Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 9.0 // Critical Darling, Commercial Flop

Happy birthday to the kindest, smartest, funniest and most talented little sister a woman could have. I love you, Sarah.

New design. The idea came from something my dear CB said to a group of people seated around a table with me on my last birthday, a table that constituted just a fraction of the people that showed up that night to spend time with me: “Jenna has a black belt in popularity.”

People talking about how likable I am will never get old.

Good morning all! I am, in fact, still drunk from my escapades last night. I woke up about an hour ago on top of the covers on my bed, not being able to remember anything after Steph drove me home. Clearly, I got all the way inside my apartment (good) and spent the rest of the night alone (doubly good, considering). I woke up wearing just my bra, underwear and a camisole that I had been wearing under my clothes, makeup still on, across the width of my bed with my legs hanging off. And freezing.

I could, theoretically, have gotten into a little more trouble last night. It would have made a better story (assuming I could remember anything), but overall, I think I'm happy with the way things turned out. I think.

I didn't expect to wake up still drunk. I expected to wake up desiring to cut off my own head to stave off the pain. So that's good too.

If you don't mind, I'm going back to bed now.

Due to a rash of comment spam, I'm now only accepting comments from registered users. I hate doing this because I get so few comments as it is, but it has to be done. I have enough work to do without spending a bunch of time hyper-moderating a personal site.

Registration is free with TypeKey. Once you register you can use it not just on my site but on blogs all over the web. You can even set up your own totally sweet profile (or not).

I hope this doesn't discourage anyone from leaving comments, because they make me so very happy. Hopefully, I'll be able to loosen to restrictions again someday.

New design! If anything looks especially awry, hit Shift+Refresh.

Not really my best work, but it's something new anyway.

This Christmas, for the first time in many years, I'm not buying presents for anyone. It's a hard candy Christmas—with apologies to Dolly Parton—and the state of my finances makes it impossible. In lieu of material things, which are hardly in the spirit of Christmas anyway (right?), I present for your viewing pleasure, two songs from my 19 year old self, and some reflection on these performances. Why the dissection? We compulsively analyze things. You know we can't stop just for Christmas.

Note: streaming flash video appears below. If if doesn't work, or you prefer Windows Media, or even want to grab the MP3 audio versions, you can find the original, four-year-aged post here.

These are two songs from the 106 West Annual Christmas Show in 2002. I know that if you are much older than me, four years probably doesn't sound like a long time, but to me it feels like a lifetime ago. This was after I had gone to college, but before I had made any close friends there, before I ever had a job, before I ever paid bills, before I cut my hair, before I had gotten over my shyness and learned how to talk to people, before Abie taught me how to dress in a way that wasn't hideous.

River (Joni Mitchell Cover):

While you can't appreciate how loud everything was, especially the applause from the audience, what you can see in this video is how uncomfortable I am on stage, in my own skin. I look at this now and think, “Get your hands out of your pockets! Why the hell did you pick that outfit?” and even “That is completely the wrong bra for you.” Overall, the person in the video feels like someone different, not me, but I can relate to her on one level, about something you can't see in the video.

I hesitate to bring it up even now, because it's long past, but it's important to my appreciation of the performance, and I've never talked about it before. At Christmas in 2002, I was estranged from one of my best friends in the entire world. The worst part was that I felt it was entirely my fault. It was probably the loneliest I have ever been. This feeling permeated every facet of my life for awhile, so while I had no romantic interest in this friend, I still related to River on a deep level (“I’m so hard to handle / you know I’m selfish and I’m sad / I lost the best baby that I ever had”), so much so that every time I sang the song the pain hurt my heart. I often am praised for an extremely emotive performance of River, and that's because I can't sing it, or even watch this performance of it, without being transported back to that time.

We eventually reconciled (with a vengence), so in the end, everything worked out, but sometimes, I still wish that I had handled the situation a different way, so that maybe I wouldn't have lost that time. Even if it means that the performance would have suffered.

Please Come Home For Christmas (Charles Brown Cover):

“A! Everything I sing is in A!”

Here, despite my lack of a compelling stage presence, I've got the audience in the palm of my hand. It's a pretty stiff performance, until the monitor made a strange, very loud sound (at the first “So won't you tell me / you'll never more roam”) and all I could do was open my eyes in shock, smile and laugh it off. However, by the end of the song, I'm freaked out to be on stage again.

The applause at the end of the song was absolutely unreal. The video doesn't at all capture the roar that came at me. One of my biggest regrets to date is that I practically ran off stage instead of taking a moment to bask in the glory.

These days I don't sing as often as I used to. Chances are, however, that I'll be making an appearance at the 106 West (Site | MySpace) Annual Christmas show, next Saturday night, December 16th, at 7:30 PM. The show is free, and should be pretty rockin, if past years are any indication. I would love to see you there.

We've redesigned just for Christmas.

I can't get over how dorky this is.

If you're seeing stars, I can tell you that you're probably not looking at my work. I upgraded my Movable Type installation today, and while I get some things worked out I dropped in the RAWK! style by Liz Lubowitz. This is mainly to gain a fresh start, but it's entirely temporary.

Why did I choose to do this today? I have plenty of work to do, but I'm also having one more bad day in a series of bad days lately, and as a result I'm procrastinating. It's unwise and irresponsible, but I think I'm doing it because this is the one little corner of the universe that feels at all under my control at this point, where everything else — and I mean everything — feels utterly unmanageable.

Only Jenna Tollerson would put off working on websites by working on a website.