Author: Average Jane

Yesterday my grandfather passed away, just three months after my grandmother.  He had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease even longer than my grandmother had, so it had been a number of years since I’d seen him and been sure he knew who I was.  Perhaps the only good thing to come from traveling to Florida for my grandmother’s funeral is that I got to see and talk to my grandfather one last time.

In 2002, when I compiled a list of my favorite memories to send to my grandparents, I included these things I remembered about my grandfather as I was growing up:

I remember…

• Trying to learn how to swing a golf club, courtesy of lessons by Golf Pro Grandpa in your front yard.  Sadly, I’m no better at golfing now than I was then.
• Riding around in your 1932 Plymouth Roadster with you.  Later, I remember learning to drive a stick shift in it.  The gears were very forgiving, which was wonderful for a driver with my lack of skill at the time.  I still prefer a manual transmission, and all my cars have been stick shift ever since.
• Marveling at the tricks you taught Poco.  I especially liked the one where he flipped a dry-roasted peanut off his nose and caught it in his mouth.  Poco didn’t like children, but we still thought he was a Wonder Dog for his great tricks.
• Going to watch you perform with your barbershop quartet.
• The "happy dance" you did every Christmas, immortalized on each year’s Super 8 film.
• Riding on your motorcycle.  Even though we went really, really slowly and not particularly far, it was a huge thrill, mainly because my parents did not approve.
• One dinner we had together at Shoney’s Restaurant.  We spent almost the entire meal discussing correct grammar.  I have no doubt that you’re the progenitor of my "Mad Grammarian" impulses.

Thank you, Grandpa, for sharing your appreciation for old cars, language, singing, Tom Lehrer records, cranberry juice, Oreo cookies, driving and reading.

Well, I lived through the staff meeting on Wednesday morning.  I’d be lying if I said I slept soundly the night before.  However, when the time came, I put on my long, red wig, bandana, backwards baseball cap, sunglasses and fringed leather jacket and just went for it. 

The song started, I waited until just before the vocals kicked in, and then I ran out and high-fived everyone in the first row while lip-synching the song.  I made it through the minute-and-a-half of song, pacing around in front of all my co-workers and trying to remember what the lyrics were.  Frankly, I have no memory of what kind of reaction it got at the time.  There’s a video of it on our intranet, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to steel myself to watch it.

Afterward, everyone was quite complimentary.  Women, especially, seemed to give me major props for gutsiness.  Other people didn’t realize it was me, or have been slowly figuring it out in the meantime.

I was painfully shy as a child, but I seem to get bolder and bolder with each passing year.   These days, I’m almost embarrassment-proof.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but social gaffes can’t hurt me.  Does that happen to everyone as they get older?

The other day at band practice, something terrible happened.  I pulled my PDA out of my purse to make a note of the next practice date and made the tragic discovery that it had somehow reset itself back to factory default.  All my information was gone:  contacts, calendar, notes, everything.

I have no idea how it happened.  I doubt I’d be able to do it on purpose if I wanted to.

If you’re thinking, "But fortunately she syncs her PDA to her computer," I’m sad to say that’s incorrect.  Ever since we did our last Outlook upgrade on my home computer, my pocket PC has refused to sync.  That means the PDA had months and months of stuff in it that had never been backed up on my computer.  I’d meant to try to figure out the problem, but I really don’t use my home machine that much, so it didn’t seem all that pressing.

Now I’m trying desperately to remember what information may have been lost.  I’m pretty sure I have a dentist’s appointment soon, so I need to call the office and find out when it is.  I hope I didn’t miss it already.  Frankly, I’m not 100% sure of the name of my dentist without my PDA to back me up, but I’m sure I can track him down somehow.

What will I do without my massage therapist’s new address, that note about what kind of port I like best for when I go to the liquor store, and the reminder that I agreed to bring goodie bag items to my next community board meeting?

I almost overbooked myself this Saturday and the following Saturday because I forgot about a birthday party and a bridal shower on those days.  It’s as though someone has taken out a vital portion of my brain.

This may be the time for me to switch to a web-based calendar like 30Boxes.  But I’d still like my calendar and contacts to be portable.  I guess I’ll start over again with the PDA and just keep my fingers crossed.

After Friday’s blog post, I went back to bed and slept pretty much all day long.  I woke up on Saturday morning feeling rested, although I still required four doses of Pepto-Bismol before I could go on with my day.

Band practice started at 4:00 p.m., so I figured I’d be up for it if I took it easy all day long.  I got dressed and noticed that my jeans fit loosely, even though I’d just gotten them out of the dryer.  Hmmm. 

My husband asked me how I felt.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because you look terrible," he said.  Wow, thanks for that.

I did have a pallor that any goth chick would envy, but I was feeling better, I thought.  Of course, once I got to practice, I realized that I hadn’t taken into account how much energy it takes to sing hard rock songs.  I stood in my usual spot for the first three songs, but after that I had to maneuver over to the edge of the couch so I could lean or sit.  I requested a break after the first ten songs so I could lie on the floor for a while and recuperate.

The band and I had a discussion about how incredibly difficult it must be for performers with a drug or alcohol addiction to go onstage and perform, considering how tough I was having it with just a little intestinal bug.  Our consensus:  just say no.

By the time I’d consumed my liter-and-a-half of water, I’d hydrated myself back to relative normalcy.  In fact, I even went out to dinner after practice and had a small meal.

On Sunday, I woke up almost back at square one.  I loaded up on OTC pharmaceuticals until I could safely move about.

I had promised to make a lasagna and a big pan of baked ziti to take to a Ronald McDonald House dinner that evening, so I forced myself to leave the house and go to the grocery store to get the ingredients.  I shuffled through the store like a zombie, picking up food items on my list.  I then numbly circled the produce section looking in vain for an eggplant, the last thing I needed for my ziti recipe.  I finally found a produce employee who spoke English and knew what an eggplant was.  He started to lead me to where the eggplants should be, then realized there were none there.  He checked the stockroom and returned to tell me that they were "waiting for a truck."
I, however, was in no mood to wait for the truck.

I went through the checkout line and put my groceries in the car.  Knowing that I had another grocery store stop ahead of me, I pried a bottle of Gatorade out of one of the bags and slugged down the whole thing.  It made me feel marginally better.  At the next store, I bought the world’s worst looking eggplant and a can of chicken noodle soup, then went home to eat the soup and try to find the will to prepare two enormous entrees.

Somehow I managed to successfully produce both dishes, drive across town with them, and socialize with my club members for an hour or so (although I didn’t eat). 

Today I’m pretty much back to normal.  I hadn’t had any caffeine for four days, so this morning’s green tea kind of made my heart race, but otherwise I think I’m fine.  However, I’ll NEVER be eating at the cafeteria across the street from my office again.

Sorry I didn’t post sooner, but I’ve been flat on my back all day long with a savage bout of food poisoning.  I don’t think I’ve been awake for more than 10 minutes at a time until now (except last night when I tossed and turned until dawn).

I’m eating a bowl of oatmeal in the hope that it will quell some of the acid that’s eating up my stomach.  Judging by the ominous rumbles my guts are making, my stomach is either saying "thank you" or giving me a dire warning.

I called my doctor’s office but they told me what I already knew:  this’ll just have to run its course.  I’ve had worse; I don’t think I’ll need to go to the emergency room for IV fluids this time.  Still, this isn’t how I wanted to spend my Friday and possibly my weekend.

/whining

I’ve always been interested in how people handle being known by different identities.  What’s it like to be a performer known widely by a professional name but in private by his or her real name? 

I remember working for a birth announcement company many years ago and typesetting baby announcements for the late Saturday Night Live actor Phil Hartman.  He ordered two sets of cards:  a large quantity with his named spelled "Hartman" and a smaller quantity with his name spelled "Hartmann," presumably for his family and close friends.

When I was younger, I used a stage name when I sang in bands.  Even my band members didn’t know my real name, although I would have told them if they’d asked.  Come to think of it, my own husband originally knew me by my stage name and only switched to calling me by my real name after we started dating seriously.

Interestingly, my husband is known by everyone except his relatives and childhood friends by a stage name he has used since he was in his early 20s.  That’s one of the reasons I didn’t change my name when we got married:  his real name doesn’t mean anything to me and I only ever see it on legal documents.

Just when I’d given up on alternate band identities (not to mention the faux by-lines I often had at a small magazine, designed to make it look as though they had more writers than they actually did), along came the blogosphere.  When I went to BlogHer last year, I had a difficult time deciding how to introduce myself.  Am I myself or one of my blog identities?  How do I smoothly include all those selves so that they’ll be remembered together?

It can be rather exhausting presenting different faces to the world depending upon the situation.  I used to compartmentalize my personality: I’d be one person at work, a slightly different person in my community service organization, and yet another person around my friends and bands. 

Over the past few years, I’ve started to remove those distinctions.  Now I’m pretty much just ME, in any setting.  What you see (or read) is what you get. 

How do the rest of you pseudonymous bloggers feel about the division between your blog identity and your real self?  Do you use other names in other contexts, too?  Are you the same person no matter what name you’re using?

This is my 523rd post (I wasn’t paying enough attention to mention my 500th post a while back) and today is the two-year anniversary of this blog.

I thought about doing a heavily linked retrospective of the topics that have had the most Google-juice over the last two years, but that’s what the archives are for.  If you’re new to this blog, I invite you to dive in and experience the dizzying combination of Sea-Monkeys, recipes, personal anecdotes, good-natured rants and self-absorption that make up the Average Jane oeuvre to date.

Aside from the writing, my favorite thing about being a blogger is belonging to such a great community of other bloggers.  Between the enormous list of BlogHers to the left and the always-expanding list of "Blogs I Like" on the right, I have so much reading material every day that I can hardly tear myself away from the computer to sleep at night. 

I look forward to continuing this blog as long as I can still think of things to write about.  I may never make it past the "D list," but that’s okay – I’m having fun.

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, I figured this was as good a time as any to tell the story of how I met my husband and how we started dating.

It all started about 14 years ago or so when I was singing in a hard rock band and dating a guitarist I now refer to as my "psycho ex."  We needed a drummer for our band, so he and I ended up going to a drummer’s house for an audition/jam.  While we were there, another drummer showed up.  He had long, curly blond hair like Robert Plant and was wearing an awesome black leather trench coat.  I thought he was mighty fine, but oddly enough the psycho didn’t seem to react with his usual jealousy.  We all stood around outside and chatted for quite a while after we finished playing.

Fast forward seven or eight months:  I’d kicked the psycho to the curb a while back and had recently broken up with a guy with whom I could never have had a future because he was allergic to my cats.  In the meantime, I’d put ads up on music store bulletin boards looking for a new band to join.  I wasn’t having much luck finding a band or a date.

Then one day I got an answering machine message from a guy who had seen my ad and wanted to talk about starting a band.  The message was garbled and I couldn’t make out the phone number.   However, I heard enough to know that it was the hot drummer I’d met before.  Damned Radio Shack answering machine!

Fortunately, he called back when I was home.  We made plans to meet and talk about music.  When he arrived, I discovered that he wasn’t blond anymore, but then again neither was I.  That didn’t make any difference once we got to talking.  The "meeting" rapidly turned into a date.  We went out for Chinese food, had McDonald’s vanilla cones for dessert, and rented "Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey" and watched it on my horrible, old console TV that needed to be pounded on periodically when the screen turned green.

We’ve never been apart since.  He moved in indecently soon after we began dating (not that it was a huge deal – he really didn’t have anything except clothes and drums) and we got married about two years later.  We’ve now been married for more than eleven years.

You may be wondering if we ever got a band together.  Well, not so much.  Actually, we played together briefly in 2004, but that was the first (and so far the last) time.  Clearly, the band thing was just a pretext.

My husband has always told me that he knew I was "the one" from the moment he met me at the other drummer’s house.  I don’t know if I was quite that certain about the whole thing, but I have to admit that when we finally met again, the old cliche of "feeling like you’ve known someone forever" definitely came into play.

So Happy Valentine’s Day, honey!  I look forward to being your Valentine for many more years to come.

I had exactly one goal this weekend:  record vocals over three or four of my band’s songs.  My husband recorded some instrumental tracks at my band practice last weekend, and since I really need a quickie demo CD, I wanted to get some vocal tracks down in a hurry.

The band’s been having a lot of trouble getting the sound we want.  When I brought the guys into our home studio, they weren’t very comfortable playing in that environment.  The guitarist was particularly unsatisfied with the sound he was getting plugged into the digital mixer.  He ordinarily plays at full, bone-crunching volume through a Marshall stack, and the digital emulators we tried just weren’t producing the same sound and feel.

Thus, we went with the live sound just to get something to work with for now.  I’m sure we’ll go back into the "real" studio again eventually, but not in the next few weeks.

So anyway, it turned out that the audio files on the laptop just did not want to be transferred to CD and taken upstairs to the studio.  It took forever for my husband to coax them all out, one by one, so they could be set up for my vocal tracks.  Grrr.

After an abortive recording attempt on Friday evening, we tried again on Saturday evening.  I warmed up, tackled the first song and managed to get a pretty decent take on about the third or fourth try.  Then we moved on to one of the songs that I kick myself for writing to be so difficult to sing.  I did about five bad takes in a row and then gave up.

On Sunday, we managed to squeeze in one more song between lunch and my husband’s band practice.  It’s another one that’s kind of challenging to sing, so I have a feeling that my husband/producer will end up putting together the vocal track from the "good pieces" of all five takes.  Sorry, honey.

I need a minimum of three songs for the demo I have to provide to enter a Battle of the Bands next week.  I’ll probably revisit the song we gave up on Saturday evening and hope things go better this time.

My husband and I had a long talk over the weekend about the weaknesses we perceive in our own musical performances these days.  He feels that his timing isn’t as good as it used to be.  I find that there are some flaws in my vocals that I can’t seem to fix, even though I’m aware of them.  He thinks his solution is to practice more often (and hope that the problem doesn’t stem from one or more of his medications).  I think it may be time for me to find a new vocal coach.  It’s probably been 15 years or more since I last took lessons.

I’m certainly no perfectionist, but it frustrates me to be kind of good at something that I’d like to be really good at.  I hope that with more practice, a little training and persistence, I can get to where I can effortlessly sing any vocal line I write for myself.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep plugging away at take, after take, after take…

Update:  I got in touch with a local voice teacher and I’m scheduled to start lessons on Thursday. If I keep this kind of thing up, I won’t be able to call myself a procrastinator anymore!