sniffle

I'm historically a workaholic.  In New York I was working the survival job, running, writing, filming Our Little Show, meeting about Our Little Show, auditioning and attempting to maintain a social life.  Then I moved here for the summer.

And I got sick.  It all started when my sister and I began cleaning and reorganizing my mother's house, which has been under this grueling renovation for nearly six months and, on top of that, suffers the slings and arrow of a notoriously avid pack rat.  Before I got my way and was able to throw a few things out, my mother had a stack of the same issue of a news publication five copies deep.  The particular news item that peeked her interest was Final Four basketball.  That's right.  Newspapers from March were stacked in the house.  She doesn't have a problem with this; for some reason I don't comprehend she thinks this is normal behavior.  I'm pretty sure it is insanity.

To boot, I'm still living out of three suitcases because, though I have a room of my own, I have no closet. Not because the room I reside in happens to be closet free.  No.  The closet is taken up by stuff.  Just stuff.  No one needs it.  No one uses it.  It's just there gathering dust to make me sick.  If you asked me to list what was in the closet piece by piece I couldn't do it because to me it categorically falls under 'junk'.  I found three plastic-sheathed cheap decorative parasols when I still hadn't given up hope of ever having closet space.  When I asked my mother what she used them for she replied in earnest, "I thought they'd be good costume pieces."  Costume pieces.  My mom runs a wine store and has three adult children.  I don't want to know why she needs costumes.  The thought sends me into dark, seedy territory that my allergy-medicated brain is terrified to comprehend.


Now I've probably overdosed on cold and sinus medication and am incapable of getting anything valuable done.  I feel so overwhelmed that I want to ceremonially burn everything I own to cleanse myself of the pack rat gene.  I'm still unbelievably congested and sound like Kathleen Turner.  I'm scared of opening a closet for fear I will discover something my brain is incapable of erasing.

What is it good for?

Love if officially in the air.  I went to a gorgeous--nearly perfect, actually--garden wedding over the weekend where the vino was flowing in overwhelming abundance and the dancing went on well into the early morning.  Considering the bride said she wanted an intimiate familial wedding, I was rather surprised when it ended up being such an epic event.  I think it was the insurmountable positive energy the revelers brought into the garden patch.  People genuinely celebrated this adorable couple, willing to spend the night in Dionysian pleasures for the sake of getting their wedded bliss off to a banging beginning.  This is the third wedding I've been to this month.  The other two were not quite like this, but still indubitably special.  I mean, who else could have table center pieces like this:

I'm pretty sure I used the word "darling" thirteen times at this wedding.  In fact, I know I did because my sister was annoyed that it was my "wedding word."  I stand by it, though; it was fucking darling.  Mazel tov, y'all.  Best wishes.

Now that my inner circle of friends have started to cohabitate with their significant others, get married and even have children, I'm starting to think there's something to this whole commitment thing.  The minister said Saturday that the life one leads as an unmarried person is over when one is married and one is then part of something greater than oneself (he said this to the betrothed, not to me over a glass of pinot gris).  I've heard that before but it hasn't been something I've really thought of seriously until recently, for my life, anyway.  Once I dated someone with a child and I didn't agree with the selfish ways in which he continued to live his life despite the fact he had a child to care for.  I always felt guilty for judging because I couldn't fathom having offspring of my own, but I felt--and still feel--very strongly that one must put one's child first once that being exists.  One of the many reasons why I've yet to truly consider childbearing: I am incredibly selfish. I have never been ready to put someone else before myself.  I've put my career before personal relationships for years; that is comfortable to me.  I cringe using that word, mostly because in acting school "comfortable" is stricken from your vocabulary, but I am comfortable being alone and having satellites orbiting my solitary, little planet.  I can always see them, if I take a trip in a rocket ship I can visit them, but at the end of the day it is just my little self-sustaining planet.  That sounds sad and egomaniacal.  

Anyway, that was how I was.  I've recently felt like I could actually be part of something greater than myself, make a commitment to something besides my career aspirations.  In a way that is part of what this summer is about: reconnecting with something more humanizing than city lights, getting back to the pure joy of acting and actually spending time in sunshine.  Life has been too shade for too long.  I'm suffering from growing pains, yes, and compromise isn't something someone would say I'm awesome at, but I'm trying.  I'm swallowing the moments of people driving like morons or taking too long to order coffee and thinking, "yes, I asked for time to slow down and I got it.  For better or for worse, in sickness and in health...until September."  

I mean, isn't this just darling?

How to be a Lady

I have a very interesting book in my library entitled How to be a Lady by the--I only assume--gentile Candace Simpson-Giles.  There are actually a lot of useful tidbits in said book about how a lady behaves in various circumstances (side note: check out what a lady does if she is surfing the crimson tide while visiting a friend).  I would suggest this as a bathroom book--which is, to me, a weird concept to be covered another day--but I've heard word that ladies don't poop, so the point might be moot.

It seems like ladies are supposed to do a lot of things, but "a lady always makes sure her book is free of grammatical and spelling errors before it goes to print," is a sentence not in this book.  The lady author's name is spelled incorrectly on the cover.  How seriously can I take this lady if she doesn't even notice that the cover of her book has her name misspelled?  Egregious.  This is what stresses me out sometimes.  Is it simply that she signed off on her copy before she had her morning caffeine or is it something greater, like a lack of self-respect?  I admit that I have some friends who have misspelled my last name after years of knowing me and I don't correct them because at this point I feel like it'd just be awkward.  I had a boyfriend once who spelled my first name "Moora"the entirety of our relationship.  This isn't good.  I'd like to think it isn't a lack of self-respect on my part, but maybe subconsciously it is.  I've done plenty of things in my life I didn't really want to do simply because it would have been awkward to say, "nah, thanks though."  I've stayed in relationships, jobs and long kisses with old men because I felt impolite doing otherwise.  I compromised what was against my nature on a basic, cellular level to avoid an awkward experience.  Granted, I'm not talking about huge things like violence against animals or eating babies during a famine, I'm talking about staying quiet during a joke I find offensively sexist or watching Two and a Half Men (joking, I'd never watch Two and a Half Men).  I don't know if Candace / Candice has reckoned with this--and frankly, I hope she hasn't because it is terrible--but seeing a lady's name misspelled on her own book immediately makes me think of my own editing at times.  Because I'm a narcissist.

In other news, is it judgment day Saturday?  I only ask because I have a wedding that day that I've yet to procure a gift for.  So I'm wondering if I should hold out, just in case the world ends I wouldn't have spent precious coin on a vintage tea set or whatever I end up giving to celebrate the nuptials.

That isn't ladylike.  I know.

Random Richmond

The Rookery 

College Revisited

The last few days I've been in Blacksburg, Virginia, home to the Virginia Tech Hokies and, more importantly, home to me for the four years before I moved to the citaaaay.  My sister graduated.  She is gorgeous.  See below.

Okay. So.  Back to me.  I found myself trying to be "in college" again. For instance, I went on a bar crawl.  A bar crawl.  I didn't make it beyond midnight.  I don't think.  I was feeling groovy after two vodka diets, which I turned all the girls on to, proclaiming it will keep them from getting fat when reality sets in and one's night of beer ingesting ends up on one's ass.  That time comes rapidly, ladies.  It isn't pretty.  Needless to say my other being "in college" antics didn't leave me nostalgic; rather, I was thankful for being where I am, who I am, right now.

Yes, when sophomore boys ask me what my major is and balk when I say, "when I graduated four years ago I received a dual degree in English, specifically literature and creative writing, and in theatre arts.  Upon graduation I moved to New York City to continue my education at Circle in the Square Theatre School," I think it is funny and kind of adorable to watch them realize that their campus has been infiltrated by an adult woman who dresses like a college kid.

I am finally willing to admit something about myself that I've been putting off articulating for a while: I still think of myself as an undergraduate and I'm not.  When I look in the mirror I still see a girl who just turned twenty-one, all blurry-eyed and blustery and capable of getting a wicked hangover.  Yes, some things are different: I now use concealer for my pollution-induced under-eye dark circles and I have a few more life things figured out--for instance, hangover prevention.  Overall, though, I am in a state of perpetual young adulthood.  I play pretend for a living and love running in rain and spend $25 on nail polish and have the luxury of being untethered thus able to drop everything--including my job--and backpack around India and Nepal for eight weeks.  Or go to Barcelona to see the Picassos.  I can do that.  I am fucking lucky.  I get the best parts of being an undergrad with the best parts of being an adult.

How did I luck out this much, gentle reader?  Had a few soul-slamming, gut-lacerating failed relationships with the mens; moved to a really smelly yet awesome city to go to an acting school that made me grumpy and breathless and powerful and unsatisfied and hungry; and became addicted to caffeine.  Follow these keys to success and you too can live in arrested development.

Luckily I still look young, so no one is really that judgy about my choices yet.  I've also been doing a lot of productive, artistically and professionally fulfilling things, so it hasn't been all nights of watching The Wall and playing Angry Birds.  I'm growing up and making wise choices.  Finally.

I'm happy.

A week ago we wrapped Our Little Show.  Watch out world, it's coming.  This is an artfully blurry photo of the core group who worked on OLS.  Blurry because we were drunk--or because someone can't hold an iPhone still--but I prefer to think it was the Russian water.  Regardless, I can't describe how proud I am of these über attractive people.  I brag with great relish: we produced something worthwhile.  I expect Haley and I will do celebrity diet endorsements within the year.  Definitely not an endorsement for acne treatment; we both have really good skin.

More shameless plugs to follow, believe me.


In other news I am in Virginia for the majority of the summer.  Buddha help me.  Finds hysterical so far:

Found this picture of myself.  Good blunt bang.  Had those until I was fifteen.  Yikes.

Found this drawer of Pez dispensers.  Normal.

Not hysterical.  Just needed a third thing and this is pretty.

I miss Brooklyn.  

That said, I find parking very easily in Virginia, unlike that one night in Brooklyn where I had to drive around two and a half hours listening to the same eight pop songs on the radio whilst looking for a parking place.  That wasn't great.