My captain hook of a wednesday

Today, was sort of a day of bad form.  My day started with my alarm deciding not to go off, or me turning over at 7am and turning it off only to roll back over and go to sleep, or one of my roommates sneaking into my room at 7am and turning it off because I've obviously not heard it.......regardless....I woke up about an hour and a half late, jumped out of bed at 8pm (when I normally have to leave the house by 7:30 to get to work on time) and rushed my ass out the door to get to work by 9:15am.  Pretty good, if I do say so myself.  I strode into work just as they were announcing my name as Employee of the Month.  Perfect timing.  Employee of the Month Lisa Burton striding in at a cool 15 minutes late.  Primo.  I then had a mediocre day at work, the most awkward encounter with a guest EVER (what kind of 40 year old man stands next to you with his hands behind his back just smiling in your direction and mumbling under his breath what I can only take to be conversation directed at me, but I wouldn't know because i was keeping a safe distance from said creepo).  Then I had writing time with my friendo MC Princeton, funtimes, then went to the IO for some improv, didn't realize it might be close to sold out and took one of two remaining last seats in the theatre,  Bad form, Burton.  Bad form.  Minor bad day, but a weird feeling day nonetheless.  Anyways.  Bees still can't count past three, so I guess I've got a one up on bees.  Or maybe like 997 up on bees.  That's on a patient day when I want to count that high.  Hope you had a great humpday!!!    Thanks for reading, homies!

Lisa B. Urton.

Filamentous Tangles of Tubulin

Been a while, eh?  It gets tough to write every day when things get busy.  And things HAVE been busy!  I've been working a lot at the museum, doing a lot with Tarantino, working towards this team at the playground, taking classes, doing my internship, planning my trip back to MN for a bit.  It's getting pretty exhausting!  By the end of the day the last thing I want to do is sit down and write a blog that I'm sure no one reads but me (and all I ever end up doing is going over it thinking how I could have written it better).  Add to that trying to have a social life and I've got a full plate.  I've been writing a two woman sketch show with my friend MaryCait and we meet tomorrow night which is exciting!  We need to send out our submissions by tomorrow so they get back on time to MN for MN fringe festival so I think I'll do that tomorrow night as well.  If we get in, then I'll be back in MN for a lot of this summer.  That'd be great.  I miss people in MPLS and I'm excited to be back.  I really feel too that I need to start traveling more.  I'm catching a really bad travel bug.  If I could find a job that sends me around the country, that would be ideal.  I'd love to get paid either to travel, or to do something that allows me to travel while I do it, like writing or painting or photography or math.  If someone paid me a ton of money just to do their taxes yearround I'd do it if I was getting paid enough to travel.  A couple science tidbits for you:  Bees can understand the numbers 1-3.  That's not many numbers, but when you're a bee, I suppose you probably can only visit two or three flowers before you're overloaded with pollen and need to drop off your shit to the hive.  One through three is all you'd need.  Also, the science news website is a little ridiculous sometimes.  Sometimes the news stories are great and profound but today one of them was about how when cells get old they let in the "bad stuff".  Duh.  That's why old people end up in hospitals and retirement homes.  Because they're weaker.  Their cells weaken, allowing for easier disease transmission.  Come on!  Science news, you can look at the big picture and figure that one out, I'd like you to put more interesting articles up please.  You know, the kind that make me go "what?!  Wait a minute...I want to read the rest of that article because I'm sure you explain how that works..."               Thank you all for reading my evening rant....I'll write tomorrow morning!          

Hope you have a great eve   

Lis

Slept like a Superstar today

It was what turned out to be sort of a lonely hump day for the ol' El Bee.  Work was fine, stayed a little later to tour the 2B folks (those that work upstairs in the offices of the museum) then came home and slept most of my night away.  For about three hours in fact.  I don't know if I just needed the sleep or what but upon waking I can't help but feel like I've just wasted a night.  I have to work tomorrow morning so there's no use in going out at this point though I have gotten three calls and/or texts tonight from folks that are out on the town (or in another town, as it were) that are having fun and I can't help but feel left out or something.  To trudge after that float on the pity parade, I've been making excuses for myself NOT to go to the gym, even though I get three free gym times at YMCA this month, and then I can pick up my scholarship app to go on a discount hopefully.  Basically, I just feel fat or something.  On the plus side, not today but every other day before that recently, I've been feeling uber-motivated to do stuff like write and look up fringe festival info and get things rolling for a few months from now and all that.  ALSO we should note a few sciencey things (yes, I promised for the last couple days and I'm finally delivering)

1.  Antarctica is warming.  We've known this for a while but I couldn't help but wonder today what is going to happen to the fortress of solitude.

2.  Scientists are finding more and more genetic similarities between twins on a DNA level.  Duh.  Come on, scientists, they come from one egg....  Duh.

3.  Three seperate families of fish were classified as the EXACT SAME FISH today.  Whalefish.  So it's Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species....and marine biologists got three different Families for the same fish because the male, female, and larvae look so flippin different...can you believe that shit?!  This is deep-sea fish territory we're talking about, the kind of crap that I go ape for....I could have been the bitch to figure this out and then the Whalefish could have been renamed from Cetomimidae to Burtonimidae.  I want to discover a fish.  A fish no one has ever heard of.  Oy.  Not to mention the two other steps to classification (genus and species) that were below Family that these fish had previously been classified with as well.  At least somebody noticed it right away.  I bet there are hundreds of bullshits like this, bugs and worms and lizards that are the same animal at different stages of life that scientists just named different to be all, "there are thousands of this type of animal" when there are really maybe only three with thousands of life cycles or something.  

Ok, I hope you had a fabulous Wednesday!!!!  Adios, amigo.

Thank you for reading.

Also, I think I want to try riding a mechanical bull sometime.  It sounds like fun and looked like a lot of fun in the movie Urban Cowboy.     

Lis

Diagnosis: New Presidentosis.

What a day!  Ladies and gentlemen, I don't need to tell you all again what happened today that we all experienced, so I will tell you what I experienced.  I was walking down to Starbucks (yes, sue me, all the small coffeeshops in my area close after 7:30pm in the wintertime) and an older African American man started walking with me and at first asked me to purchase an Obama Pin.  "no, thank you" I politely replied, and was then nervous that this man kept following and talking to me until he said, "oh, hell, everybody's done with this shit for the day, I may as well get some cookies for my kids and go home...you mind if I walk with you for a little bit?"  We had a nice conversation about Obama, Change, Change not happening overnight, what I was doing in Chicago, if I was from New York (I was wearing my New York City hat and the man seemed disappointed to find out I was not, in fact, from NYC); but I was then surprised to find out that this man was a substitute teacher.  He was talking to me about his day and how one kid got up in his face today and how he lived through the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights Movement and what right did this high school kid have to get in his face and get mad about nothing in particular on possibly the most historic day this kid is ever going to see in his lifetime.  It was only about a ten minute conversation before I reached Starbucks, but it was a great Inauguration Day gift, and I'll pretend it was from Obama.  Thanks, Pres B-O.  I'll take it!  

Hope you all had as great a Tuesday as I did, and I'll hopefully see you again tomorrow!

Lisa Patriotic Burton

holes in the socks of my weekend inauguration

I have holes in both the socks I'm wearing today.  I feel this is perhaps a metaphor for the day I had.  Though the socks kept my feet warm, my big toes were left cold and estranged from the rest of my warm foot.  My shoes were great.  They kept my feet from getting wet today, but still there seemed to be something just a little off about my step.  From the outside everything was perfectly fine and normal but I was just going through the motions, secretly knowing that the holes existed.  I think the holes in my day could perhaps translate to the sleep I lacked this morning.  My body woke me up at a shockingly early 4:45am and I was unable to get back to sleep.  No one else knew this about my day, and I'm sure I seemed perfectly fine today but I felt weird and I think it was the lack of sleep.  This changed my morning routine.  For example, I was able to dress myself a little matchy-matchy today and I curled my hair and made a lunch that I didn't have to pay for in the cafeteria.  Don't get me wrong, I liked it.  I felt pretty good about the amount that I got done this morning, but I still felt weird.  Then I forgot it was MLK Jr. day because I'm a pud.  I thought maybe I was just lucky that the trains weren't crowded, that maybe karma had caught up with me or something and somewhere down the line I had done something great for someone and that it was coming back to me in the form of an easy commute.  Turns out not to be the case.  It was MLK Jr. Day.  Then we got slammed at the museum, which is always good and bad.  Good because the day goes by fast.  Bad because we're super busy.  

My weekend was very great!  The folks from the Brave New Workshop Theatre came down for sketchfest which was super fun!  The shows I did at sketchfest went really really well, and I thoroughly enjoyed having the passes to get to see some other sketch groups.  I even got to spend some time with Mike while they were all in town!    

On that note, I hope you have a great inauguration Tuesday morning and I thank you for reading and I'll write tomorrow!

Lisa b.

I don't really like water

I don't like the act of drinking water all that much, or maybe it's that I don't like the taste or something.  I'm probably just effing weird, and yeah it feels good to have water after a run or other high energy activity or when it's hot but if given the choice to quench my thirst with water or orange juice, apple juice, kool-aid, watered down flat diet coke I got from McDonalds for lunch yesterday, or nasty lemon-lime gatorade, I'll choose any of the latter and leave the water on the table.  I can actually feel the difference when I start drinking more water, my body feels better but it's getting it into a glass to put into my mouth that I have trouble with.  I'd rather taste something, maybe?  Or maybe it's that the Chicago water doesn't taste very good?  But this has been a recurring problem throughout my life.  Hrm.  Anyhow, today I'm going to "check out" of the U-505 and get my pewter pin and be able to give tours for realsies.  I'm excited for the show on Thursday but have not yet found an intern to fill in for me at the IO yet, which is a little nerve-racking.  Even if it's just for two hours so I can bust out and do the show and then come back, that would be enough, I just need to FIND somebody!  Sooo busy!  Ah well, I like it that way.  Hope your Tuesday is smashing!  

Thank you for reading!

Lisa B.

P.S.  

Tomorrow I'll get back to science, I swear!

Just what I did on Monday. That's it.

Today I did some things:

1.  Gave my first tour of the U-505 all on my own, with NO help from anyone.  I should be getting my pewter pin in the next day or so.

2.  Sat at home thinking about how my socks are all dirty because it's been so wet outside and I should really invest in some good snowboots but I won't.

3.  Went to Gingers after having chatted with my friend Tina online and ended up running into a bunch of people I know and playing set at Gingers tonight, which was fun and some of the first improv I've done onstage in front of people in months.

4.  Did tech rehearsal for show at Sketchfest on Thursday....went awesome.

That's what I did.  That is all I have today.  I am tired.

Hope you had a great Mondaytacular!!!  Thanks for reading, as always.

Lisa B.

historian fantasy rant

I wish I was a spy.  Well, sometimes I wish I was a spy.  I just wish I could do everything because there are so many things in the world that get my engine turning!  I've recently turned over in my head the thought of becoming a historian.  There were these two drawings in my parents' house growing up that pictured an old man in a huge library with thousands of books all over the place, large bookshelves from floor to ceiling and a comfy armchair in the middle of it all.  I want to be that old man and I have a feeling the only way to do that is to become a historian.  That would be the only feasable way I could be interesting and long winded but justify having an enormous library where I spent most of my days.  I could sort of introvert myself into my library and make huge creative discoveries and connections between ideas.  I could know about scientific history as well as world and social history (sometimes the same thing) and write large interesting volumes that many people would of course want to read because hey, I'm a historian.  "This was writ by that great historian, Lisa Burton" they'd say.  Perhaps it would be long after I was dead and gone.  People would come in and discover my bones in a secret passageway with all my writings strewn about me, put them into a book and say, "goodness, this woman had an incredible grasp on history!"  And wait!  I would have super secret information about the world because people would need to connect the dots to tons of discoveries and why use a computer when they could just come to me, the garbage center for useless knowledge, and I could use my brain to connect the dots for them and tell them what book they can reference it in so that their discovery of the masks of the Guadelahara can be archived with the correct artifacts because they are said to have mysterious magical powers.  Hm.  I'll sleep on it.  Hope you had a fun Thursday and I'll probably write tomorrow!  Thanks for reading!!!                

~Lis 

History, Coal Mines, and Billy Corgan

History is sooooo so so so interesting.  To everyone.  Young, old, rich, poor, everyone loves history.  Something about it is wonderful, magical even.  I get to give tours now of the U-505 submarine at the Museum and I'm totally digging everything that goes into it.  It's like previous to this I had never heard of a submarine or something.  All of a sudden doors have opened up and wars seem interesting to me.  Never before have I been so intrigued by military machinery, no offense all the boys I know, but I just never have up until this point.  I have three books that I'm going to try and get from the library so that I can read through them.  Three boring-sounding books about submarines that I am so excited to read I could pee myself.  I got to walk some kids through the submarine tonight and I decided that at the point I'm at now that was maybe a bad idea because the kids and I just kept going back and forth about how totally sweet it was to be on the inside of a real life submarine.  I then realized that maybe I need to do my research and get over this fantasy of old-timey war.  Most of my friends will be excited to know this spark of history interest has ignited a fire that may be difficult to put out anytime soon because not only am I now interested to know more about WWII (not that I didn't know a lot before I mean come ON we're all required to learn about that stuff in school just now I WANT to know) but I also am excited about US history in general.  Ok, enough.  

Aside from that, I went on a coal mine tour today, also very interesting.  The machinery coal miners use is heavy duty stuff!  Man alive, to think so many men got paid so little money to do so much work, and right here in Illinois no less!!!  Yikes!  Also, Billy Corgan was in the Museum today.

Hope your Wed was spectacular!!!

Lisa B.

Twyla heck am I asking so many questions in this blog?

I am currently reading Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit" and though I'm finding a lot of the book to be self-helpey, I'm really enjoying some of the basic points about harnessing the creative power within and using it on a regular basis.  Today I'm addressing a section of the book having to do with muscle memory as compared to improv as an art form/skill.  I'm going to open the floor for discussion on this because I'm not sure how I feel just yet....and I'm not even sure I'm making an accurate comparison here, but these are the wires that connected themselves in my head as I was reading:

If you learn skills while learning improv say.... how to just react to whatever "gift" is given to you, or how to spout out the first thing that pops into your head....and if skills learned for dancers that are like that, how high to raise a leg for a certain dance move or how to spin around without vomiting all over the first row....are all of these skills grouped into the category of MUSCLE MEMORY?  Because we're then applying those skills to other structures or forms in the improv world, and for dancers it would be to different dances.  We should be able to do those things without thinking about them but to do so we really had to work at it at first...well, for most of us.  IF THIS IS TRUE I ask you this.....is that a good thing?  Aren't we, in improv, constantly trying to stretch ourselves to break out of habits and patterns to be ready for whatever is thrown at us?  Don't we do messed up extra hard excersizes to warm up to scramble our minds to accept the impossible every time we step out onstage?  

I hope I didn't confuse you too much today.  For my small mind, this question is like wondering about the size of the universe.

I hope you have a pleasant Monday evening!  Mine will be filled with grilled cheese and tomato soup!

L. Burton

A letter to the early morning CTA train operator

Dear CTA train operator,

You are a wily fox if ever wily a fox should come.  You are the designer of daily destinies and 90% of the time you are the god I curse.  Though for the most pare you are the witch that snatches away my hopes of being early or on time to work, this morning you are the savior of my sore bag-heavy arms.  After being shoulder to shoulder on a full megabus, not getting sleep, waiting 15 minutes in the cold for my bag, cursing myself for being the idiot who wore jeans with holes in them, and sorely missing the city from whence I came, I was not surprised when I walked up the stairs onto the platform where my brown line train sat, doors freshly closed.  But you saved me.  You noticed.  You opened the doors and I thirstily scrambled inside.  

I thank you.

L.M. Burton

Oy, what a year and welcome 2009

This last year I lived in three different cities, created and met many of my goals, have started to take my creative education to the next level with writing and taking more and more classes, been really poor and really rich at points, purchased my first laptop and my first awesome cell phone, promptly lost that cell phone three months after I had it, started a blog, started reading blogs, saw the conclusion of one relationship and the beginning of another, met countless new friends, been depressed for maybe the first time in my life (oy, money!), saw history, had some of the happiest and proudest moments of my life, and overall, I think 2008 was productive, but a rough one for me.  I'm really looking forward to do more in 2009 and try and figure out what the honkin' heck I really want to do.  Do I want to keep pursuing the funny knowing there are millions of funnier people out there?  Do I want to go back to school and get an education degree and be a teacher?  Would I rather spend my life traveling or settle down and then travel to my little heart's delight?  One day at a time, people.  For now, I'm pretty happy doing what I'm doing but I'm looking forward to being in one place.  I know what I want and how to get there, this process is killing me, though.  I'm pretty impatient.  I'm dealing with the risks I've taken thus far and I'm excited about more risks.  2009 will be another good year for me.  A life-changing year perhaps?  Isn't every year?  Don't we come out different?  Or are we the same person we started out as?  I like to think I'm a little different than I was last year.  For 2009:  I'd love to get a camera.  I'd love it.  Ok, it's time for me to watch some tv until I have to get on the megabus and go back to Chicago.  

Hope you all had a pleasant New Year!!!  Happy 2009!

Lisa M. Burton