So the contracts have all been signed, and it’s lookin’ like next week–god, I hope next week!–I’ll finally get out to LA. I’ll be gone between one and three weeks, staying at the home of a…well…celebrity, workin’ like a dog, and due to confidentiality clauses, I can’t tell you anything much about what I’ll be doin’, and would ask you to refrain from public speculation.

This was already looking to be an extremely surreal adventure, but my agent managed to make it weirder.

“It’ll be a blast!” she said. “Ooh! And we’ll take a day and put up a profile for you on Salon.com! My friends all do it, it’s a kick!”

“Sure!” I said–as I say “sure!” to just about everything my agent suggests, because I am agreeable and she has done wonderful things for me. Salon.com? Is that the magazine that does spots at NPR? Is this some kind of marketing gimmick, like when she wanted Nurk to have a MySpace page?

Long after she’d hung up to go close deals somewhere, I realized that she was talking about placing a personal ad.*

It was already looking surreal, but this was a whole ‘nother flaming giraffe galloping across the landscape.

I could have fixated on one of the important issues–the fact that I am still attempting to attain some inner peace (never something I was terribly skilled at–brief moments of zanshin at the height of my iaido days were as close as I got, and the state of relaxed alertness from which to annihilate the foe probably isn’t quite what you’re after in relationships) and probably not ready to dip my toe back in that pool ‘o crazy, or the fact that I haven’t been on a date since grunge was in fashion, and am more than a little nervous about heading back into those dark waters, or–personal ad? Dudewhatthehell? I mean really, what the HELL?–one of the many perfectly valid reasons why posting a personal ad struck me as straight outta Cracktown.

However, I’m me. And so of course I fixated on the fact that my bios are all snide little blurbs that say “raised by wombats” and I had somebody ELSE write my bio for LJ, and–good lord, I can’t condense my professional life into a few pithy phrases. How do you write a personal ad? What do you say?  “Artist seeking geek birdwatchers?” “Artist seeks avatar of Squash Kachina?” “Artist is on the rebound and doesn’t actually want anything at the moment and probably wouldn’t have time even if she did, but is now driving self nuts trying to come up with pithy blurb to summarize life because she’s a little nuts that way?”

The world is strange, my friends, and lately, for me at least, it just keeps on getting stranger…

*We could argue that this is not unrelated to marketing, I suppose.

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