Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

It's summer here in The South, which means that it is ridiculously hot even in the middle of the night. I keep the temperature in my tiny apartment quite low, but since I work from home, I also get to spend an ungodly amount of time lounging around in my underwear.

I've gotten so used to almost immediately stripping off my clothes nearly every time I walk through the door, that I actually just had a moment where I saw myself in the mirror and said out loud, “Whoa, how did I end up naked?!?”

This may turn into a problem the next time I have company. Need to be mindful.

I had a dream last night that I was an orphan, living in an orphanage that was some cross between a warm version of the one in Annie and the dormitory in Real Genius. There was some cookie and lip gloss eating contest going on, in which I was not participating, but I remember feeling that the stakes in the contest were quite high; the winners were to be spared from some unnamed but dark fate.

I snuck through some small, short door between the contestants, who were measuring their success somehow by filling large, Plexiglas bins that resembled aquariums. In the dream I was a child, but I still had to duck and shimmy through the door, which was square and only a few feet tall. The door was sunk a couple of feet into the wall and had aged iron hardware; it felt very Alice in Wonderland. I came out into an empty, sun filled room. The side that I had come out of mirrored the opposite wall; both walls had the same small wooden doors in the center and were otherwise covered with large planks of light colored wood, that had been finished and polished to a high gloss sheen. The floor was covered with the same wood. The walls to my left and right were painted an eggshell color, and above me was a dome of glass. The room was easily half the size of a high school gymnasium, but I remember thinking that was secret, that it was a place only I knew about, even though I had never been there before, I had known all the time of its existence. Read More »

I kid you not: a guy on stilts, at least seven feet high, just cruised by my window.

It was quite surreal.

Christmas Eve dinner at the Tollerson house was a low-key affair. My father had purchased one of those cooked rotisserie chickens, and the side dish was apples. Not baked, not fried, just whole apples sitting next to the chicken on a paper plate.

Such is the level of cuisine on this very special occasion from my normally culinarily triumphant father. Without anyone to impress, however (my mother was absent from the holiday, staying at her mother's house in California), he seemed to be off his game.

Early on in the night, I presented both Dad and Sarah with the Christmas mix (cover, liner notes, back) I made as stocking stuffers for a dozen or so people, and my father liked it so much that it was played about 27 times over the course of the next 48 hours. I was flattered. I also can't listen to it again for at least another year.

When not listening to Merry Christmas (I Don't Wanna Fight Tonight)—also referred to at HQ in Winder as “The Tollerson Christmas Theme”—we intermittedly switched around channels in on the tele, me periodically harassing my father to stop on TBS's 24 hour marathon of A Christmas Story. He keeps asking us to watch Dawn of the Dead with him. Sarah and I repeatedly refuse, retorting that it's not very Christmasy.

No tree, no stockings, no lights, and we had the audacity to claim that Dawn of the Dead wouldn't be Christmasy enough. But it worked.

At about 10:15 pm, Sarah suddenly shouts, without provocation, completely from nowhere,

“Eggnog!”

“What?” My father and I were appropriately dumbfounded.

“We forgot eggnog. We need eggnog!”

I agree. “Dad, let's go.”

“Well if we are going to get eggnog, we need booze. Let's go to a liquor store.”

What must be noted is that my ‘deddy’ is not really a big boozer, so his declaration of buying liquor, and furthermore, once we were in the store, insisting on whiskey, was foreign to me, in a hilarious way. I was delighted.

We were in our first liquor store, one of six stops, less than 5 minutes after Sarah made her initial random interjection. When it comes to partying, Tollersons are apparently your go-to guys.

We picked out a whiskey, and then inquired at the counter about eggnog. The cheerful family working pointed us to Old St. Nicks Alcoholic Eggnog in a Noel-decked bottle. My father bought the whiskey and the eggnog while ignoring my suggestions to add on a bottle of Jager. Then we were off to search other locales for a non-alcoholic version of holiday cheer to... add alcohol to.

We are a strange lot. Read More »

So my network card has finally died it's official death. That means that until i can get the wireless network up and running in my house (or until my dad can anyway) you will not be seeing me on AIM and updates here will be sporatic and read a little bit desperate, quick and accomplished from other people's computers.

But in good news, I went through and optimized this journal page (cleaned up some old code that basically pulled things in from sites that no longer exist) so those of you that had been experiencing those slow download times should be mostly remedied now.

Finally, things are weird lately. I feel hyper-lucid, like everything is suddenly becoming clear, which sounds really cool but it's more like—well let's just say it's just not cool. It's rather silly also but being offline is making me feel cut off from my support system. Really I'm spending a lot of time trying not to bother people but knowing I should bother somebody.

I want December to be here! I want my work to be done, class to be over, and to have time on my hands to thing about all this, maybe to talk about all this.

That never seems to go anywhere though.

Tonight was Jump at Georgia Theatre. I definitely had the best time ever, dancing and screaming and singing along. Completely revived my love for Jump. They played a lot of news songs and a lot of old-new songs and some Magazine and a little teeny bit of Vertigo (and even one off Early Years). I was quite satisfied with my Jump show experience.

After I galavanted with the hooligans, somehow it was decided that a caravan of people were going to come see my apartment, two blocks away. I was not involved in this decision but it made me very happy anyway, even though it was really not ready to receive guests, given the dust monsters forming in every corner.

We arrived and gave everyone a tour, and of course, since I am in rock star training and also the slut of the house, Alli insisted that I sing for the crowd of people sitting in our living room waiting to go to the Grill.

I attempted to entertain with (what else but) the song I call Christmas Blues, which was not written by me but by some old guy, and I'm also pretty sure I don't use the right name. Even though I could here my voice shaking a little at some parts everyone seemed to enjoy it.

We then made our way down to the Grill and had out milkshakes, pies, fries with feta, etc, and went our separate ways.

I arrived home at four o'fucking clock in the morning, with the street sweepers coming out and the whole scene around my block dying down. That's how you know you are hardcore.

Weirdest dream ever.

I'm living in this house, and for some reason my clothes are on the other side of the house. I could wait to call out to someone to bring them too me, but I'm late for something plus I have to pee really bad so I decide to make a break for it, because the bathroom is also on the wrong side of the house. I have to rush down the long hallway that every room is off of (of course my room is at one end and my destination is at the other). Almost everyone who lives with me is watching Wheel of Fourtune in the living room and laughing their heads off, at random times for no real reason. I peer into the room and some of them are naked too, just lounging around like that.

I feel home free until I have to walk by the kitchen, where this dude from my New Media class (who is late almost every day) is sitting in the doorway on a stool, leaning against the door frame and talking on the phone. (The phone is yellow and it's got that spirally cord coming around the corner from where the base is). He is also completely naked. I am not happy. He smiles and kinda waves at me when I pass in a friendly I'm-on-the-phone way as if everybody being naked is inconsequential.

Finally I get my clothes and I walk over to where the bathroom is and when I am about to go in, a handicapped man taps me on the shoulder and asks to go first. For some reason in the dream I know that even though this is the house where I live, we have designated Men and Women's bathrooms, so I'm a little annoyed, but I let him go first, I think because of my polite Southern upbringing. By this time I'm cramping I have to go so bad and I hear the dude pull out a newspaper!

Then my alarm went off. And immediately I knew I needed some relief.

So to have really weird dreams don't consume anything weird, or watch a scary movie, or listen to strange music while you sleep. Just drink a giant glass of water right before you pass out! Works way too well for my taste.

So I have been working this evening on my self portrait, my first in paint, and since I have gotten very good about drawing from life but not good at making things up, about half way through my progress I actually went and put on the shirt that I am wearing in the painting.

(Mind you, this is a painting in progress.)

Upon approaching my work again, I had a brief flash of the feeling of embarassment you would get showing up to a party in the same outfit and hair as another girl.

A second later I reasoned with myself: the "other girl" is a painting I did of me wearing one of my shirts. I cautioned myself to keep my feet on the ground and sat down to work.

You know it's not going to be a good day when you are about to leave the house and you think, Now what am I forgetting?

You see yourself in the mirror and realize,

I have to be wearing a shirt to go to work.

Whoa.

My legs have a good dull ache from dancing and I have that lovely stale cigarette smoke smell in my hair. Rock shows are cleansing, in a way.

A couple of things:

I have finally accepted that people actually like me.

Suddenly, my life is very much in perspective for me.

You don't realize how strong you are until somebody you love really needs you.

We are in this together. We'll get through these days. One at a time.