It’s 5pm and I’m at Spiderhouse, using their free wireless, enjoying the sun, getting bitten by mosquitos, sending out press releases to Los Angeles and will be podcasting later.
If you’re around, come say hi, I’m at the back!
Dear Austin.
Please stop presenting cool things to do for about six hours so I can get some sleep.
Love,
Astrid.
Austin is really damn good. Have met lovely people, not the least of which being Hollis Webb, a local musician that I happened to catch at Spiderhouse today. He was great onstage and then mentioned having a day job, and since I haven’t interviewed many artists who are working a day job as well as trying to make a go of their craft I talked to him afterwards and got an interview. Very cool and interesting guy with very insightful things to say. Go look at his site, and buy his CDs so he can quit his job and play guitar more often; I’m confident that the world would be a better place for it.
Yesterday I got interviewed by Insite magazine; apparently I’m going to be in the September issue, which is cool. I also found out - drum roll please - that I’m going to be on Dudley and Bob, Austin’s big morning radio show on Monday just before I roll out of town. Rock on.
Which means, of course, being at the studio at 7am, but hey. Nothing I haven’t done before.
Then driving as far towards Vegas as I can possibly get. Yee haw.
Ended up at a party tonight with a lot of really interesting people; actually ended up interviewing one since he said he thought that the monetary system was a form of violence, which I thought was a really interesting perspective that I hadn’t heard before.
I may also have an interview with another paper tomorrow. What I do know is that I’ll be busking on Guadalupe tomorrow, so if you’re in the area stop by, say hi, throw tomatoes. You know, the usual.
(I spent $3 today on a bracelet that says OH NOES because every time I look at it I laugh, which is crucially useful at a juncture where I keep ricocheting between hysterical laughter and the verge of a nervous breakdown.)
I messed with Texas. You heard me.
No update last night because there was no reliable net connection that would not cost me a billion dollars. I had it all planned out in my head and everything.
Went past Harry Anderson’s magic shop in New Orleans today, pants afire to meet my magic and Night Court hero. Unfortunately since he’s doing a magic show five times a week he’s not going into his shop anymore. Boo! I wilted just a bit more in the million degree heat.
I did thumb through one of his books though, and opened it to a page which said “Don’t believe in miracles. Depend on them.”
Got to Austin, at long last, after an all-day burn across Louisiana and Texas. Louisiana has a lot of creepy dead swamp trees that I’ve only ever seen in movies, and huge dragon flies were buzzing the car at a billion miles an hour. We, at one point, had to drive the wrong way down an interstate to avoid waiting six hours for an accident to be cleared up (it sounds a lot more dramatic than it actually was but I did feel very Dukes of Hazzard). Apparently everything is bigger in Texas, including miles, because it seemed to take for-goddamn-ever to get here.
But we made it. I am here until early Monday morning, tearing it up. I’m so excited about Austin; I’ve been here once before and it’s one of those cities that grabbed me at the first moment.
We are being put up in an apartment so swanky I keep expecting security guards to come and bounce me out of the place, the weather is perfect, and I may actually get a decent amount of sleep tonight. And I am setting up interviews and readying to take this place over and there’s a rollerderby on Sunday.
Austin, I think I love you.
Made it to New Orleans without incident. Mississippi and Alabama are pretty amazing; swamplands and long bridges through marshes.
Just before leaving Athens (which I was sad to do), I managed to drop my cell phone and absolutely shatter it, right before having my picture taken for the Athens Banner-Herald. I’ve dropped that phone a million times and it finally gave me the finger and gave up the ghost. So I had to procure a new one, and if you have the old number and call it it gives you the new one, so not to worry.
New Orleans is hot as hell, we’re staying in a hostel parked beside a car that has a sticker from my home town in the back window (haha), and are just setting out to check things out a little and catch up with the only person I vaguely know here. The focus of New Orleans: interviews. And a podcast.
Austin is next in the sights, from Friday to Sunday seems like. Then … well, looks like Vegas.
Just remembered something that Marshall Brain said that really resonated with me:
Nine out of ten things you do won’t work, so you have to keep moving towards the one that does. You have a 90% rate of failure, and if you can accept that then you can get through to what succeeds.
People have been asking me why I’m being so positive these days, and that is why. Because the more schemes fail, the closer I get to the one that doesn’t. Failure is part of this process so it’s ridiculous to hate failure or not want it to happen. Whether failure is a negative experience is entirely depedent on what you do when it happens.
New Orleans tomorrow night.
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend checking out del.icio.us and getting an account.
It’s a service (freeee) where you can bookmark cool things you find on the internet. Yes, we all have bookmarking stuff in our browsers, but this allows you to share the cool stuff you find with your friends, and send links that they might find interesting or useful to their accounts.
You sign up, put the buttons in your browser toolbar (trust me, they’ve made this as easy as humanly possible) and away you go.
My account is called disastrid, and you can see what I bookmark by going to http://del.icio.us/disastrid. You can add tags to things that you choose to bookmark so they get catagorized (like http:.//del.icio.us/tags/million, for example). It’s like a giant well-organized internet filing cabinet that you can share with people. It’s awesome. I am amazed, constantly, by the amount of stuff I come across on this service that I would never ever see otherwise. Wanna see the future of teh internetz? Here it is. I use del.icio.us about as much as Google now, probably more in the coming months as the network expands. Check it out, and send me any cool or interesting stuff you come across.