs from shooting out of my skull. I could power boats with the wind I'm blowing out of me. I focus on the pain, let it take over, let it control my heartbeat, my nasal passages. At one point, I feel I might start to drool from my tongue swelling. I see colors of pain. My fingers twitch involuntarily, as if trying to let me know they'll form a fist of retaliation as soon as I give the signal.

She stops. I relax.

And then she gets on top of me.

So this is Thai massage, which I wasn't expecting, which I've never had before. And she's pretty much laying on me, jamming her bony parts into my tender parts, and I can actually envision the stringy ends of my nerves, because they are en fuego. She's breathing and I'm breathing and there's this tiny lady on top of me and I'm naked under this sheet and she is tenderizing me like a cube steak.

It was like a giant, female Cal, kneading me with a silent intensity that blocked out any signal I was giving of being in unbearable pain. In fact, the sound of me in what might be considered prayer seemed only to encourage her.

She used one of my legs to massage my other leg. She sat me up and put both of my hands behind my head and bent me backward over her knee. A slight change in background music, and we could have done a quick, nudie rendition of "And Then We Both Reached For the Gun."

But.

I must say, my shoulders are so far away from my ears now I have to glance down to see them. My shoulder blades are sore, but I'm drowning myself in water, and I'm feeling so much better than I did just a few hours ago. I haven't caught myself holding all of the muscles in my face taut -- something that's been happening quite often lately. She must have spent ten minutes on this one stubborn knot, enough to make me want to beg her to stop, and I'm only now starting to be able to feel grateful for what she put me through.

I forgot to ask for her name, but the next time I'm there, I'm pretty sure I'll recognize her voice, because at one point it whispered in my ear, "Will you be okay?" just before she jammed her thumbs into the base of my skull and lifted me up like she's finishing me at the end of a game of Mortal Kombat.

I didn't even have to unlock my door when I got home. I just slid right under the frame.

Posted by pamie at 11:09 PM |

June 26, 2008

i have gone into flipmode.

I don't even care that I have to confess I heard this song because I watch So You Think You Can Dance, as this has been the bright point in a bleak week.

Posted by pamie at 9:36 AM |

June 16, 2008

one. oh.

Ten years ago right now I wondered what would happen if I started writing a web diary.

Ten years. I haven't had any address in my entire life as long as I've had pamie.com. Very few things last an entire decade. I thought I should do something special to commemorate it, as it's not often one reaches a ten-year anniversary of anything, but in many ways it felt too self-important. I'm the only one who has actually been here every day of those ten, who wrote the words and uploaded the pages and checked the stats and blah, blah, blah. It felt like I'd be patting myself on the back for typing and uploading.

Friends and lovers have come and gone and there's been life and death and travel and huge changes and there's no real way to talk about the past ten years. I didn't want to trivialize the important people and events of my past ten years. There's no way to hold it all up, the big moments and little. It would take another website the size of pamie.com.

There's been you. All of you. And because of that I got lucky enough to have a career in writing... which, if you click the link to read that very first entry, is clearly nothing short of a miracle.

In the end, I didn't have any words about what it means to have kept this site going for ten years. I don't really know what it means, if it means anything. Or if it proves anything, other than the Internet wasn't just a fad, and it turns out it actually was "for girls," despite what my ex told me fourteen years ago. I'm grateful to have a wonderful group of readers, and there's not one tiny part of my life that hasn't been forever changed by this place. I'm thankful I get to do things like Dewey, and met some of the smartest and funniest people on this planet. It still amazes me when I think of the relationships that formed through this place -- including more than one marriage -- and that still, even this past weekend, after something funny happens someone will turn to me and ask, "Are you going to blog about that?"

I don't know if I would have gotten into this thing if I'd known one day it would have such an un-sexy word used to describe it.

I guess all I can really say is thanks. I can't believe it's been so long, and I can't believe it feels like just yesterday I was sitting at a desk in Austin, loading up a Geocities page, pretending I had something important to say.

A few weeks ago I went to see Cat in her awesome improv musical show, and found myself standing in the lobby of the theater where I first performed and auditioned in Los Angeles, that very first year I started pamie.com, when I still thought it was a good idea to write about my love life. I watched Cat sing and dance on the stage where I made my first steps in this city, where I had my first disappointment, where I first saw headshots in a Dumpster, an image I still haven't forgotten.

Being back in that theater, after all these years (and eventually getting into Aspen), I kept thinking of how different things are. If I had the option of finding myself backstage there ten years ago, would I have told younger-me anything? Given her any wisdom or advice?

I decided I wouldn't. It could change something, and even the painful lessons I've learned over the past decade, I needed to learn them. Wait. There's one thing: I'd tell her to keep that apartment she had with Ray a little longer, or at least find a subletter. That place was sweet. It should have been kept in our circle.

Happy Ten Years, pamie.com. I couldn't have become me without you.

Posted by pamie at 12:47 AM |

June 15, 2008

wanted.

I was running this afternoon when a lamp post caught my eye. There was a message taped, a love letter. It said it was the eleventh of fifteen, a public message for a special person. There, typed, was a poem, about how the writer's love was real. His or her need was real. That both the love and need were undeniable, but more importantly -- insatiable, a desire compared to the myth of Sisyphus, that will never reach its summit. The writer concluded by saying this person was going to be loved and needed "forever."

It then gave directions for the next letter of the series, number twelve: a few blocks over. I changed my path and ran those blocks, even though they were in the other direction. I had to see what happened. I was on the love letter scavenger hunt. I was rooting for the writer. For romance.

I arrived at the next location. But unfortunately, there was no letter. Not at any of the corners. Not on stop signs or telephone poles or mailboxes. I ran to the next block, hoping I could find letter thirteen.

Nothing. The letters stopped. There were flyers for yard sales, lost cats and parking restrictions, but no letters covered in packing tape.

It made me very sad at first, thinking that whomever these confessions of love were written for might not have found this path, might never have known how much he or she was loved. But then I thought about it, and tried to stop immediately going to the dark place.

Maybe the missing letters were pulled down by the beloved, and are already placed somewhere safe. I like to think that letter fifteen concluded with a proposal. Or, considering the day, the very last page informed the object of devotion that he was about to become a daddy. Another loving need that lasts forever.

I don't want to think of jaded hipsters yanking these love letters from their posts. I can't stand the thought of a woman on her daily jog lost in thought, not noticing the typed words of devotion just inches from her eyes. Or worse, some guy who can't seem to get rid of this girl he tricked into thinking he loved her, now can't even go a block without having to remember that someone out there believed what he said, and now she's doing everything she can to let him know she's his. Or worse than that: the entire thing is a trick. This is Hollywood, after all. That letter might have been a forgotten prop from an indie film, or a psych experiment and someone was filming me from a nearby apartment, to see just how many jogging girls will go those three blocks in the wrong direction to follow the love story. See, I can spin it into something that resembles the opposite of love, but I don't want to. I don't want to give up hope. If I don't believe in it, it's like I killed it myself.

And if it's real, if I indeed stumbled upon a true scavenger hunt for the heart, I want to think that love that strong hits its target, and right now two lovers are sharing one pillow, hands entwined, breath slow and matched, as they sleep together on a warm summer night.

Posted by pamie at 11:25 PM |

May 21, 2008

cookie puss

We had our first table read for season two yesterday.

That's a very exciting thing, being on a show that comes back for another year. But this second year is still the first year, and I kind of forgot how we went straight from season one to the strike to season one point five, to this second season without a break.

That is, until Melissa McCarthy looked me over and said, "You guys... you didn't get a break, did you? Not even like, a day."

The actors were so tan. All of them, all healthy and glowing and pretty, happy to have had time off where they weren't unemployed; they were on hiatus. It's the same empty schedule, but a hiatus is allowed to be called a vacation.

So after staring at my pale skin and post-strike thighs, I knew the only thing that would make me feel both better and worse was a Table Read Cookie. They are very good cookies. I do not know what they put in them, but they are the talk of the Table Reads. That is, they're the talk of the people who are not tiny, tan pretty people who are famous actors. Okay, they're the talk of me.

It's warm out, but I didn't expect the cookie to be half-melted. In fact, I didn't know it was half-melted until it was half-eaten, which is when I noticed that my hand was half-covered in chocolate. I tried to wipe it off on my napkin, but it was sticky and all I was doing was smearing chocolate streaks all along my hand and I'm sure there was an equal mess on my face. Like I'm five.

I try to be cool, but it's not working. The more I'm cleaning chocolate, the messier it gets. I try to make a joke out of it to Tim Russ, who walks over to grab some kind of healthy-actor vegetable.

"Be careful of the cookies, Tim. They make a mess."

"Thanks for the warning," he says, always so cool.

I'm such a dork.

All of which means that my hands were in a sink when Christina Applegate came over to give me a hug, so I greeted her with, "I HAVE CHOCOLATE ALL OVER ME! BE CAREFUL! DON'T TOUCH ME!" I was able to wash most of the chocolate off, but for some reason felt compelled to inform Christina, "MY HANDS ARE WET NOW." She kind of gave me that "Aw, one day you'll have a good day" squint/grin, and then hugged me while I kept my arms at my sides.

This is why they try not to let the writers out of the room.

Posted by pamie at 9:20 AM |

May 18, 2008

grateful and grumpy (aka: old-lady pamie)

For those of you who are crazy cat ladies/actual veterinarians/long-time fans: Thank you for writing in about Cal and his new meds. That's very kind of you, and your advice is much appreciated. Yay for Pill Pockets. Now if only Greenies made a "Liquid-y Vomit Catcher (tm)" for thirty minutes after Cal's had his medicine.

I don't need to be yet another person to tell you how hot it was in Los Angeles this weekend, but I will be. It was hot. Very hot.

Also, since SNL is very diligent in protecting their copyright over the Internet, I cannot find the "Rabun to Shuri" episode (Season 26, Episode 2) where Kate Hudson and Maya Rudolph did a Japanese parody of "Laverne and Shirley" that remains one of my favorite sketches. So, I was quite disappointed in seeing the exact same sketch done this past weekend with a Japanese parody of "The Office," complete with break for a commercial. In the original, a cockroach turns into a pastry. This week was a Hello Kitty tampon, but I think it even had the same "Ding!" punchline. It certainly had the same running gag about bowing. I know everybody loves Kristen Wiig, but Maya Rudolph's Rabun was the best.

And yes, I just talked about pet medication, complained about the weather, and then bitched about television ripping off the old stuff that used to be on television. So before you tell me, yes, I know that means I'm old. Get used to it! I'm old! Get out of my yard! I know things! I was doing anime while y'all were still in diapers! Now that I'm old, I will complain about things that mean nothing to you because that's what I do now that I'm old! Because I'm old!

Therefore, I will now think about stuff that completely ruins my day while you are footloose and carefree, sucking on penny candy, riding on your rolley-skates all the live-long day. Understand? Good. I mean, honestly.

...I'd better nap before it's time for bed.

Posted by pamie at 11:53 PM |