Suzi Moonlight

I’m a night person. I can’t see any advantage to being a morning person – not that I could ever be one. Night people have the world, mostly, to themselves. The world is quiet at night. Like robots, everyone shuts down. I like that. Morning people like to pretend they have the world to themselves, up before others, but it’s like yelling ’shotgun‘ as you’re headed to the car. There’s always someone running behind you trying to subvert your claim. Morning people walk a razor’s edge of knowledge that the world is waking up around them. At any moment there they are, the rest of the world. Night people have a good 4-6 hours of the world only getting further and further away.

With the world shut down, I like to tie up loose ends at night. Do the things I didn’t get around to during the day. Several of them are on my toolbar right now. I’m working on a networking site project. To find out what applications are fun, easy to use, and reliable, I’ve signed up on a few social networking sites and have some blogs on other sites. (Don’t hate me, but LiveJournal is not fun to use) I do NOT have a myspace page. I simply cannot bring myself to have one.

Okay, that’s kind of not really the truth. I have two myspace pages. Oh God. I can’t believe I’m admitting that. Neither page is really mine. One is… a silly, mocking page for [that which cannot be named]. The other is in my pen name. I have pimped them, but my author page is marked private, and I only did it at the urging of my publisher. I don’t log into them very often, monthly at most, sometimes months go by…

I can’t put my opinion about myspace here, because my friends all know it by heart, and it would definitely lead them here. I have one sentence that shows exactly what myspace is… come to think of it, I may be able to dance around it so it won’t show in a search engine. If you’ve been on the net a while, you’ll remember there were users of a certain bulletin board service that thought it was the internet, who were mocked for their poor social skills and lesser degrees of intelligence. They all migrated to myspace. I think I’ve worded that safely enough.

For having pages on social networking sites, I’m not very social. I’ll accept almost any ‘connection’ offered, but I don’t search people out. I’m testing the applications. I don’t really have the time to put too much effort into each of them. Some sites, like Gather, are crazy busy. It’s like no one on there works, and they all send me email all day long.

I don’t belong to any dating sites. I have dated… I’m thinking it’s three right now, but I could be wrong… guys I met online. One I dated a while. Two I went out with once. I like the concept of online dating – what if my perfect man lives in another state/country? – but I haven’t pursued it. I write back to everyone who emails me on my domain. I’ve made some good friends that way.

I realized recently I don’t have dating as a priority. I checked my to-do list. Checked my extended projects list. Nope, forgot to write it down. I met a guy recently online, and we wrote to each other for a while. It was like a slow first date. Instead of realizing we had very little in common in a few minutes, it took me a few emails, spread out over more than a week. By that time, he wanted to meet. I thought ‘what the heck’, then couldn’t figure out when. I finally gave him a date and time. I saw it as an appointment, he could tell. I felt bad about that. I only went, because I felt like I owed him a face-to-face. He seemed uptight even in email. Uptight and I don’t go together. A friend recently said I remind her of Dory in Finding Nemo, because I’m astounded and amused by the dumbest things. (I was giggling about a blurring css code on a webpage – she didn’t find it as amusing)

I have a TV rule for late night. Do not stop on PBS. I don’t have cable/dish, because I would spend all day watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. I would. I would watch Dobie Gillis, just to see Maynard. No, I don’t have a crush on Bob Denver. I like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. So smart, yet so easily confused! I would watch Bewitched. I would watch just about any black and white movie. I would watch SciFi, Discover… I would never leave the house.

I won’t stop on PBS, because I will get stuck there. I watched some of Ken Burns’ War series. I watched a documentary about Typhoid Mary. The best thing I’ve watched was a version of Hansel and Gretel. It was scary and wonderful. The trees in suits were the best. I thought they might give me nightmares, but I couldn’t look away. The worse I’ve watched, when I made the rule, is a documentary about some world hairdressing competition. I tried to pull myself away from the TV. I told myself it was a stupid thing to watch. A waste of time… I could not care less about hairdressing… I watched the whole thing. I try very hard now not to stop on PBS.

I do some real work late at night as well. I work on updates for my domain. It’s in dire need, but rather large, and I like playing with the code and graphics. Seems I never get anything finished. I have a few writing projects I’m working on – on which I’m working? One is a play. I’m stuck 3/4 of the way through it. I love the characters. I love the setting. It reminds me of a poor man’s Iceman Cometh, but I don’t know where it’s going.

Usually, I just let the characters tell me. They are mum. When I write, I don’t outline. I sit down and write. I finish what I’m writing. This one is beyond me. I think it’s safe to tell you (yes, only you) the working title is Tattoo. It’s not a shocking, pushing the envelope play. Like I said, Iceman comes to mind. I tend to write with a masculine voice, probably because I’m not a big fan of female writers and draw from what I’ve read. Most of my writing is taken as a man’s – a lesser Lethem.  A reviewer compared my writing to Philip K Dick. – don’t I wish.  A friend said my writing reminded her of Richard Matheson.  I asked her if he’s known for misspellings and bad grammar.  She didn’t think it was funny.

I use genderless names for screenplays, fiction, articles, etc. – pieces of my real name that can be used without gender, except for on my book. That was strictly a pen name. Well, not strictly. Actually, it was a neoist take on my real name. ::laugh:: I never realized that. [Neoist I used to share mail art with] would be proud.

So, that’s what I do at night while most everyone is sleeping. Not very exciting. But the quiet gives me time to think without the energy of others around. Everyone needs time to think.

thoughts.txt

Original file date: 08/01/07

Bill Gates killed intelligent software by saturating the market with left-brained, unintelligent software. See: Lotus Agenda

Though I didn’t like it when it was released, I’ve come to realize Master of Puppets is the best heavy-metal song ever written.

Imagine, fifty to a hundred years from now when our current time is mocked for the belief in evolution and global warming. They’ll laugh at this time like we laugh at the ‘flat earth’ people.

Sometimes when I’m listening to music, it strikes me as odd that people write words and music and perform/record them for other people to listen to. There’s an entire industry built around the concept of, “Listen to this song I can sing.”

I don’t get spring fever. I get fall fever.

If you name a product ‘Chocolate’ it should be brown. A dark brown would be nice.

After posting, WordPress found THIS.