Should I Worship Rabbit Christ?

While I was walking down the street today, the Rabbit Jesus walked by me again with followers, this time reincarnated as a woman in a red dress and listening to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy." It seems there was a religion tailor-made for me.

The week went by without too much event, with the exception that I was mildly and persistently depressed for most of it. A combination of lack of sleep and work frustrations will do that to me. But there were perks. For example, on the subject of work frustration, Jeff Vandermeer posted a set of his former odd jobs, my favorites of which are numbers 4 (because, as an editor, I can wholly understand harassing someone to the point of grammar-related violence) and number 5 (because it's just a damn good story). Until I found my present job, I worked as a temp/freelance theatre technician (i.e. functionally unemployed guy/novelist) for a few years, and the one thing I remember was consistently wondering why nobody else seemed to notice that the office was crazy. It was never anything particularly glaring--with the exception of the job in a medical-records office, in which the woman just above me had less than a high school education, couldn't organize records by the alphabet, and regularly everyone marveled at me because I could turn on a computer, or the time I was fired from a job for doing precisely the thing that my supervisor had asked, or the...okay fuck it, there were lots of things glaringly wrong in these places. Mostly, though, there was just an overall sense that something had to have gone terribly wrong in people's lives before they would accept sitting at a desk under buzzing fluorescent lamps, staring at sheets of paper so white they were blue, as normal. I never accepted that this was normal, which is why, I'm proud to say, I never made a very good temp.

In my current job, lots of things are glaringly crazy, but the people I work with all seem to recognize this; so I at least have the comfort of knowing I'm sane.

The workshop for the next Tantalus show started this week, directed by my friend, Glen, and his roommate, Devin. I worked with Glen last year on Dreadful Penny's Midnight Cavalcade of Ghoulish Delights (say that five times fast, and win a prize), but my role in that was more as a writer than as an actor. This time, I'm an actor, and it's a little strange having Glen and Devin direct me. But the workshop's been fruitful the past couple of sessions. On Wednesday, I came to the workshop and promptly realized I was supposed to have brought an image that I felt summarized the show. I told Glen I hadn't done that, and he handed me a magic marker and some paper and said, "Well, draw something." I did. A single-page, four-panel cartoon, summarizing the entirety of Norse mythology with stick figures. I was very proud. I think rightly so.

Theresa Nielsen Hayden, who writes the Making Light blog, wrote a blog the other day on lamps, which included several pictures of paper lamps. They are gorgeous, and they inspired me to a new project. When I saw the last Redmoon show (which is what sparked my week where life felt like theatre), I was captivated by the paper lanterns that they used at the end (in which boats sailed by us on the river, joined by Death bringing the soul of one of the characters with him. The image was beautiful. The lanterns were beautiful. And I figure, since I'm moving soon, it might be a fun thing to try to make a paper lamp to light one of the rooms in my new place. My mind is already all abuzz with possibilities.

I work tomorrow, as a journalist at Graph Expo, which is much less glamorous than it sounds (or much more, depending on how glamorous you think a printing trade show would be). So I should go to bed soon. I leave you with "An Open Letter to Hummingbirds."

Off to drink some tea out of my dragon teapot. And then sleep.