Ask the Moon - November 10

Yeah, yeah. I promised a post Thursday night. And here it is just moments before the stroke of Sunday. In my defense, I should point out that I claimed to be able to solve your problems, not my own. And with a show opening, and some other factors, I just couldn't post until now.

I'll tell you about opening night in another post.

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Inx Minner from Cornville England writes:

Dear Mr Moon,

I have recently purchased a new pair of witchy tights. To all intents and purposes these tights are indeed very witchy - a very definite purple and black stripe which is so fetching when worn with the pointy boot.

However, I have been duped. These tights have no feet, they are in fact a 'footless' tight. What is the meaning of this?

The shop (Gothic Dreams) from which they were bought is certainly the most trendy place for a witch to buy her nocturnal apparel but what on earth does one do with a pair of tights that are missing a vital piece? I tried tying a knot in the end of the legs but that was very uncomfortable and I couldn't get my boots on - it also meant that the crutch was lowered to knee level which made the riding of a broomstick almost impossible.
I am in despair and have very cold feet. Please advise.

Yours regardlessly...

Inx: I assume that the obvious solution—removing your feet—had already occurred to you before you wrote in. So I'm assuming that you are looking to wear the tights at the same time as you are wearing feet and, I see from your letter, boots as well.

My best guess is that the shop from "witch" the tights were purchased is trying to make more money off of you. Was there a bin of very short stockings near the cash register? Or perhaps they are counting on your tying the ends together and hoping to sell you some larger boots (one assumes they have some solution for the mid-thigh crotch problem as well, and that this will also set you back a pretty penny).

I recently bought a "tank top" from a store, thinking that wearing something armored might be a prudent thing to try from time to time in the huge, dangerous city in which I live. Imagine my surprise when I got the garment home to discover only a thin piece of cotton. My mood darkened further when I discovered that there were no sleeves of any kind, merely a strap for each shoulder. It was basically a torso sock. As the customer is always right, I stormed back into the store and flung the thing into the face of first a crying cashier and then the store manager. Long story short, I am no longer allowed inside the Gap. They put up my picture and everything.

Hope that helps!

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Dear Uncle Moon,

I want to know how I can win the jackpot on the lottery as I would like to have a lot of money and be stinking rich. I am a woman of wide experience but this has so far eluded me. I did try a couple of times but though I gave it my best shot and put the numbers I thought looked lucky, nothing came of it. Please do not advise me to go and write a best-selling book instead because I particularly want a lot of money without having had to work for it just to know what that feels like and because - well - I'm worth it.

I hope you were joking with that disclaimer you put at the bottom of your post, because I have today ordered a Porsche, booked a luxury holiday in the Maldives and promised the bank that my overdraft will be cleared imminently. So I am rather relying on your advice. I know you won't let me down.

Thanking you in anticipation,

Signs.

Signs: Don't fret. By taking my advice, you will be able to keep the car, the holiday, and the promise to your bank.

You mentioned in your letter that you had tried picking the numbers that "looked lucky." And therein lies your error. If you are going to base your attempt at riches on luck at all, you need to choose instead the numbers which are actually lucky, regardless of their appearance.

But even this stretegy will not guarantee you the riches you seek. The way to do this is to select the exact series of numbers which will be drawn at random later. This is the only way to guarantee that your ticket will bring you the life of luxury you so obviously crave. Make sure that your tickets holds these numbers, and you cannot lose.

*****

Confidential to JH in Hackensack:
Your engineers are absolutely correct. Such a railroad is impossible to build. I would suggest that if the origin point is to be your living room, that the terminus must also be on planet Earth.

Confidential to QI, also in England:
I enjoy your program. No doubt you'll starchily inform me that it should be "programme," but you are mistaken. Please try to remember how vastly we Americans outnumber you.

Ask the Moon - November 6

Pundy from, uh...here writes:

Dear Mr Moon Topples

I am so relieved to have stumbled upon your blogsite because I am at my wit's end with a problem that up to now I have been too embarrassed to talk about. Your confidential advice service is my last hope.

Here's my problem which - brace yourself - I'm sure you will agree would bring a tear to the hardest heart. If hearts could cry, that is. You know what I mean. As you've probably guessed by the lyrical quality of this plea, I am an aspiring writer who is absolutely desperate to break into the big-time world of bestsellerdom. The difficulty I have - which is proving unamenable to treatment either on the NHS or even homeopathetically - is that -I can hardly bring myself to write this down - I do my best work when I am lying in bed at night, in the wee small hours, composing the words in my head into my literary masterpiece. Come the dawn I leap up and attack my computer as I feverishly jot down my masterpiece.

Where's the problem, I hear you ask (assuming you're still reading this, that is)? The problem is, not to put too fine a point on it, that I CAN'T STAY AWAKE AT NIGHT. As soon as I climb into bed and my head hits the pillow I fall asleep. To compound my misery I never wake up until the sun is high in the sky the following day.

As a result of my sleepfulness I am suffering from extended writer's block. My lack of fecundity with words is driving me crazy. Parodoxically, although I am well-rested I am also exhausted.

Please, please help - you are my last chance. Yawn. Excuse me, I would like to say more but it's nearly my bedtime and I must go.

*****

Dear Pundy:

Don't worry. From what I can see, your problems are all physiological in nature. The words are there, but your body is hindering your mind's ability to get them out and into the world properly. This is not an uncommon experience. It is well documented that the body and the brain hate one another.

First, to tackle the sleeping issue: whenever I get a letter in which a desperate reader falls asleep as soon as he lays head to pillow, my advice is always the same: remove the pillow. It seems clear to me that without such soft cradling of the head, your wakefulness should increase dramatically (studies suggest at least 60%).

Should you fall asleep anyway, putting a rooster inside an east-facing room with no blinds or shades should help you to be able to attack the dawn more regularly. Roosters can be bought nearly anywhere these days (except vending machines, unless you live in Japan), and cost very little to feed, especially if your house is made out of seeds.

Your letter did indeed bring a tear to my heart, Pundy. When I read of how frustratingly well-rested you have been, I knew I would have to leap in and offer whatever help I could. The advice above should set you back on the path to sleep-starved novelist in no time.

—Moon

*****

Sometimes readers seek advice without taking the plunge and composing a special letter. For the anonymous visitor who clicked into my site recently from a search for "stop smoking Sarah cat," I offer the following...

Dear SSSC,

Getting a cat to quit smoking is indeed a difficult task. Many of the standard nicotine-replacement therapies available to humans are problematic for a feline. The patch, for instance, requires you to shave the poor thing, and even then there is a good chance that the critter will simply try to eat the patch off of its body. They also lack the patience and discipline for the lozenge or the gum, and clinical trials indicate that the inhaler makes them hallucinate.

Before I get into more concrete suggestions, I do want to say how grotesquely irresponsible it is to get a cat hooked on cigarettes in the first place. A cat will not, on its own, take up the habit. It cannot work a lighter or a book of matches. It has no thumbs, and cannot flick ashes into an ashtray. Even the shape of a cat's mouth is not naturally conducive to forming the sort of seal around the filter that smoking generally requires.

My guess, SSSC, is that your Sarah must have painstakingly trained the animal to smoke, which must have taken a tremendous amount of time and money. And now that the trick is no longer quite so amusing at parties, she is regretting her choice. Or perhaps the cat has expressed a desire to quit, but does not feel he or she can do so alone.

Either way, cats generally respond best to a cold turkey approach. Feed the cat cold turkey every time it expresses a desire for another cigarette. Make sure that both you and the feline have agreed on a quit date, and try to be supportive of your pet's needs during this time. Blowing up and yelling because the cat has scratched a piece of furniture or urinated on your computer is only going to create stress, which the cat is by now conditioned to respond to with a craving for nicotine. Talk in soothing tones, stroke its fur, and have plenty of chilled turkey meat available. It is normal for a feline to gain weight during this process. Encourage exercise, and do not berate your furry friend for no longer being as svelte as it once was.

—Moon

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Confidential to WS in Luxembourg:

Do not panic. Such things are normal this close to an event of this type. Your arranged bride is probably just as scared by all of this as you are.

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Moon Topples, Advice Columnist is still hoping you will Ask the Moon. He is a bonded and licensed advicer who can easily see into the heart of any matter and right all wrongs. He enjoys late-night talks and long strolls on the beach. Send your questions to the email at left.

NaNoWrinKle and tech week doubts

So they don't have the handy-dandy status bars this year, at least not that I've seen. If you click on the link in the sidebar, though, it'll tell you that I have a paltry 1300 words completed after four days of NaNo.

Sadly, even this is an overstatement. They are once again the wrong set of words. My guess is that I'll start getting words on paper for real on probably the sixth, which is more or less when I started last year.

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Tech week on the show started today. For non-theatre folk, this is the week before a show opens, when you typically work the show on the actual stage and figure out the lighting and sound cues, adjust the blocking to fit the space, and begin running the entire show, in order, in the costumes or clothing you'll be wearing for the actual performances, with props in hand. These rehearsals are often long, arduous affairs, and tech week is also commonly called "hell week."

Usually, a show is already on its feet by the time this process begins. We run it again and again to iron out any last glitches or to make a choice stronger, more realized. For this show, however, there are still pieces we have to run with scripts in our hands, still blocking issues across the board. The show has been plagued with bad luck and problems from the start, but I feel a panic right now that I am not used to feeling this close to an opening.

Perhaps I will elaborate on some of the bad luck at another time.

And still, I think we can pull this off. Crushingly optimistic, perhaps, but it may also be that I have no choice but to believe that the show will open and that people will like it. No choice but to believe that we will know our lines and move when and where we are supposed to and deliver the lines with all the spontaneity, high stakes, and realism we need to carry the pieces across. And I try to remind myself that I am frequently told that I am an incredibly harsh critic when it comes to something I am involved in. Just ask anyone from my former band.

I myself am in six different short pieces. Trying to assess things objectively, I'd say three or possibly four of them are where they need to be, or are close enough that polishing over the next five nights could get them there. One of these is a monologue, and entirely on my shoulders. Two have been worked enough, and the other actor talented enough, that I think they can play correctly (in spite of how they might have played tonight). Of the ones I still feel unsure about, one is designed to be presented as a cold reading, so that's more or less ready to go, too, such as it is. Which really only leaves one gigantic question mark in the mix: the full ensemble piece which features all six actors and closes the evening.

Right now, my gut says to throw my weight, energy and time into the five that are closest to being ready. Those are all scenes which feature only one other actor each, so I can afford much less to slip up or let the other performer down. We'll be on our own up there, and whether it's the scene that involves kissing a fair maiden or the one where I nearly get into a fistfight with a man over a game we are playing, I want to make sure that I give the other actor what they need to make the scene seem true.

*****

Wow. I had no intention of writing about all of this tonight. I guess it's a difficult thing to wipe away a nine-hour rehearsal.

Still, I could have sworn I sat down to write about my lack of progress on NaNo. I'm sure I intended to try to say something positive to any of my readers and fellow NaNo-ers who are also feeling discouraged by their current word counts.

Because thirty days is really a good chunk of time. So is the twenty-five days which remain. Anything can happen. So long as we are setting aside the time and trying to push through the difficult parts, we can still find ourselves later in the month crossing the finish line, exhausted and flushed from our labors, with a tiny curl at the corners of our lips that says we have been victorious.

Advice, I suppose, I should also try to take to heart where the play is concerned. Even though the window is smaller, there is still a lot that can still happen to make this show special.

*****

Moon Topples, Advice Columnist is still waiting to help you with all the problems you might have in this world (or others*). Send your queries and quandaries using the email address in the left sidebar (rather than leaving them in the comments) and I will ponder your difficulties as if they were my own, solving them so easily that you will feel a little silly for considering it a "problem" in the first place, but not in such a way as to make you feel bad. I would never do that to you, Blogadviceseeker.

I plan to begin answering the questions I have already received later this week.

*Offer excludes Jupiter. Jupiter knows why.

Ask the moon!

Hello, Blogreader! You're looking well.

I have decided that writing a novel, acting in a play, looking for work and doing a blog post every day throughout November is not enough for me. I have decided to use the power of the internet to launch an exciting new career:

Mr. Moon Topples, advice columnist. Or Agony Aunt for the limier of my readers. Well, Agony Uncle, really. Why don't we just all agree that it's "advice columnist" and move on.

Although my personal life is sometimes a laughable shambles, I believe that my years on this Earth have prepared me for this. I stand before you ready to answer all of your questions about life, love, and even the mysteries of the mercury seeps, way down in the depths of the ocean. I know it all! I am never stumped!

Not sure which pie you should order? Ask the moon! Can't find your car keys? Ask the moon! Concerned that the cat who eyed you from that apartment window is actually a terrifying beast sent here from another dimension to lay waste to all you hold dear? Ask the moon!

Submit your quandries, questions, quagmires and queries to the email at left, and I will respond here in public! Right here on this very page! (Sorry, I have a lot of exclamation marks I have to use up before the end of the year.)

Disclaimer: "Moon Topples, Advice Columnist" is for entertainment purposes only. In every case, he will attempt to make jokes about the questions being asked, so take care not to ask anything about which you are not prepared to poke fun. No actual advice will be given, and not all emails will be replied to. Questions considered "funny" by the author will receive preferential treatment, as will problems which are obviously fake. Moon Topples is a registered trademark of Wayne McAvoy Industries.