Facing the music

I was up late last night. Of course, this meant doing the rounds with housecleaning, but I also logged in at MySpace to fiddle around with my profile and leave comments on pages. (An online friend recently had a baby and I wanted to congratulate her. I ended up FORGETTING to do that once again, and got distracted in checking out some pages.) I have also had to email someone I know named David. I have had to email him for WEEKS and....I KEEP FORGETTING!!!! ARGH! I swear, I need to stamp it on my forehead: "Email David." Ohh, but then I wouldn't be able to see it. Hm. Oh! I could write it on my hand! There we go! Now I just have to make sure I don't slap my forehead afterwards. Haha. Then I'd have "liame divaD" on my forehead.

Hmmmm.... liame divaD? Hmm.... Liam E. Divad. Yay! A character name!! IT'S MINE!!! *gets all possessive-like* Maybe I could model it after Liam Jackson (this guy: Liam Jackson ). Heh, that'd be cool. Then I could email him and say, "Hey, LJ, for once, I modeled a character after someone I know!"

Anyway. The MySpace stuff I did LATE last night wasn't for naught. I mean, sure, it HAS actually started to become a distraction for me. Not only am I constantly getting ideas for people to look up and changes to make to my profile, but I'm also TRYING LIKE CRAZY to post a bulletin about the latest issue of my E-zine, a latest essay posted online, and send out a call for book excerpts. (My darn weak Internet connection!) One person I know complained that I was "wasting so much time on MySpace" even though it wasn't like she was standing next to me with a stopwatch to prove that. At the time, she was wrong. I was only on there once or twice a day. But now I'm always going back there. It's like 'oh, I forgot to do this' or 'I forgot to return the comment favor with this person.' Etc. Sometimes I try to STAY OFF of there and my online friends IM me saying "please comment on my new pictures!" Etc. Ugh. Anyway. It wasn't a waste. I ended up checking the pages of the guys who are part of the band Grynch. I'm writing an essay about living next door to a band. In this case, Grynch (these guys: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=10470359 ), and as I checked the pages, I came up with some new material to add to my essay. For example, one member, the drummer Tobby, has a page and on it I read the comments about how he was on the radio. I was all like, "Eck. He was on the radio? When did THIS happen??" I was tempted to run over there and ask him myself, but it was kinda ten minutes to 2 a.m., so maybe that wasn't a good idea. I also checked Darrell's page, chuckling over how he listed himself as "78 years old." (WTF??) (As a side note, I don't know ALL the guys in that band. I mostly talk with Darrell, Sean and Tobby. I haven't yet "officially" met Kyle and Jon, but I HAVE seen some guys smiling and waving at me as they walk in/out of that house. I just smile, wave back, and sit there thinking, 'Who's that?')

I am trying to think of just the right angle for my essay. At first, I was going to make it into one of those "what it's like living next door to a band" type of thing. But...eh. It's really not all that exciting, folks! LOL Besides the fact there are ALWAYS people going in and out of that house and I'll occasionally catch sight of them loading up this BIG van to go practice somewhere, it's really not all that much to write home about. (And I would LITERALLY write home about stuff; my family's in California.) (.....*bawls*) When I had first found out that I was living next door to a band, and not next door to a bunch of guys who liked to hang out on the front porch fiddling around with guitars (which is what I first THOUGHT! LOL), I told an online friend and he typed back, "How appropriate." I joked, "At least I can't complain about the noise." Then one day, my daughter, ex-husband and I were hanging out on my front porch, and my daughter started dancing. I asked her if she was hearing music (Note: I'm deaf, her dad's deaf, but she can hear. Got it? Good.) and she nodded as she pointed at my neighbor's house. Now, I knew they don't normally practice at home. Darrell told me that would cause problems with the neighbors. So I wondered what music they were playing loud enough for a child next door to hear. Maybe one of their tracks? Or maybe one of the neighbors had just pissed them off. Well....if it WAS one of theirs, I'd have to teach my daughter the RIGHT way to dance to that kinda music: Headbanging. So maybe I could write about being deaf and living next door to a band. Hm, when I read Tobby's page last night, he was talking about how music was his life and all that. It made me remember my passion for music, too. This passion suffered a HUGE blow when I lost my hearing at the age of 13, but even still, I grew up knowing music, hearing music, dancing and singing to music. Music was ALL around me. Now it wasn't. It was just next door! A reminder of the one thing I could never accept losing my ability to hear: Music. Something that represented that burning flame within me every time I had danced and sang with family members as we had the Beatles playing. Or Elvis. Or Creedence Clearwater. Johnny Horton, Ronnie Milsap, the Bee Gees, Beach Boys, Air Supply and Hank Williams, Jr. Yes, we had a VERY eclectic mix of music playing in the home as I grew up. I remember my cousin and I singing a Pat Benatar song as we swinged on the swingset. How my sisters and I would sing a beloved Bonnie Tyler song on car trips. How every New Year's saw us on the coffee table, dancing and singing. Darn. Just THINKING about it makes me nostalgic. Kinda sad, too. Oh, boy. I better stop talking about this before the tears start forming. :(

This morning, I woke up early. I DID NOT want to get out of bed. It was too. Dang. COLD!! Brrr!! I was a little sleepy, too, but as I thought more on that extra material to add to my essay, I became more and more awake. Yes, I COULD write about the MySpace stuff in this essay. And it just MIGHT be better off with the "being deaf" angle. I made a mental note to ask the guys if I could take a picture of them to go with it, and I inwardly groaned when I remembered my digi cam is LOUSY!! Ugh. I once tried to take a picture for an article with that thing, but it was soo fuzzy. Dang. My nephew, Nathan, gave me a digi cam, but I can't figure out how to get the darn thing to WORK! *sigh* I thought more about this essay. For some time, I've thought of pitching it to Rolling Stone Magazine. Now, THIS is my "dream magazine" to get published in. Forget Good Housekeeping. Forget Reader's Digest. Forget Newsweek. I wanna get published in the Rolling Stone! I love, LOVE that magazine. Even though I keep reading about bands and musicians I can never hear, something about this magazine keeps drawing me to it. Something just "connects" me to it. I have one Jimi Hendrix commemorative issue of this magazine, but I've gone through other issues, too. The thought of trying to get my essay published there had me all excited. I wasn't sure of my chances, though, but I had to TRY!! I'd have to write and rewrite this thing until my eyes bleed just to get it "right" but I was certainly going to give it my best shot!

I had to. I had to at least try. As they say in the writing community, "The worst they can do is say no."

I started thinking about something else, too, now that I was more awake: My novel revisions. I HAVE to get the novel revisions DONE. Finished. Over with. I'm planning to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, and since the editor said the door was open until December, 2006, I have to get CRACKING!! I'm running out of time. So, I REALLY gotta get this baby done and sent off to the publishing company.

That was enough to get me out of bed this morning and face the cold. That, and the prospect of hot coffee.