Creampuff Revolution

Creampuff's Neighbour Who Hates Us Part II

Part 1 of the neighbour who hates us

I remember the afternoon when the music started. It was Sunday, April 2nd, at around 4pm. Katr and I were in our dining room, playing a game of Wingspan, when we started to hear loud shitty death metal blasting from what seemed to be NWHU's house. It was a pleasant day and the windows were open. The music was so loud I could Shazam it from inside the house, but I wouldn’t, because it was so shitty.

I poked my head out the back door to see what was going on. Up on NWHU‘s balcony, she had a little boombox set up with the speakers pressed up against the balcony railing, pointed directly at our house.

I wrote down the time the music started, closed the window so we wouldn’t have to hear it and went back to playing. But I was shaking with fury. She tried to Noriega us in our own house! Also, it’s not like we are the only people who can hear this music. Literally everybody else in the neighbourhood was being blasted by death metal on a Sunday afternoon. For, as it turned out, three full hours. 

The tarps were one thing. This music blasting is really next level. Who does that? It was bananas. But when she didn't do it again for the rest of the month, I figured she had gotten it out of her system.

Speaking of the tarps: it turns out that anger tarps take a lot of maintenance. It was springtime on Vancouver Island and it was windy and rainy. At least once a week, she and her son had to be out in the yard, adjusting the tarps, trying to keep them from falling down or breaking the branches on the various trees she's tied the tarps to, so I was not surprised when, at the end of April, she gave up and removed them. 

I hoped she had taken them down because she was over it. But then I remembered that every spring, NWHU leaves for an entire month. I don’t know where she goes, maybe home to hell. But from the end of April to the end of May, we had a golden time. 

But as we all know, nothing gold can stay. Back to some boring details about the pool.

It turns out that the bylaws say that the WATER part of the pool has to be a minimum distance from the fence line but your pool decking can be right up against the fence. Guess where ours ended up? HA ha!

The proximity of the decking to the fence was a bit of a surprise to us too, but I think we wouldn't have worried about it if NWHU wasn't already SO FURIOUS about the pool.

I remember saying to Katr that when NWHU returned and saw the progress that had been made, she would completely lose her mind.

I...was correct.

(To be fair to NWHU, the way the pool deck was positioned along the fence, if you stand on the front edge of the pool deck, the fence is only waist high. If you wanted, you could stand on that corner and peer into her yard. This is the area we had promised to cover with privacy greenery, but I imagine that might have been hard to envision in the moment.)

Probably my favourite incident during this period was one evening when I was in the kitchen, looked out the window and saw NWHU on a ladder slowly lowering an extended measuring tape over the fence into our yard.

I opened the window and yelled "NWHU, DO YOU WANT TO JUST COME OVER TO MEASURE?" and she called back "No, this is fine!" HAHAHAHAHAHA

The next day, she took a bunch of photos over the fence and our masons called her a Karen.

Armed with her measurements and photos, NWHU called her city councillor. She called the mayor. She called the local building inspector and his boss and his boss's boss.

We received a notice from the chief inspector of the city that we were going to have to have an inspection from the city's chief bylaw officer to make sure that everything was aligned with all the permits we'd received and all the bylaws.

This was obviously stressful for a lot of reasons; shit had PROGRESSED, so now there was no way to move the pool if it turned out the fence line was not the property line (although short of getting a survey done, which she would have to pay for and we knew she wouldn't, because she's cheap, there was no way to 100% disprove that the fence line wasn't the property line and also, they built the fence around this big tree that's in both our yards, which seems like a weird thing to do if that's not the property line BUT I DIGRESS).

She also accused us of raising the grade of our yard higher than the bylaw limit of four feet. Fortunately, this wasn't an issue because we'd dug into the high part of the yard, so the pool deck was just matching the current grade of the yard.

The chief bylaw officer sent our local building inspector out to inspect the pool and report back to her. We knew this guy, because he was the same guy who had already signed off on the previous two inspections. He rolled his eyes as he described the stink that was being made at City Hall by NWHU. Apparently she was well known to them, thanks to her fighting the development that went behind us a couple of years ago. He assured us that short of hiring a lawyer to dispute where the property line was, there was nothing she could do about this pool. Because we had followed all the rules. And because we and our pool contractors are not idiots.

He wished us luck with NWHU. 

(Sidenote: in the middle of all this...Pumbaa went blind! So we were all pretty fucking stressed out.)

Once it became clear that we were not going to bow to her demands and she had no legal recourse because the city was all "this is fine", NWHU returned to her audio terrorism. We started to take videos every time she blasted her boombox at us. Although I have to say, she did switch up the radio stations frequently and I did Shazam a few good songs. 

Then one morning, just after 5:30 AM, which I happen to know is the time NWHU's son leaves for his daily sports team practice, a car alarm went off. It sounded like it was in our yard. It went off for about a minute and then shut off. Then about 15 to 20 minutes later, it went off again.

At this point, I would put nothing past NWHU. I took my phone and busted out the front door in my pyjamas and took a video of her big truck parked as closely as possible to our house with all its lights and alarms going off.

Over the course of that weekend, she set her own car alarm off seven more times, once at midnight, ripping us from sleep and filling me with so much fury, I could not get back to sleep for two hours.

I did a lot of microdosing during this period, just to keep from constantly screaming.

I thought I could do this in two parts but I was wrong, sorry, there will be a third part. Stayed tuned for the thrilling conclusion but also, here is a supercut of some of NWHU's greatest hits.

And for those following along, a 50x50 update:

Books read: 23 

Air fryer uses: 35

No-dessert days: 10 (hahahahahaha)

Vegetarian meals: 49

Meditating but not while in bed: 9

Creampuff's Neighbour Who Hates Us Part 1

As I mentioned in my plum duff post, we have a Neighbour Who Hates Us (NWHU). But it wasn't always so.

When I first met this neighbour, she was quite pleasant and friendly. Probably about our age, British, often busy around her property, where she lives with her university-aged son. She has an adorable cat.

We had nice chats in the driveway or when we met putting out the recycling but I soon noticed that, as our British friend Past would say, NWHU was "one of nature's whingers."

She works from home a lot because her manager at work is just "a terrible person". She tried to sue the city when the development behind all our homes went up (about a year before we moved in). There was always something annoying her but it wasn't us, so things were fine.

We sponsored her son's rowing team; he shovelled our driveway when it snowed - and then she did it once when he couldn't. I baked cookies and brought her a bottle of wine that first Christmas. Good times.

So what went wrong?

Part of the appeal of the house we bought was that the yard was big enough to accomplish what for both of us has been a life-long dream: having a pool.

Did we feel like bourgeois shitbags for installing a pool? Sure. But did that stop us from starting the pool-building process even before we actually moved into the house? No, it did not. We met our wonderful pool contractors in January of 2022 but because they were insanely busy, we didn't break ground on the pool until March of 2023.

The pool did not come as a surprise to NWHU. I mentioned it the first day we met. She remarked on the large parts of the pool sitting next to our garage when she was over shovelling. But she never asked us anything specific about it in the 14 months before we started building, even when we had to take down a large tree in our yard (which I warned her about, because it was noisy) or when I texted to tell her work was beginning the next day.

Two days into the dig, I got an angry text from NWHU. Highlights included:

1. Why was the pool so close to HER yard (instead of in the MIDDLE of our yard, so that both sets of neighbours were "equally inconvenienced" by its existence)?

2. The pool equipment would be noisy.

3. The pool might leak and flood her property.

4. She wouldn't have any privacy. Because of the pool. In OUR yard.

5. She and her son are upset by this whole thing.

I'm not someone who thrives on confrontation, so I found this pretty upsetting. But setting aside her tone, I could understand some of her concerns. So, after consulting with Katr, I sent back a friendly but firm text. Highlights included:

1. The placement of the pool makes the most sense with our yard layout and it's within the allowable distance from the fence line.

2. I hate noise too! Our contractor assured us that the pool equipment would be the quietest available, well below the allowable noise level in our area.

3. It's a steel and concrete frame and a vinyl liner and it's dug into a hill so if there WAS, GODDESS FORBID, a leak, it would flood our property, not yours so...you're good.

4. Uh...no one wants to look in your yard, lady. But there will be landscaping for extra privacy for ALL of us.

5. Pretty sure your son doesn't give a wet shit. Maybe he would like having friendly neighbours with a pool, just saying (this was internal monologue only).

She IMMEDIATELY fired back a text, ignoring my explanations and said that our pool contractors were too focused on OUR needs and were not considering the neighbours. She finished up by saying that this was a kind, respectful neighbourhood and that we must move our pool at least 15 feet from our shared fence.

I wasn't really sure...how to respond to this.

Like, it's not like these guys showed up and started digging. It had taken us 14 months to get to this place. There had been months of planning, and official engineering reports and permits. Plus, at this point, the hole was already dug. The steel frame had already been assembled in the hole.

Moving the pool now would require getting new plans drawn up, new permits, generally a huge delay and an equally huge cost.

And also...not to be a B but...IT'S OUR FUCKING YARD.

While I overfunctioned at a level detectable from space, Katr had the brilliant idea of getting in touch with the previous owners of our house (a young, active couple with two young children) to see if they had any tips for dealing with an angry NWHU.

We texted them and explained the situation, and they had some illuminating things to say. Apparently, NWHU had been in various neighbour feuds in the past, some of which I knew about (the development behind us) and some of which I didn’t, such as a dust-up she got into the neighbours on her other side about cutting down trees in their yard.

In the end, the former owners told us that we may have to be the bigger people in the situation, although they also reminded us that it was our yard and we should do what we want. In closing, they said that NWHU was lucky to have us as neighbours because when they lived here, they had a hot tub pump that was "loud as hell" and they "partied constantly" hahahahaha (I believe it, they had an OUTDOOR TV!)

Fearful that NWHU might have some sort of legal recourse to getting our build shut down, we then double-checked with our pool contractors to make sure that we were in indeed within the limits of the permit for building the pool (we were). They told us that if we REALLY wanted to, we could move the pool a foot or two away further over the fence, but that would necessitate another day of digging and moving the steel frame. They were clearly used to people freaking out during pool builds, and it was extremely calming to talk to them.

So.

Since I had answered NWHU's first text reasonably and with all the information she was actually looking for and addressing all concerns carefully and reasonably, and since the second text was basically calling us shitheads, in the end, we decided not to respond at all, the greatest flex there is. It was extremely satisfying.

The next day, as digging continued to progress for the backfill that would go in around the pool, I heard a great laughing from the guys outdoors. I looked out the kitchen window to see that NWHU had begun to hang a ragtag series of tarps along her fence line. Because...privacy.

Privacy side note: I feel I should point out here that we are the only rancher surrounded by two-story houses. Literally all of our neighbours can see directly into our yard from their second story, windows or balconies. Also, our yard has a slope, so if you walk up the slope to the back of the yard, we also can see into most everybody’s yard just by lifting our head near the fence. So it’s not like she has complete bubble of total privacy that’s been viciously pierced by where the pool is.

We texted the old owners about the tarps and they laughed. "Oh yeah," they said, "The tarps! She put those up when the other neighbour did some landscaping along their fence line that she did not like. And put them at the back when the new construction was behind her house."

Personally, I found the tarps to be a great solution. She didn’t have to worry about our trades looking into her yard. I didn’t have to see her fuck face. We started referring to her as "Our Lady of the Tarps" and I figured that once the digging was done, we'd all just carry on with possibly a bit more of a chill between us.

The end. HAHAHAHAHAHA OMG JUST KIDDING THINGS GOT SO WEIRD YOU GUYS STAY TUNED

And now, a long-overdue 50x50 update:

French lessons: 38

Boardgame plays: 24

5km walks: 27

Hours of knitting: 16

Dips in the pool: 50!!!!!

What the Fuck Has Creampuff Been Doing For the Last Ten Years?

There are a lot of memes going around right now about the fact that the decade is ending and WHAT HAVE YOU ACCOMPLISHED??

Hands down, my favourite response is this one:

there’s ONE MONTH left in the decade. what have you accomplished? more than that month has. that month didn't even begin yet, and it's November. fuck you, December, you worthless piece of shit

— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) November 14, 2019

I find this question very panic-inducing for some reason - what HAVE I been doing?? AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

It's obviously time for a narcissistic clip show. BUT, instead of jerking off to my own blog reading ten years worth of posts, I decided that I would try to remember - without looking at the archives - one random fun thing I posted about for each year. 

2010

I volunteered for the Olympics!

2011

I couldn't remember a single thing from 2011 and I refuse to look it up.

2012

We went to Hawaii! 

2013

I was the oldest nerd at a young adult fantasy fiction book signing.

2014

My play Camp Victoria opened at Lunchbox Theatre!

2015

My play The Good Bride opened at Northern Light Theatre! Also, we got a puppy but I didn't post about that until 2016.

2016

We got a puppy.

2017

Katr saved the house from burning down.

2018

I introduced readers to Beaver Mews, where the ladies go for love.

2019

I shared the one lifehack I've ever come up with on my own. I donate every year...but I've had the same poppy for five.

Anyway, I think focusing on what you've accomplished in a ten year period just leads to comparing your accomplishments with others and comparison is the thief of joy, so fuck that. 

 

Creampuff Goes to the Dogs

I feel like I'm really falling down on the "actual content" side of NaBloPoMo this year. Am I busier? Am I less inspired? Am I too busy ogling my incredibly gorgeous Dickens Village?

Anyway, here's a photo of a corgi my grandpa took in England in the 1960s.

Creampuff Guesses That Fuck-Up Fridays Are a Thing Now

Another Friday, another missed NaBloPoMo day. WTF Fridays?

In my defence, yesterday was a very busy day - a first thing in the AM vet visit, workin', a meeting with a writin' friend and then, at 3:30pm, we decided to put the tree up.

It did not go well.

Crenellated Creampuff

I ran out of time for blogging today, so here is a photo of my Grandma on a cannon.

Creampuff Misses her Dumb Games

Many years ago, Katr introduced me to an online game called Neopets and I became addicted. Basically, you have a virtual pet and...you have to feed it. You could play a bunch of weird mini-games to earn points to buy food to feed your pets and you could change your pet's outfit and you could battle your pets against other pets and you could have your own shop and you could have a house and decorate it with stuff you bought from shops. There was a lot of other stuff you could do to, but those are the things I mostly did.

This is my pet on the right, AdelinaVenus the Elephante.

I always miss Neopets this time of year, because for the month of December, they had an Advent Calendar in the snowy area of Neopia and you could visit it every day and get stuff.

I realize that I am 42, but this kind of thing still delights me.

I stopped playing Neopets several years ago, because it had changed hands a couple of times and became very glitchy and also, I recognized that I was spending waaaay more time on it than a person should.

I was game-free for awhile, until our friend Elai sucked us into a Facebook game called Pet Society. 

Pet Society was like Neopets Lite. VERY lite. It was more about shopping and decorating and adorning your pet, which I loved. It was a very popular game and I had many "Pet Society friends" on Facebook and we would just used each other for daily bonuses and everyone was fine with that arrangement.

Eventually, the creators realized they weren't making much money and they started to monetize the game and I will not lie to you guys, I DID pay a small amount of actual money to get non-actual items. My taste was exquisite. BEHOLD.

Indiana Jones themed week - although nothing was licensed of course, so it was Bindiana Bones.

The Boyal Bedding. My hat was the best.

 Bight at the Buseum.

 Had I known that they were going to shutter Pet Society with so little fanfare, I have taken screenshots of my countless other rooms, like the Barry Botter room and the room where it always snowed. GOD, I loved Pet Society. But it's gone.

I was briefly drawn into Castleville, but that thing just got too crazy and it wasn't fun any more, so I quit that.

Then I got sucked into Tiny Tower on the iPhone...and its companion game, Tiny Death Star...but after awhile, those both started to feel more like work then fun, so I gave them up too.

It's been a few years since I really got into one of these dumb games and I miss them a little bit. Katr and Drtr both have a couple of games that they both enjoy but they both like more complicated things. I'm a simple bear. Who wants a simple game.

All this to say - if you have any suggestions for dumb games, I am ALL EARS. Like this tiny warthog.

Tiny warthog cooling off in a tiny mud puddle. pic.twitter.com/30bFK53UOS

— Surprising Nature (@suprisingnature) November 28, 2017

Creampuff on the Mend

One month ago today, my stomach blew up.

In retrospect, I saw it coming, but I'll be be honest with you guys, I ignored it, because I was sad about my aunt and stressed about work and I wanted to eat my feelings, and enjoy coffee and drink to forget and take a Naproxen for my foot and then on Oct 16, I had a quarter of a pot brownie and we ordered Swiss Chalet and a few hours later, I woke up thinking I was going to die. The pain in my stomach was excruciating. After about 4 hours of agony, I actually threw up and WAS VERY HAPPY TO DO SO.

An aside: Chelsea Peretti does a bit in her stand-up special about whether you're from a barf family or a shit family. We're a shit family, so when I throw up, it is SERIOUS. I can't even MAKE myself throw up, because hell, if I could, I would probably have been bulimic through my twenties. So throwing up signalled that I had really crossed a line.

Long-time Creampuff devotees may recall that a similar thing happened to me back in 2010, which resulted in me experiencing the horrors of living gluten-free. After a few years of that nonsense, I discovered that, while I didn't feel GREAT if I ate a bucket of Timbits, it didn't cause the kind of great and terrible suffering you'd expect if I was actually celiac or had a serious gluten sensitivity. What really seemed to bring me to the brink of stomach disaster was the combo of caffeine, ibuprofen and stress. So I began to be very careful about the first two and was pretty much fine for seven years.

The few times I did have a more extreme stomach issue, I had a reliable stomach repair system. I would only drink water for a day, then add chicken soup in the next couple of days. Then some bananas and other bland solids. After about a week of bland times, my stomach would forgive my trespasses and I'd be elbow-deep in a Festive Special, just like old times.

Well, not this time, motherfuckers.

This time, any time I tried to actually EAT anything (vs drinking water or chicken broth), about two hours later I would get this crazy fist of pain up under my ribs that would last a few minutes or a few hours. It was the kind of pain where you can't do anything except pace around deep breathing until it's over. Clearly I had fucked myself up worse than ever before!

Naturally, I went to the doctor. And by the doctor, I of course mean the internet.

After researching my symptoms and the triggers I already knew I had, it seemed like what I was dealing with was gastritis - an inflammation of the stomach lining, often brought on by excessive consumption of NSAIDS, caffeine, booze (which I don't have that much of, but certainly had been drinking more of late) and (the one vice I do not have) smoking. 

In my search for how to recover from this crazy flare-up, I came across a "Gastritis Support" group on Facebook. And I joined it.

Here's a thing you shouldn't do: join a Facebook group for a physical ailment. Because:

• No one there is a doctor. But one of their friends is cousins with Jenny McCarthy, so.
  
  
• A lot of these people have serious problems. Like, they have been fucked up for YEARS for reasons that are unclear. And it's fucking scary when you're also sick and feel like you might never EVER eat again.
  
  
• People have a lot of remedies that work for them and get shirty when those remedies don't work for other people and then there are fights.
  
  
• This post:

 

After a week of totally failing to heal myself using my usual bland diet and the advice of yahoos on the internet, I did finally go to a real doctor, who agreed with my self-diagnosis, sent me for an h.pylori test (negative) and gave me a ten day course of pills (PPIs, a class of drugs I'd seen mentioned in the group) meant to lower stomach acid so that my sad, ravaged tummy could heal. 

I reported back to my Gastritis group that the doctor had prescribed these pills and all hell broke loose in the comments between the PPI haters and the PPI believers:

• "Dontt take them they wrecked my body"
  
  
• "She's only on them for 10 days and it's a mild dose."
  
  
• "PPIs make me worse"
  
  
• "I've been on them for 13 years and now I can't get off them without horrible consequences"
  
  
• "PPIs cause STOMACH CANCER and OTHER CANCERS, just drink oatmeal water and pray"

I defied the group and started the pills, while continuing my water and chicken broth regime. At first, I could eat about two tablespoons of something totally fucking boring at a time. Then I'd wait two hours to see if it fucked me up. Then I'd try two tablespoons of something else. Repeat.

It was like I'd given myself an involuntary gastric bypass. And I KNEW it was entirely my fault for ignoring the very clear warning signs my stomach had been sharing with me. But I was still very resentful and petulant about the whole situation. And also upset a lot of the time, because I was hungry. And you guys, this might shock you, but...I really like eating. Like, A LOT. And not being able to do it made me question my WHOLE LIFE in a way that wasn't entirely bad but still, omg, I JUST WANTED A FUCKING SANDWICH.

As a sidenote, Katr and Drtr were both saints to put up with me and my almost-month of wistful looks at their food and my occasional huffing of the peanut butter jar and my near constant bitching.

Slowly, slowly, I could eat more than two tablespoons of things at a time and I was SO GRATEFUL to, like, have a whole egg. I don't love sushi that much but I nearly cried when I could finally have a piece of sushi. Watermelon was a revelation. I made sweet, sweet love to a single green olive.

Anyway, it's been a month and I'm still being VERY careful about what I eat and how I eat it and how much of it I eat and it is fucking tiresome but definitely much better. But goddammit, it's holiday drink time, you guys! So today, I screwed up my courage and got a tiny decaf latte.

It was delicious.

 

Oh Hai

Welp, it's fucking May.

It's been awhile, so let's warm some shit up with some photos of my crappy knitting.

Macr's Scarf

I've wanted to knit a scarf for my BFF Padu's BF Macr for a loooong time, because he's a lovely human being and I want him to like me. Plus, I hear he makes my favourite food stuff - jam - and they have a beautiful new kitchen, so I'm hoping this will get me on the jam distribution list this summer. NO PRESSURE, MACR.

First, I had to consult with Padu about what colour Macr would like (manly blue) and then I had to wait for Sundara Yarn to dye a suitable colour (because Mama doesn't go to the yarn store - the yarn comes to Mama). Then I had to find a pattern that looked easy enough that I could knit it while watching Buffy but not SO easy that I'd get bored as hell, because Macr is about 25 feet tall and unless I was going to knit him a jaunty cravat, I knew I'd be plugging away on this thing for awhile.

It took me a year. 

The pattern I chose was the Tilting Rib Scarf. There are much better photos of it at the link, my photos are the WORST. I really couldn't capture the cool texture of this scarf AT ALL. But you have to look at it anyway.

And here it is ON THE RECIPIENT!! This was definitely a mistake, because when a recipient returns of photo of themselves wearing my knitting, THEY MAY BE KNIT FOR AGAIN.

Looking good, Macr!

Geha's Hat

I started knitting this baby hat for Chezza's daughter Geha on the night of the U.S. elections. I thought it would be cool to tell Chezza that I started knitting this hat for her daughter, the future of America, the night the very first female president was elected in the United States. But instead, I started knitting it on the night The Handmaid's Tale became a real possibility. 

Fortunately, it KINDA looked like a pussy hat, so in the end, little Geha was ALL SET TO RESIST. 

UNfortunately, despite her attempts to shield her baby from the horror, it looks like Geha found out about Trump.

In related news, I laughed so hard about this tweet today that I almost blacked out. 

Trump's nuts are 2 for a dollar at my grocery store. pic.twitter.com/5mlamP9fkh

— amber ruffin (@ambermruffin) May 2, 2017

 

I feel like I need to make a list of things I've been meaning to blog about so that I don't wait another five months to use my blog, WHICH I PAY MONEY TO HAVE. Here's a start:

• How our vet suggested our dog go on a vegan diet
• How I got my scalp biopsied (nothing life threatening)
• How Katr put out a literal fire I started
• The "new" Anne series
• The new Handmaid's Tale series
• Awesome books I have read this year
• Anachrony

 

Creampuff Has Zero Ideas

Me: What should I blog about today? I don't have any ideas.

Katr: Why don't you blog about not having any ideas?

Something I love about Katr is how generous she is with ideas. "Ideas are infinite," she likes to say as I steal hers, "ideas are for sharing!"

I, on the other hand, am very miserly with my ideas, because I fear that for me and my tiny brain, they are a finite resource. Which is why, for example, when I hear about a show description that sounds in any way similar to something I've done, I get all panicky like the douchecanoe I am, instead of knowing that it's probably fucking fine.

When I finished The Good Bride last year, I didn't have any ideas for what I was going to write next except that OMG, I'M SO BORED OF STORIES ABOUT STRAIGHT PEOPLE, NO OFFENCE, STRAIGHTS, so I figured that whatever I worked on next would be "something gay". And I read lots of books and watched lots of movies and listened to a lot of music and was a homosexual and a year later, I have zero ideas.

I'm collaborating sporadically on a few different things with a few of my favourite people, so it's not like I'm not excited about stuff or that my brain isn't working. I just don't have any NEW ideas.

This wanky navel-gazing came up because Playwrights Theatre Centre here in Vancouver has this program called "The Associates" where you apply with a "big idea" for a play and you get to work on it with them for THREE YEARS OMG SO FUN YES PLEASE.

I applied the first year, in 2010, and wasn't selected. Then I applied in 2013 and got to the "please send more support materials" stage and then didn't get selected.

So this year, I was hoping to at least make it to the interview part of the process before they realized that I'm just not that smart but that I do occasionally stumble into good ideas, the way a bear stumbles into your campsite and gets her head stuck in your peanut butter jar. (That's a thing, right? I don't know, I don't really enjoy camping.)

I was pretty sure that I would have an idea before the deadline. I REALLY wanted to apply for this thing and I've been waiting for THREE YEARS to apply again. But as the deadline got closer and closer, my lack of ideas loomed larger and larger. Like, let's be clear - it's not like I had a bunch of bad ideas and rejected them. I literally could not come up with a single thing.

I wrote my letter of intent. I updated my resume and gathered my support materials. All I needed was an idea.

And then the application was due in just 24 hours.  And I still had NOTHING.

A little crestfallen at my impending failure, I took a moment to reread the submission criteria in the wild hope that it would spark something, ANYTHING OMG COME ON. And that's when I saw that this year, they had changed some of the wording in the application materials. This year, the project in question should "somehow reimagine theatre."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH OKAY THEN.

I'm sad to say this, but I'm not personally interested in reimagining theatre. I think it's great that other people want to reimagine theatre. You go, Glen Coco. I will buy tickets and marvel at your genius and hope that some of it rubs off on me as I wander barefoot through the bushes, dressed like a possum, watching scenes from your parents marriage performed in the hollowed out trunks of redwoods while the rain licks my face and tells me secrets. But Jesus H. Christ,  I'm just a simple lesbian. I just want to tell cool stories and hear/see cool stories. And if I have to come up with a great idea that ALSO somehow reimagines theatre? Yeah, I'm not going to get that application in on time.

The application was due on Tuesday and I still feel a little pang when I remember that I couldn't get it together. I REALLY wanted in on this. But clearly my mind field needs to lie fallow a little longer. That or I'll never have another idea again. Either way, life is still pretty great and I, as my wonderful friend Glst likes to say, am a very lucky fish.

This corgi knows what I mean.

we've almost made it to the weekend, you've earned this: here's a happy lil doggo playing with balloons pic.twitter.com/F6MfVn0EXu

— megan brown (@thatgirlondeck) November 17, 2016