I’m sitting at work, decompressing from the infuriating 100 minute commute (to cover the vast distance of 27 miles — thank you Los Angeles for your oh-so-useful mass transit system that is currently useless to me).
I’m supposed to be writing for my show, but, seriously, I’m so dang frustrated from the drive, that I’m taking a few minutes for myself to catch my breath and settle down.
I gotta stop drinking coffee when I drive, too…and I shouldn’t listen to democracy now. It just gets me all riled up.
Couple of things: I really enjoyed reading the trash-talking and back-slapping that went on in the last two posts. I’m happy to see that there are other people around who know what and what not to take too seriously…and if you think I got worked up about hockey, just you wait until baseball season starts. I’m calling out all the Giant fans right now. Now that I think of it, wouldn’t it be cool to do a WWDN fantasy baseball league, at Yahoo? I’ve played in those the last two seasons, and it’s really really fun. I’ll add that to the TODO list.
Drew, from FARK, who has become a sort-of friend of mine, is doing this really cool thing, that you should all check out.
If you live in or near the City of Angels, and you enjoy your old pal Wil Wheaton, and you enjoy the live theatre, you can come and see the two combined, starting in two weeks, because my friend Keith and I are kicking off a whole new season of the J.Keith vanStraaten show!! I’m really, really excited about this season, and I sure hope that lots of WWDN readers will come out, see the funny, and then introduce themselves after the show. Unless, of course, you’re a freakin’ weirdo. Then I’d prefer you go see shows at The Groundlings.
Heh.
Ahh…I feel much better now, thanks to the cathartic process of writing, and the soothing sounds of Catherine Wheel, who give us this entry’s title.
I hope you all have a wonderful day!

Seven things I am thankful for today:

1. Spending the entire day with my family.
2. Playing a Madden 2002 Tournament with Ryan and Nolan, which I lost. Badly.
3. The way Nolan puts his hand on my shoulder every time he is standing near me
4. The way Ferris sits at my feet, and looks up at me, waiting for attention (instead of chewing the hell out of [important thing], like she did as recently as a few weeks ago)
5. Anne coming outside, sitting on the ground, and getting grass stains on her butt while I mowed the back yard
6. Nolan and Ryan laughing hysterically at my re-creation, from memory, of “Space Madness” while we ate dinner
7. Super Collossal Brownie Sundaes(tm) for dessert.

Imagine if you can that it’s the summer of 1988. Not too hard, what with the terrible economy, deficit spending and incompetent president.
Still with me?
So it’s 1988, and a little show called Star Trek: The Next Generation is in it’s second season. It’s struggling a little bit, experiencing the typical sophomore slump of any new series, and a writer’s strike is not helping very much.
In the summer of 1988, I turned 16 years old, and, just like the Corey’s, I got a License to Drive!
It’s well documented within the Star Trek community that Patrick Stewart and I bought almost the same car, a 1989 Honda Prelude…the, uh, only problem is, I bought a model that was just slightly cooler than his. (He got the si, and I got the si4WS, baby.) Patrick has really had fun over the years, teasing me about how, since then, he’s always had cooler cars than I do, to which I reply something about his driver.
What’s not well documented, however, is this thing that happened, in the summer of 1988, in the parking garage at Paramount, where we all parked our cars.
We were all working late one night, probably shooting blue screen on the bridge, so we were all wrapped at the same time (a rarity). I excitedly walked to the parking garage with Jonathan Frakes, who I was already looking up to.
So we’re walking back to our cars, and we’re talking about something, I can’t quite remember what, and I really feel like Jonathan is treating me like an equal. He’s not treating me like I’m a kid. It really makes me feel good, and I say to him, “You know, Jonathan, I can tell, just from talking to you, that when you were younger? You used to be cool.”
He laughs, and I think to myself that I’ve cemented my position with him as cool contemporary, rather than lame ass kid.
Then he says, “What do you mean, used to be?!”
I realized what I’d said, and how it didn’t match up with what was in my head, which was, “Gee, man. You are so cool now, as an adult, I bet that you were a really cool guy, who I’d like to hang out with, when you were my age.”
He knew what I meant, I could tell, and he really tortured me about that, for years. Every time I see him nowadays, he turns to a person nearby, and he says, “You know, Wheaton here told me that I used to be cool.” We laugh about it, and I make the appropriate apologies, and explanations, while Jonathan makes faces and gestures indicating that I am full of shit.
Now, when I was working on Trek, I always wanted to be:

• As good an actor as Patrick,
• As funny as Brent,
• And as cool as Jonathan.

I’m still working on those things, and Jonathan just recently showed me how cool he still is.
Jonathan directed this new movie, called “Clockstoppers“. It’s a movie geared towards kids, but it seems smart enough for their parents to sit through it without dreaming up ways of eviscerating the writer responsible for robbing them of 90 minutes of their weekend, which sets it well apart from most “family” films.
Ryan and Nolan have been talking about how they can’t wait to see this movie, and I mentioned to them last week that I was friends with the director, and I had heard that it was going to be really cool, and I was pretty sure that I could get us into a screening.
So I called up Jonathan’s office, and asked if I could get some tickets to a screening, so I could take the kids, and be a hero to them. Jonathan’s assistant said that it would be no problem, and I’d hear from someone at Nickelodeon about the screening.
The next day, the phone rings, and it’s totally Jonathan himself, calling me back, telling me how happy he is that I want to take my step-kids to see his movie, and that he’s really happy to get me into the screening on Saturday.
See, the thing is, Jonathan is what we in Hollywood call A Big Deal(tm), and usually people who become A Big Deal(tm) don’t usually talk to people who aren’t also A Big Deal(tm).
But Jonathan is not only A Big Deal(tm), he’s also A Really Great Guy(tm), and he didn’t need to call me back, personally. Actually, I really didn’t expect him to.
But he did, and that proves that he is now, and always has been, cool. Despite my fumbled proclamations as a 16 year old dorkus.

I woke up this morning to find my entire dining room table covered in cat pee.
Goddamn Felix. He won’t use the cat box, and I guess he didn’t get to go out early enough last night…so he decided to use the grocery bag on the table. Little bastard even got some on my cool G4 hat.
Why do I bring this up? To show, by example, why I haven’t written anything in 2 days.
I got nothin’, man. Nada. Zero. I got UPN ratings for ideas to write about, my friends.
I think it has to do with my cooler-than-me, funnier-than-me, better-looking-than-me wife’s previous entry. I haven’t had anything that could top that, except for the final installment of SpongeBob Vega$Pants, but I haven’t had time to write that up…and it’s killing me, believe me!
Oh, and I’ve been printing out all your comments, and giving them to her. You guys have all made her feel really, really happy, and I want to thank you, sincerely, for being so cool. Maybe we can talk her into coming and playing with us sometime again, in six months or so. 🙂
So I sit here this morning, constantly refreshing the traffic map, waiting for a break, so I can leave for work, sipping this Chai mate tea that I just got, lamenting my lack of inspiration.
Oh! The cat pee reminds me of something funny that happened when I was doing the “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Sunday Show” show at ACME last year. My friend Kate had written this really funny sketch, that was a take off on PBS’s “Great Performances”, where a bunch of us wore all black, and performed 80s pop-tunes as dramatic spoken word pieces. It was hellafunny, and it was one of my favorite sketches in the show. For my costume, I wore black jeans, socks and shoes, and a black shirt, that was sort of a “hipster” shirt, that I got at Hot Topic. It was polyester, short-sleeved, and had this pseudo-shiny stuff up the center. Boy, that description really makes it sound gay, doesn’t it? Trust me, it was fairly cool.
So we’re all changing backstage, getting ready for “Great Performances”. I can hear the audience dying, cracking up to “Let’s Swap”, we’re all talking a bunch of shit to each other, because that’s what actors do, as we’re changing.
I pull my shirt over my head, and sit down on the couch to tie my shoes…and I am overwhelmed with this terrible, terrible smell. So I ask Maz if he smells it. He does not. Dara doesn’t smell it, either, nor do Chris or Kevin. But Cynthia is sitting next to me, and she smells it, and we both realize that it’s my shirt, but we can’t quite place the horrible smell…it’s not just cat pee…it’s something more, probably because of the chemical interaction between polyester and cat pee. Dammit, I wish DATA were here. He’d know what it was.
What?
So I realize that I have a pretty serious problem: we are on in less than a minute, and I smell like something you’d find in a back alley in Hell’s Kitchen, right after Republican budget cuts have forced the closure of another homeless shelter.
So what do I do? I suck it up, and I go out there, like a man. A cat-pee-stinkin’ man, and I do my bit in the sketch, and I make the audience laugh, while making Dan Fester, who is standing next to me, nearly gag.
Why?
Because the show must go on, Virginia. The show must go on.

I’m going to start by saying that I am so lame when it comes to computers. I don’t even know how to turn one on. In fact, I’m pretty bad with any electronics. When the daylight savings time happens, the clock in my car is off by an hour for six months. Before meeting Wil, my VCR was always flashing 12:00. Pretty lame huh?
My friends tease me for having a husband who can build his own website, yet I have to ask what a BLOG is. You get the picture. So when Wil told me that he put on his website (he has to read me his entries and prints out responses for me to look at) that he wanted to do something cool for me for putting up with all the time and energy (and MANY profane words) he has put into building and maintaining his site, by doing sort of a “donation box” for a gift for me, I was so touched by this. So touched, in fact, that I had Wil set up this whole little deal here so all I had to do was type what I want to say. And boy, do I have a lot to say. I’m so excited. I feel like I finally have communication with this whole world that I only hear about! I know, you’re probably thinking, “what the hell is wrong with this girl? Does she live in some sort of cave?! Well, as a matter of fact, yes. I live in an Atari 2600 world. Simple, yes. Advanced? No. But that’s ok. I have a husband who can look things up for me if I really need to. But it is pretty cool to finally have a chance to have my thoughts about all this heard. So first things first. (Oh and by the way, I still play my Atari. what the hell is this Playstation thing anyway?)
First of all, I was totally surprised when I came home from work today and Wil told me about his “donation box” story. Surprised mostly because I have friends who read his entries everyday, and didn’t tell me he was doing this. But also that there were enough donations that he was able to get me a gift certificate for a yummy day at a spa. Mmm… massage…. oh sorry, where was I? Anyway, these past few months have been very difficult, but at the same time very rewarding for Wil, as he was able to get his site going. You know, I think it has been for me too. Wil would stay up FOREVER working on this, which meant me going to sleep by myself, and work on it every free moment he had. So it’s nice to see Wil so happy with all his hard work paying off for him. He feels like people get to see what he’s really like, instead of what some “I hate Wesley” fan guy has to say. And just in case you were wondering, I had never seen Star Trek until they started running that marathon on TNN or TNT whichever one it is. Wil watched that thing practically the whole time it was on. He kept saying, ” Oh, this is my FAVORITE episode.” ok seriously, he said that like 20 times. But it was kinda funny that he really likes that stuff. Even when he’s in it. So once in a while he’d say, “look honey! There I am! Man does that suit look stupid. Oh man, look at my lame hair!” But he’s all into science fiction stuff, so that must have been pretty cool to be part of something you like so much.
Anyway, his website means so much to him and I think that it’s so awesome that people have responded so well to it. Of course, he tells me about the occasional lame ass that has to throw in his negative two cents now and then. But I guess that’s the beauty of this on-line world. You don’t have to say your shit directly to the person’s face. But I guess you do what makes you happy. I think that Wil tries to not take that crap seriously. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt any less. I never thought that all his time spent on this entitled me to any sort of gift. I have the gift of a happy husband. (I know… gag) Nevertheless, I am extremely touched by your generosity, and I’ll be thinking of you all while I’m having my spa day. Thanks!
On to the next subject. The most recent entry of Wil’s (at least the one he read to me yesterday, and printed out all the responses for me to read) The 7 things you are thankful for today. My list is for today and everyday since I am a dork with this computer and probably won’t get a chance to do this for another six months
1. My husband- his unconditional love for me and for Ryan and Nolan (my men)
– his little love notes in my lunch I take to work or my suitcase when I go out of town
– the way he rubs my ear at night to help me fall asleep
– when he thanks me every time I do his laundry
2. My aforementioned men (Ryan and Nolan)-the way Ryan laughs so hard he can’t sit up (just like I do)
-when Nolan tells me he loves me and gives me a kiss in front of his class (because he doesn’t care what his friends think yet)
-that they both still make me Mother’s Day cards out of construction paper
– they have Wil’s sense of humor, even though they aren’t biologically his
3. My friends- the handful of close ones I have had for years
– the same ones that have to hear the same stories about the bullshit my ex husband is doing now
– the same ones that we take turns taking each other to the airport
– the same ones that go do stuff with me while my husband works on his website
4. My job- that I’m actually doing something I enjoy-something I chose for a career
-that I can make my own schedule so I can be here for the kids or take a day off to hang out with Wil
5. My health and my family’s health- I know that that seems like a typical one, but we have had a lot of death around us recently, so I am truly thankful that we are all well.
6. Chocolate- need I say more?
7. The Simpson’s- now you’re probably thinking “what? does she mean OJ?” No. Definitely no. As in Homer. You see, that show is probably the one thing that makes Wil laugh harder than anything. It’s funny. He laughs so hard he puts his hand in front of his face, but you can still see that the tip of his tongue curls up. Isn’t that weird? I wonder why that happens. Probably the same explanation as me not being able to sit up straight when I laugh really hard. Just one of those things. Anyway, hours of entertainment, that’s all. And the happiness it brings my husband.
I just loved reading all the responses and lists of everyone’s 7 things. Wil is pretty cool that way. I guess that’s why I married him. He’s a smart guy. An honest, funny, loving, caring, wanting to make the world a better place kind of guy.
I think this whole computer thing isn’t so bad after all! Of course, it’s taken me an hour to type all this. No seriously, it has. I think my 10 year old could type faster than I could. I guess I should finish now. I think I’ll go kick Wil’s ass in some Air-Sea Battle- guided missiles of course. He hates that he can never beat me. Then again, I am 3 years older than him. That gives me 3 more years practice. Whatever the case, he’s still getting his ass kicked by a GIRL!
Thanks again for the awesome gift! And please, tell Wil to wear his glasses (they totally look like the ones Corey Feldman wore in Stand By Me… I think he jacked them) while he’s on the computer. He looks cross-eyed when he’s on this thing for too long (which is everyday)
See ya!
Anne
P.S. Did Wil ever finish telling you about the Vegas trip back in September? I think that was how all this got started and he mentioned a while ago that he hadn’t finished it yet. So let me sum it up for you…. his sketch comedy show was awesome, William fucking Shatner still doesn’t speak to Wil (but I guess he has since then…Weakest Link thing)….we… I should say I, lost my ass at roulette(is that how you spell that?) and our second-hand smoke filled 5 day extravaganza was finished off by my laryngitis, and upper respiratory infection due to all the damn smoke -illness. God I hate Vegas. I can’t wait to go back. Later!