Friday, June 26th – 1:34am – Couchtown, Burnaby, BC

Wow, what a helluva day Thursday turned out to be. Unbelievably, two American icons died on the same day – Farah Fawcett finally lost her battle with cancer and Michael Jackson collapsed due to cardiac arrest and was not able to be revived. Everyone seems in total shock. The guy got weird and who knows if he was guilty or innocent in the molestation cases against him, but I remember being head over heels into Michael Jackson during the Thriller album years.

I actually first remember being introduced to him and Thriller when I was staying with the Jester family while my Mom was in New Orleans having surgery in 1984. I was in the 4th grade. Now that I think about it, I think that’s the first time I can remember being anxious. I remember always feeling like there was something in my throat and it was hard to swallow or something. I get that same feeling when I am having an episode of reflux, no doubt brought on by anxiety.

I remember looking at the Thriller cover and seeing him in a white suit with a black shirt and holding a leopard cub or something. I noticed that the tendons in his wrist were taut and sticking out because of the way his hand was bent and he was holding the cub. What a weird friggin thing to remember. But, as a kid, I would try to bend my wrist to make it do that, I guess since it looked so weird. The Internet is the most awesome thing. Want to know why? Because I can look for any of this stuff and find it so I can include in my post! Awesome!

Then, when we were living at Plantation South, I memorized all the choreography from the Beat It, Billie Jean and Thriller videos and would take my “jam-box” outside on the lawn in front of our apartment building and listen to the songs and do the dances. How embarrassing. My Mom loved to tell everyone about that and how I went through a Michael Jackson phase, a Rambo phase and a Ninja phase. haha  Worse yet, it’s all true!  I was into all those things when I was a kid. I wanted the red Beat It jacket with all the zippers so I got one that was similar. I wanted parachute pants. I got them. I wanted penny loafers (so I could do the moonwalk, of course!), I got them. Now that I look back on it all again, I was really into Michael Jackson for a long time. I remember a reunion tour he did with his brothers and also an appearance he did on MTV where he did Billie Jean and did the moonwalk and I swooned!  I must have watched that a zillion times, too!  I also recall being at Verdie’s house and walking up to hardware store up the street and looking for white gloves. I wanted to get sequins and have a white glove like Michael! lol

I also probably watched the Making of Thriller video a zillion times. My Dad had recorded it on MTV, back when MTV was still pretty new. My Dad was always into recording stuff and TV and movie-related gadgetry. I think it’s cool. 🙂

Now that I think about it again, I remember my favourite picture of him was one where he was wearing a white shirt and a yellow vest of some sort. I just did a search online and it was the cover for the Human Nature single. I think I have that picture as a sticker in my sticker book that I found at Mom’s. Once again, Internet to the rescue. Show and tell is so much more fun than just show!

I guess I didn’t fully realize how sad it really is. What’s sadder is how messed up his life was. The guy couldn’t have been happy. People were always mocking how he looked – with good reason, he looked nothing like his Thriller-era self. He was actually a good-looking guy back then. Who knows what the real reasons were behind all the weird stuff in his personal life. I don’t think he had a very good childhood. I think his father was a bit of a bastard to all the kids – whipping them like show ponies or something.

At any rate, I have a lot of good childhood memories linked to Michael Jackson, so I wanted to pay tribute to that and remember some of those things.

In other news of the day, I did not go back to sleep after Angelica called and woke me up at 9am after only 4 or so hours of sleep. I worked on their newsletter layout – AGAIN – and sent them another layout draft. Waited to hear back, revised, sent another one, revised sent another one. My GOD. How picky can you be? Anyway,  I finally got one that they like, so just have to do a few changes to it tomorrow to send to Jacquie. AJ’s going to Italy on vacation for two weeks! Lucky!  I told her that we’ll have to talk about revising the pricing for the newsletter when she gets back because it was supposed to just be a matter of taking out unnecessary pages from the big report and making a separate document of it. Not remotely the case. I’ve done essentially 4 different layouts for this stupid thing. I’m pissed that I didn’t charge them hourly!

I’ve been keeping a daily log of how I’m feeling anxiety-wise. You’d think that, given I had little sleep and awoke from a very emotionally-charged dream about my Mom, that I’d have been really anxious today. Not so at all. I felt pretty well normal all day today. Weirder still is that I wore my glasses the entire day – something that I NEVER do willingly.

After I sent the latest draft to PS, I came to lounge on the couch and submitted the Design Groupies site to a bunch of Twitter directories. I’m up to almost 80 followers already, which is cool! I added a couple of new posts to DG today and sent out a few tweets. I got Lynn to sign up and she’s sending out updates, too, which I think will be good for her biz.

I watched Venus Williams’ Wimbledon match and then, to my delight, also got to watch part of Venus/Serena’s doubles match. Naturally, they won, as did Venus in her singles match. Going to record the matches tomorrow so I can hopefully watch Serena again. I like tennis season!

Got to go to bed. I keep staying up til I end up only getting to sleep a couple of hours (if that) before the sun comes up and starts streaming through my bedroom window. When I wake up, I have to come lie on the couch to have a hope of falling back asleep.