babes mcphee

the eternal return

2011-10-31T07:20:00.000-07:00

Two nights, after I'd gotten in bed for the second time, I got a surge of inspiration and got up again and wrote two sentences of a new piece of fiction. Granted, it wasn't a lot and perhaps wasn't even very good, but it was the most substantial writing I've done in perhaps a year. It was also enough to demolish all the plans I've spent the last six months erecting for myself.

It turns out not getting into Juilliard after getting SO close burned me out big time, along with simultaneously getting snotty treatment at a theater company in NYC that I not only was certain I'd have an "in" at when I decided to move, but whose work is actually downright mediocre if I'm being polite.

So I've spent the last six or seven months not WANTING to write--also frustrated with my job to an increasing degree, so planning on embarking on a seven-year journey to get a Ph.D. and teach college...and THEN write...maybe.

So that's it--I'm scraping myself up off the floor after this six-month excursion and applying to MFA programs this fall. And then I'm going to write and write and write and write.

my year of quests: your princess is in another castle

2010-12-18T15:07:00.000-08:00

These past few days as I prepare to move to New York (via my parents' house, until I get a job), I've found myself thinking about this guy named Troy I used to know.

I think it's fair to say I had a monster crush on him, the first crush I'd had, if memory serves, since breaking up with my boyfriend when I was 20, four years earlier. But by the time I met him, he was already dating his wife...just dating...his friends assured me it was nothing serious but women's intuition made me gawk at them and think they were insane.

To my best recollection, they were married pretty soon after I moved out here and had a baby fairly soon after that. And then, some nostalgic night a year or two later I googled him and found a blog he had started...chronicling his permanent move from Philadelphia, where he always thought he would die, to Austin, his wife's hometown. His last blog post was poignant, about how there was really no regret, no nostalgia, no time to reflect, just life. Then nothing.

And when I read it back in 2006, even though I had already left Philadelphia and a while back, and we were never close, I felt this sense of loss, like he had just disappeared.

So now, in pondering this enormous life change for myself, my mental rolodex pulled up his name again. Maybe because I'm making a huge change and he'd written about it so eloquently. Maybe because by the time I moved here, he'd already found something (someone) that I still haven't found these years later. Maybe because I don't want to disappear.

I googled him to see if there were any kind of updates. And there aren't. Save a note that he now has two children, a wife, and a bassett hound. When I knew him he had the wife (girlfriend) who had the bassett hound. I even met the bassett hound. He works in banking. His house is appraised at $540,000 (at age 32!).

I don't know why it all makes me so melancholy. I am reasonably sure he's very happy with the way things have unfolded for him. And after all, I barely ever knew him. And yes I had a crush on him, but I've probably had a hundred since then that don't hold much if any water in retrospect. It wasn't the crush part that means much.

Maybe he made such an impact on me because he was only slightly older than me and yet I KNEW I was already watching the denouement of his story even when none of his friends did, or even he did.

And my life is not going like that at all. And I don't want it to. I want to "level up" until I die.

And that's the predominant reason I'm moving. Better job opportunities, better playwriting opportunities, better guys (one can hope), older, better friends, a family I've gotten old enough to actually want to be close(ish) to, for a change. I am moving, in a way, to prevent myself from disappearing.

I've played my 9 rounds with LA (or 7 levels, to be true to my blog title) and I am still in the game, so it is time to level up.

my e-mail to marie claire's editor-in-chief

2010-10-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

This article made me so outraged to read this morning, not only for its hateful, ignorant "fattie"-bashing but for its plain old piss poor writing quality (as Jenelle Riley points out...it's "heroin", not "heroine"...). Granted I never read Marie Claire magazine, but now I never will. So I guess you could say this article was BAD enough to get a non-reader, non-fat-person to try to get a total stranger fired. Anyway, for what it's worth, here is my letter to the editor. If you would also like to write to her, feel free to at JoannaColes@hearst.com:

Dear Ms. Coles,

The fact that you have allowed Maura Kelly to admit to being hateful and offensive in a letter nearly as long as her poorly written and hate-filled article itself, without actually removing the article from the site or even the link from your homepage, says that you continue to endorse this article, the writer, and the prejudiced, uninformed views expressed therein.

It makes me think that the entire editorial team at Marie Claire must be vapid anorexics, and before you accuse me of being some bitter fat person, I'm a size 4, which you probably think is "chunky". Please fire Maura Kelly and her editor (although I can't believe an editor ever saw this article) and salvage some reputation for your magazine while you still have a small window of opportunity to be classy.

Sincerely,

Christy B.

my year of quests: life potions

2010-09-29T12:22:00.001-07:00

This morning as I was frantically driving to kinko's to fax in the confirmation of the paperwork I filed a week ago to the Bureau of Clunk and Junk (LAUSD) for emergency processing, fraught with despair that I was going to lose this two-day assignment that stood to both save me financially this next month and set a foundation already for the following month, I was thinking--

"Life is not like a video game. There are no life potions and no heart potions and you can't die and you can't get fed up with it and quit and go do something else."

Then I got home, and called them to verify receipt of the fax. I waited on hold musak for about five (but what seemed like thirty) minutes as she went to check the fax.

When she got back on the phone, she had my fax in hand and said she was processing it as we spoke. She assured me I would be available in the system in ONE MINUTE. I called the school back and the woman there who is so nice and patient with me said she would only call me back if there was a problem, if not she'd see me tomorrow morning.

She hasn't called me back.

I just got a life potion, after all.

my year of quests: 12,000, 100, 60, 20, 1

2010-08-02T20:12:00.000-07:00

12,000 words of my young adult novel written (in ten days...actually in six days, with zero written in the last four days...but see below).

$100 to (hopefully) restore ALL my writing from pre-July '09 plus all my iTunes from my old harddrive, including 50 or so pages of this same novel from when it was a different novel. so unaffordable and yet SO worth it...if my old computer will still work with these new parts...

60 days to lose 20 pounds. I KNOW, I KNOW i don't need to. but i want to. and i have $1000 in pants riding on my ability to. i'm on day 4. and i'm not using a scale.

1 finished rewrite of "Jordan and the Mannequins" (finally! as of today!) that is now 100% ready for the next public reading. which i just shot off an e-mail about, to try to book a space for mid-September. TBD.

my year of quests: restless

2010-06-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

I suppose it is time for Q1 deliverables reporting, as my year of quests proper did not begin until March 1.

The message here is: HOLD YOUR STOCKS! DO NOT SELL! DO NOT SELL!

I'm working on a few job leads I think could make me happy instead of just making me money. The minute I decided to move back to West Hollywood or Los Feliz the Valley just started to suck, but now I'm stuck here until I get a new job. It doesn't help to be woken up too early many mornings by my awful neighbors on one side's screaming matches. She desperately wants a divorce and he refuses to give her one? (Is this even possible?) And kept awake too late by gutteral human noises accompanying loud gay porn from the man upstairs...

I live in such a nice place. *I* can't even afford to live here. Just goes to show money does not buy class in America. Or perhaps period.

So for now, I'm keeping on keeping on...looking forward to the Fall when my life will hopefully make sense and be fast paced again, and I can afford to do things other than sit at home and write blog posts, which is obviously free.

Not looking forward to a slow, hot summer in the Valley. Or any kind of summer in the Valley.

my year of quests: unleashing my domestic goddess

2010-04-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

holy crap, do i break for domesticity. i even own a thing called a "Dessert Master", two full sets of heart-shaped ramekins, have baked a cake that got me a marriage proposal from a stranger (that he didn't even know was vegan!), (and Heather knows i can temper an egg!), and etc., etc.

in short: never leave me unattended in Williams-Sonoma with a credit card.

but just because i never started smoking or did drugs as a teenager, i did not escape my childhood free of bad habits that would haunt me into adulthood. namely one: CLEANING.

growing up, my mother was INSANE about it. i think the day she told me she'd always wanted daughters, "to help her with the housework," puts it rather succinctly. throw in there, "cleanliness is next to godliness" (i didn't really aspire to be godly), and one of my mom's favorite sayings, "boring women are immaculate" (i DEFINITELY didn't want to be boring), and the fact that she clearly hated doing it herself (to be fair, she worked/works too and got/gets no help from my dad), cleaning was presented in the framework of the absolute worst thing ever in life.

my bedroom was chronically a DISASTER because it was my own space and i was going to do whatever i wanted to it! so there!

and yet...meanwhile...whenever i got to sneak away, the real me would start to shine through. when i went to a 2-week drama camp the summer after eighth grade, the counselors were so astounded by my ability to make a shower they'd all given up on SPARKLE, and with crude supplies...they made me an award.

and then there were my 14,000 batshit crazy roommates in a row following the four i was raised with...you know the kind that write your name in magic marker on your frozen vegetables/staple post-it notes to the wall/leave their WEAVE on the back of the toilet/throw your dishes out on the back porch and BREAK THEM because a third roommate used them without your permission and did not wash them...etc.

anyway, i've lived alone for over a year now (=THE BEST!) and have suffered more and more because of my inability to keep my apartment clean. and i realized the other night, in talking about it to a friend, that my environment is subliminally telling me how to value myself...and that i do not/cannot feel good about myself when my place is a mess.

and it has been A MESS for a while now because cleaning has always been an EVENT...that awful, laborious thing that i do once it gets SO BAD i can't take it anymore (add in another bad habit i picked up from my childhood...passive aggressively avoiding problems i would rather not deal with...like you know...my kids...oh wait, that wasn't me!).

if you are trying to say, lose weight permanently, the most effective plan is to adopt the diet and exercise regiment of someone who looks the way you want to look, and if you stick with it long enough, you will also look that way. and keep looking that way, because you've created a new habit.

so it's an inward shift...a lifestyle change. something that i am doing for myself, because it makes me happy. a doing a little something every day until i gradually adopt a new pattern.

whee!

my year of quests: a tv spec (or two, or three)

2010-03-25T12:41:00.000-07:00

but two and three both start with one.

i've come to one of those forks in the road--namely, to industry, or not to industry.

i've decided to apply to Juilliard's Playwrights Program next year (for Fall '11 entrance) and let fate wield its die...not that that'll do anything. my friend who is there now just wrote an episode for "melrose place".

but in the meantime, i'm in LA. and while i feel like i have a great shot at the program in spite of a 5 out of 300 acceptance rate...it's a 5 out of 300 acceptance rate. and i already basically have my manuscript submission portion complete over nine months before the application deadline...

so in the meantime...what to do...what to do...

ummm...plan B. warner bros' writers workshop. application deadline right after i'd find out if i got in or not (next year), or in uh, three months (this year!)

work, work, work.

that word never sounded so dreamy!

in which i admit my failure as a magician

2010-03-24T12:28:00.000-07:00

I've been dwelling a lot lately on the mistakes I've made in love...well, not dwelling. Analyzing in the hopes of evolution. And not mistakes...earnest output caused by faulty programming.

It's hard to admit or accept that so many years later, my love life (or lack of one) has still been affected by emotional deficits in my childhood. I have exhibited pattern behavior. Time after time falling for subpar guys who I bend over backwards for just to wind up feeling unwanted, unattractive and unworthy of love...

Hmmmmm...who...does that...let me see...**

I was raised with the paradigm of The Asshole and The Saint--a fairly broken man who contributed almost nothing (except income and...landscaping) and a servile woman who scrambled to be the Perfect Wife and Mother and believed (believes) that she can make up for all of his deficiencies if she just loves him enough and does the work of two by herself.

And so have I (and my sister) fallen for guy after fairly broken guy...with some alchemistic belief that our own awesomeness is an elixir strong enough to bond awesome with non-awesome--to elevate non-awesome. So here-in I admit my failure as an alchemist...but hey, you know what? All my failed years of trying have made me an expert at metallurgy.

And I think my prospects in the world of real metals seem rather lucrative.

**see below for original ending to this blog post, which while in my opinion is better, has nothing to do with admitting my failure as a magician. but if you want to read it as was, skip the rest of my posted blog now and read the original ending.

----------------------------------------------------
My father once called my mom a trophy wife to her face (right in front of me), and she beamed. When I griped in college that the closest thing to a compliment my dad ever gave me (the day I broke up with my first...and only...boyfriend), which was, "Well Christy, I think you've lost a lot of weight and a lot of guys would look twice at you, now."--my mother's sharp retort was, "HE WAS GIVING YOU A COMPLIMENT." (PS for anyone interested, my days as a lard ass involved me being 5'7" and a size 10.)

So anyway. The only way to describe the emotional and psychological environment of my childhood is toxic.

And yes, it's kind of shitty that feeling unloved for the first part of your life retards your search for love in the second part of your life. Just like it's shitty that most people born very poor will stay poor their entire lives. But some poor people do become rich--if they have the brains, moxie and work ethic to shun that which they were taught and reeducate themselves into a more enlightened state...

Hey, wait a minute. That's my dad's story.

(Get it, he gave me the damage AND the model by which to overcome the damage...now if you'll excuse me, I just tripped myself out.)

a hollywood parable: how to get on the rock

2010-03-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking the past few days about The Slackmistress's parable about making it in Hollywood being like hoisting yourself up onto a slippery rock in the ocean--you can do it if you can get a firm grip on it and use all your strength, and then once you're strong enough to make it up on the rock soundly you can help pull other people out of the water--

Thinking about it in terms of my last several years in Hollywood. I think a missing part of the metaphor is that the water around the rock is swarming with people too weak to ever make it onto the rock, unless by some fluke a kind giant appears to help them out. They are gradually losing strength from having tread water for so long and are desperate, because once they lose their little bit of remaining strength, they've got nowhere to go but down. (They could probably have at one point made it back to shore but now they seem too weak to even do that.)

So when they see a young, strong new swimmer approaching the rock that they think really stands a chance of making it up, they swarm her. They grab onto her for dear life as if she can pull both of them up at once--but if she doesn't manage to kick them off, she's going to go down with them.

But after she manages to do it a few times, with a struggle, the other people floundering in the water know not to mess with her anymore--and in fighting them off, she's built up the physical strength she's going to need to help make it onto that rock.

my year of quests: some clarity

2010-03-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

My hazy vision of a few days ago has been coming more into focus.

I wound up talking a long time last night with an extraordinarily talented new friend of mine, who recently gave up a very comfortable life to pursue her dreams.

She's been in a relationship (MARRIAGE!) for twelve years with a man who promised her six years ago he would move to LA with her in 2009. In 2009, she came here alone. She is still here alone.

Her husband has achieved his ideal vision for his own life in suburban New York--a great job, a country-club membership, a big suburban home, a beautiful wife--

Meanwhile, after trying for years to settle, she has become consumed with a need to pursue her passion and her (considerable) talent. She also wants to have a family one day--and her husband doesn't want children, either.

Even though our stories are so drastically different, they share a strong bond:

We've both just embraced our talent and ambition, because we both finally discovered a real passion--for what we were already doing. We also, equal to our careers, both want families.

We've both been on a tough road. Her trying to make a marriage work for a year in spite of opposite coasts and splintered life goals, but beginning to deal with the reality that it is not working. Me feeling for years that I've been "settling" for being a writer because what I actually wanted was a relationship, but have been consistently denied (and though it's too easy to rationalize as such--probably actually did dodge a few bullets.) I turned to my pen and paper in misery, not in passion. I've been "pursuing writing" with a mediocre commitment, at best, for five years, because it's what I'm best at, and something I had some control over pursuing, but would readily tell people that my "#2" was defaulting to my "#1" because my "#1" never materialized as an option.

It was just a week ago that I woke up and realized everything had changed. Writing had stolen my #1 spot. I suddenly have a passion for it. It excites me. It hasn't done that before, not since I was a little girl writing stories about cheerleaders and Harvard students and endless pairs of identical twins. I've lived the last decade without much of a passion for anything (or anyone).

A lot of people pegged me as extremely ambitious for packing up my car and driving out here to pursue "my dreams", not knowing anyone in all of LA. I did feel an epiphany-level certainty when the option was first presented to me, but i was definitely *not* ambitious and writing was NOT "my dream"...I was merely trying to do what I was best at, and even when i took a cash advance out to produce my own play in 2006, i genuinely gawked at people who thought i was ambitious.

The only thing I've ever been ambitious for is happiness, and that's been a very rocky and miserable road so far. But now the path has widened and smoothed out considerably...I guess "happiness" and "writing" have just merged into one road for me...and some distance up ahead, a few more roads feed into it. At a certain point it becomes paved, and after that becomes a major artery.

And that's where I'm going to end up eventually. I have no idea how long it'll take. But for the moment, I'm just really excited to get the rocks out of my shoes, you know?

my year of quests: three more

2010-03-02T09:43:00.000-08:00

Man, I've been on fire...since...last night. My Year of Quests has *definitely* begun...at least in my mind...but everything starts with an idea.

Twice now (in my life, in a row) I've gotten all caught up in massive mediocrity, just wanting to settle. Sick of the chase, of the not having, of the feeling entitled and overdue...so sick that I've been so, so willing to just take *something*...

It probably happened twice because I'm thick-headed and have never learned a lesson the easy way, or the first time it was taught.

But twice, my dire attempts at settling and making my world very small have failed miserably. Which in the short term is it's own downward spiral..."WHAT!? You mean I am not even capable of achieving mediocrity?"

(And so far the answer to that question is "NO.")

Have I been lucky? Or am I just on a path the universe has set for me that it will not allow me to alter for some momentary comfort and compromise? I think maybe both.

But anyway--here are three more quests for my journey--short, medium, and long-term (after all My Year of Quests is really just the beginning of my Life of Quests):

Short-term: Put up a reading of "Jordan and the Mannequins"--think I'm going to do it on March 31. Think I'm going to direct it myself.

Medium-term: Fit back into my leather pants from college!

It's an interesting phenomenon--I wasn't as thin in college as I am now, as far as I know. But I had NO ASS. I actually didn't have an ass until I was 24 years old...and then a beaut popped out. So now I think I have to shave a few pounds off my belly (which I could definitely stand to do...) to make up for ass...which is a recipe for HAWT.

(Again, not that I don't think I look hot right now...which has been the bane on me losing these extra 10 I've gained over the past year and a half or so...but damn, I wanna look HAWT...and fit into all my great work pants in time for this awesome new job I'll be getting soon!)

Long-term: Have a reading of "Jordan and the Mannequins" in NYC. Within a year. I've got the itch to make the transition to "where it counts"--as I told a friend last night, nobody makes it in theater by circumventing New York City.

my year of quests: a hazy vision

2010-03-01T10:11:00.000-08:00

To expound on my previous post...

As I now start on my Year of Quests proper...down resources and a party member or two, there are a few biggies that are definitely happening this coming year:

1) A New Job: this one can't really happen soon enough, but I have 3 months left of unemployment to find something...and I'm still holding out hope I can find something that pays a decent wage that doesn't totally suck...those are the parameters of my quest. A job I'd actually enjoy for the first two months would be so great.

2) A New Apartment: could come before or after #1, depending. If I can get #1 within the next month or two, that would be the most awesome because then I could move into a much nicer place or even stay where I am (although I want to move out because my gay porn freak upstairs neighbor is really just TOO MUCH! and I hate my management company. And the other neighbors.) But if I don't get #1 FIRST, i might have to move into a crappy place, which I don't want to happen, because my place right now is pretty great. Just freaking expensive.

3) A New Play: it's already in the works. It's called "Marrow". It's about two young women who I haven't named yet, who happen to be of the same age and of similar dispositions as my sister and me. Actually something she said to me a few weeks ago is what gave me focus for the theme of the play.

After that, it's anybody's ballgame. But that's enough to worry about, isn't it? I assume, statistically, romance has gotta happen SOMETIME...but really not banking on it this year at least.

my year of quests: a few hiccoughs

2010-03-01T08:27:00.000-08:00

So, around about New Year's, I announced that 2010 was going to be my year of quests.

So now, on March 1, a full two months into said year, I must admit it's gotten off to a rocky start. Not that I haven't been questing...but that my quests have been for mere survival, and not for fame or glory or fortune, or even a base entertainment value.

The worst is now over (knock on wood), but what a doozy these last three weeks have been. And I'll come out of it all *okay*, but not as good as I was going in. Because going in, I had that much more money left on my unemployment claim, those five digits of available credit, and misguided hope in a guy who turned out not to be so great...or honest with me.

It's like embarking on an epic quest with moxie and well-stocked supplies just to meet dire peril around the first corner and barely make it out alive--

But you did. Your supplies and spirits have dwindled, and your party is down one of your favorite people. But you still have to plow forward...

...because fame and fortune still await you. And you'll remember that once you rest up, heal a little bit, get a good meal and set out once more...

Because you are an adventurer, destined for greatness.

lesson thirty: every little thing's gonna be all right

2010-02-18T00:46:00.000-08:00

and this is what i'll leave you with...LA's a lot of things, and the people in it are a lot more things. and sure there are sob stories, stories of lives thrown away and dreams destroyed...but despite the rumors, people fall in love here and people find success here every single day. and two of those days are about to be mine.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-nine: where the light switch is not

2010-02-17T23:27:00.000-08:00

(this post was originally titled "everyone gives shitty advice"...including me. so i'm just warning you, because i'm about to try to give you some advice.)

in college, as an econ major at NYU, basically the only class i took that i actually felt was mind-expanding and changed me at all for the better was Austrian Economics taught by the elderly rabbi Israel Kirzner--should be noted that he is also the world's leading living expert on the subject, which made BSing essay tests a real drag.

the prerequisites were Intro and Intermediate Macro and Micro--where you learn all about economic models, and aggregates, and how things work. four long, grueling semesters full of formulas and promises that there is an answer for everything.

so then, once you've mastered keynesian theory, supply and demand, the shutdown point of a business (when marginal profits sink below average fixed costs...i THINK...)...you can take Austrian Economics--

WHICH BLOWS YOUR FREAKING MIND.

because it teaches you that all the things you've spent late nights in the library memorizing the past two years and reciting like trained monkeys are BOGUS.

it's a worldview (and the right one, imo) that suggests there are no workable economic models, because everything in the market is subjective. you can't, for instance, make the statement that diamonds are more valuable than water because if you're dying of thirst in the desert, you're going to value the water over the diamonds.

and this is why everyone gives shitty advice. it's not that they're bad people, or they're unintelligent, it is because all of their advice is based on their own subjective experiences.

case in point: jack and jane met in the grocery store produce section, fell in love and have lived happily ever after ever since. THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU WILL FIND LOVE BY LOITERING IN A GROCERY STORE. that will more likely just make you seem creepy and desperate.

but...that said...there are people who know more than you out there, and me, heaven knows, that CAN help you on the path to what you seek. (my two biggies right now being love and career.) so here are just some pointers, from me to you, for you to take or leave. (most of this blog post stems from my propensity to ask EVERYONE for their opinions about EVERYTHING--and then deal with the mental fallout of "who do i trust?"...a: at the end of the day, MYSELF.)

1) follow your heart. this one's kind of a doozy, particularly from me, as mine has been put through the wringer more times than i'd care to admit to. LET IT be put through the ringer, then pick yourself back up. because you just learned something you're not going to do next time.

2) only listen to the person giving advice if they have what it is you seek. and then understand that how they got theirs is a subjective story. if you ask someone who DOESN'T have what you're looking for, they're just stumbling in the dark like you are, looking for the light switch. so maybe you can meet up and say, "is it over there? no? you already looked over there? good, thanks, i'll save myself the trouble." but that's about it.

3) don't listen to anyone for advice on everything. as far as i've found, advice comes in specialties. the person who can tell you how to get the job you want is probably not also the right person to tell you how to land the man of your dreams (*note: and if they are this super-human, a naught-seen character in my travels, you'll really annoy them. so find someone else to ask about the other thing.)

4) do not listen to dating advice from anyone older than your parents. they may be happily married for fifty years, and that's just great. they also got married when jobs were separated in the classified section as "jobs for women" and "jobs for men". **this goes quadruple for young women listening to older men.

5) don't read self-help books. i know this one will be controversial, but they're really all boiler-plate hogwash and at the very best like the bad models taught in intermediate macro and micro...so maybe self-help advice is a prerequisite to good advice...so maybe read self-help books, if you don't already know what they say.

6) no one can prevent you pain. but pain is part of growth. see 1)

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-eight: it's about the journey

2010-01-06T12:21:00.000-08:00

Not to say I thought it was about the destination before...to be honest I can't recall how I felt. Except that probably I would arrive in LA and everyone would recognize my immense talents and I would immediately be super-successful. (I swear to god I found a spreadsheet I'd made near upon arriving in which I planned to be a millionaire and own a home by age 27! FOR REAL! It gave me the biggest laugh!)

But more to the point, while everyone is resolving right now in honor of the New Year, so am I. My ongoing resolution is to be less and less hard on myself, as despite being completely silly I tend to be over-serious and harsh in regards to my own various successes or lack thereof.

And--I have a lot to do this year. 2008 was a holycrap-OMG!-surprise-guerrilla-attack-war year. 2009 was a recovery year. so 2010 is a "get shit done" year.

So as I was thinking about this, my friend Brian was starting to put together a weekly "Sunday Night Questing" video game night with a bunch of our friends (best idea ever!)

And I thought--this is going to be my year of quests. One at a time, like a Netflix queue. However long it takes, is how long it takes, but I also can't move on to the next one until each is finished (hopefully a little give-and-take motivation/reward to myself.)

So as my 30 Lessons from Lalaland winds down (it was supposed to be finished in July? really? see how deadlines paralyze me!?)--my new blog series will begin:

2010: My Year of Quests.

Should be a great one!

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-seven: embrace the geek

2009-12-29T18:57:00.000-08:00

About a year ago(ish), I was very unhappy (again) in LA and was thinking seriously about moving (again). 2008 had been my personal year from Hell--

I lost my (great) job TWICE in two months.

I lived in four different apartments from the beginning to the end of 2008--two of which I fled from bad-crazy roommates, the bad-crazier one of which then sued me for money I'd already paid her and she just refused to cash the checks. (And she somehow won--or the judge, not caring, merely split the difference because she added fake charges to it, too.)

And then there was that thing with that guy...

Then I went home for a much needed respite, and didn't get it. I just got more guilt for not being a Christian, not having a boyfriend, and not having a job.

(Did I mention I didn't go home this year? And it was FANTASTIC!)

So back around Februaryish I was doing some real soul-searching. I wanted to GET OUT. But what it eventually came down to is, I hadn't achieved my objective yet, and until I finished that quest I couldn't even know what the next one was or how to go about achieving it (much less leave with a clear conscience). It would have been hitting the "eject" button and seeing where in the atmosphere I landed...

The thing was, I couldn't imagine leaving while I was so lonely. It felt like it would be accepting defeat when I was (I hoped) so close to a victory (although war-weary like nobody's business). My objective in LA, whether knowing it consciously or not from the beginning, was to have a social support system for the very first time in my life.

And now, looking back on the year and forward to the next as is tradition every year's end, 2009 was (although subtly so) a banner year:

--I achieved my objective! Mission Accomplished! Answer: It took me 5 whole years to have a solid support system for the first time in 29.

--I wrote my first full-length play. (which is AWESOME, and which I need to get my butt in gear and rewrite the ending of very soon so I can get a reading up in early '10.)

--I got the savvy and the balls to finally learn to say "no" to guys (not in a lesbian way) until I find something I want instead of trying to hammer something in that doesn't quite fit (not in a hetero way). I mean I don't have a physical list of requirements or anything, more a VERY finely honed yes/no censor.

Which leads to the geek part (in addition to the fact I've been playing Civilization 4 for 3 days straight...and the fact that I've become a much happier person since being outwardly and proudly the geek that I am after hiding it, ashamed, growing up.)--

(And in addition to the fact that after being pummeled a few times, I kicked serious butt last night, leading to a metaphor about how this time it took me five years but I was shooting in the dark, doing something I'd never had the opportunity to accomplish before and now I know what's what it definitely won't take me five years the next time.)--

But before my objective was achieved, I thought that once I achieved it there's no way I could leave Los Angeles because I finally found what I'd been looking for for my entire life.

But AFTER achieving it, I realized that life is much more like a video game. You complete a quest and it falls away, leading you to new quests.

It takes being happy to happily move on, you know?

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-six: monogamy isn't natural

2009-11-28T10:02:00.000-08:00

...and neither are: being potty-trained, brushing your teeth, cupcakes, paychecks, learning to read, going to the bank, organized sports, modern medicine, houses, brunch, refrigeration, or anything else we do or benefit from in life.

in every single facet of our existence, we've overcome the embarrassments of our crude, natural state, and we've (rightly) embraced our superiority in the ability to do so. and yet the argument persists that monogamy just isn't reasonable to expect of ourselves.

and i don't want to hear anything else about the freaking penguins mating for life...we have nothing else in common with the penguins...so why would we share that one trait?

but you don't hear people crusading for the right to take a crap on the sidewalk, do you?

have you ever been overcome by the dire urge to pee while stuck in traffic? sure you have. did you do it? no, you didn't.

because no matter how painful and terrifically all-consuming it was in the moment...maybe you had to bite hard on a pen for fifteen minutes (done it) and fight back tears (done that) but you made it home as fast as you could and relieved yourself there.

and you didn't make a mess, and you didn't ruin anything. and once it was over, the anguish of your trip home was all but forgotten and you still had your dignity in tact.

so if you're willing to go through those lengths just to save a pair of pants and your car upholstery, how much more is it worth not to mess things up with the person you love because you are overcome with some temporary bodily urge?

committed relationships aren't natural, but if you're lucky enough to find a good one they're way more valuable and satisfying and way less replaceable than a pair of pants or your car upholstery.

so if you're the type insistent upon embracing your natural state, please go live in the woods and be free. but if you're the type to appreciate and enjoy the finer things we've achieved on this planet...

...please train yourself to hold it until you get home.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-five: it's okay to forgive someone for purely selfish reasons

2009-10-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

This one's not going to be long. But a little less than two weeks ago, I did something I've never done before. I forgave someone who hurt me--although unintentionally--very, very badly, without any kind of proper apology or explanation.

(Several weeks) after this happened, said person finally said, "I don't really know what to say." And that was about it. A few weeks later I told him--"THIS IS WHAT I NEED YOU TO DO SO WE CAN BE FRIENDS AGAIN." (He thought we were already cool by that point.) Did he do this? No. Did I have any confidence the gesture was forthcoming? No.

So after feeling terrible about something I did nothing to cause done by someone who seemed incapable of making amends for weeks, if not months...a light bulb went on. Something like: I get to stop feeling bad about this thing that was done to me. I get to stop feeling awkward around this person who did something to me and is unwilling to deal with it.

And I realized I was allowed to forgive him, anyway. Just like that. And based on the results, I have to exponentially recommend it. I'm going to start forgiving people for no reason more often.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-four: shave your pubes

2009-09-22T03:17:00.000-07:00

i admit, i was not born with the gene that understands at birth that women should shave their legs. or wear makeup...much less, you know, "trim the hedges".

or maybe i *was*, but lost it somewhere in the wake of watching my former southern-beauty-queen mother cake on makeup and curl her hair just to drop us off at school. even if that meant we were late (or maybe she was really going to go see her secret lover afterwards??...nah...).

at the sweet, tender age of ten, i was probably close to a militant feminist. i had very short hair, refused to wear dresses, openly scoffed at my mother's domesticity (sorry mom!) and was certain that if hair grew anywhere on our bodies, it was because it was supposed to be there. (and i was apparently good enough at this that i effectively convinced my mother i was a lesbian until my mid-20s.)

[how did i turn out so mild? and straight?]

so anyway. up until i moved to LA, i never really trimmed...down there. i suppose it had simply never occurred to me as something to do.

shaving around "the area"...sure. for even though my mom's passive aggressive attempts to buy me Nair, without ever actually telling me what it was for, failed completely...once around age fourteen or so my sister walked into my room when i was dancing around in my underwear and i guess i had some afro-in-a-wig-cap action happening down there, she merely held up her hand and said, "CHRISTY!!! how about a courtesy shave!?" --well see, that worked wonders. see, parental units, mine and at-large, when you actually speak to people, amazing things can happen.

but that was still a decade before i found myself in the company of two of the first LA women i ever met in this great city--both very proud to be *double scorpios*--which for those not in the know apparently means nympho sex kittens/maniacs.

and one night, hanging out with these lovely ladies at fat fish, a great sushi joint in west hollywood, one of these ladies and i had to go to the bathroom at the same time. and there was only one.

"oh, don't worry, we can go together!" she enthused, and pulled me in with her.

*sidenote: all through junior high and high school i had a recurring nightmare that i had to go to the bathroom in front of other people. my high school psychology teacher informed me this was a dream about feeling that i had no privacy.

*side-sidenote: at the time when he told me this, i had had the definition of privacy (reposted verbatim from the dictionary) taped to my bedroom door for several years.

*side-side-sidenote: i COULD NOT go to the bathroom in her presence. she said her ex-husband was the same way. "pee-shy", she called it. i actually, truth be told, drove all the way home just to pee before re-meeting them at a bar later that night.

but anyway. while i was waiting for her to go, i couldn't help but notice her daintily trimmed pubes. just a tiny triangle of hair, really. i apologized and probably blushed ridiculously for noticing. but see, the thing about DOUBLE SCORPIOS is how sexually open they are! she merely laughed and apologized for the moment even happening.

but like i say...tell me...show me...i am open to bettering myself. i am doggedly addicted to bettering myself. so from that night on, i decided, well...if a double scorpio does that with her pubes, who am i to argue?

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-three: music is not just an instrument of torture

2009-09-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

i like music. no, i love music...although i gotta confess i rarely find myself listening to it on my own time.

i've never owned an iPod (but...i want one! *wink wink*) i never turn on the car radio. i don't listen to anything at the gym (except the "house music", whatever happens to be on, but mostly refer to the "no iPod").

i don't have a stereo. i have a decent iTunes library and listen to music on my computer, on occasion. (1500 of my songs, 4000 of my father's--a gift from him on an external hard drive a few christmases ago. this chick, hands-down, i think easily has the biggest Kingston Trio collection of any girl in hollywood.)

if i need to unwind after a stressful day, i'll pour myself a glass of wine, light some candles, pour a hot bath (and set off the smoke detector more often than not, and in the middle of the night...but i digress), and put on some norah jones or rosemary clooney, which makes me a fifty-year old woman or an eighty-year old woman, respectively.

but i really, really love music. i always want to learn more about it and discover new bands. i now have enough indie music recommendations to impress the prolific Indie Music Buff in LA for exactly one conversation (Lenka and the Noisettes...shoot i just blew it!) it is stressful for me to be around Indie Music Buffs because i am neither against them nor have anything to contribute to the conversation.

all because i grew up thinking that music was bad.

i grew up with my bedroom in between the thin walls of my brother's and sister's rooms. my brother had an amplifier addiction and only listened to rap music and country--that vibrated the walls. my sister, who grew up trying to emulate my brother in every way, only liked country music on the other side. loud, bad country music.

so on the rare occasions when i could escape to my room without required listening, i basked in the quiet. and then when the music started again, i would flee downstairs--

to where my father would be blasting easy listening music.

there was no escape.

and then, there was my mom. she's the one who drove me everywhere, and her car was her sanctuary. where my ears were invaded by freaking modern christian inspirational music. we're not even talking about good old-timey gospel tunes, which i could dig. i swear. this was like, sandi patty. go ahead. look her up. it'll be a nice kinship-empathy moment for us.

"Mom, can we just turn it off?"

"Christy, this is the only time I get to listen to it!"

so yes, it took me until age 28 to hear about the Smiths. and yes, the last rock concert i went to may well have been Bush when i was thirteen...(i was SUPPOSED to go to the Killers on wednesday, but had dress rehearsal. gah!)

but all in due time...and i'm in the right place for it. and even though by LA standards i am sure i am music-retarded, my music IQ is off the charts compared to what it would be like if i'd stayed within oh, 3000 miles of my father's stereo.

(but i gotta admit, my knowledge of classic rock is not shabby...and exactly when in life do you meet a girl who can sing along to "charlie and the mta"?)

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-two: "definitely" means "never"

2009-09-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

if you're looking for definites, don't move to LA. of course the saying goes in life there are no guarantees, but in LA there are even fewer. people dressed like superheroes regularly walk the streets. writers with no experience get six figures for a one-line pitch. the "wrong" people may surprise you and the "right" people could very well, and probably have, let you down.

maybe it is because of this inherent vulnerability that the word "definitely" tends to boomerang here...it has nowhere to really latch onto, so it turns around and goes back on itself.

examples:

"We definitely have to do this again soon." --translation-- "We will never see each other again."

"I will definitely read this script." --translation-- "I will forget about this forever by the time I get home."

"I will definitely get back to you by Monday." --translation-- "Don't expect to ever hear from me again."

...and so on. sadly it took me turning into the beast before i realized this curse.

"Oh, I will definitely e-mail you when I get home," I said. (I never e-mailed her.)

when hanging out with a friend of a not-really-and-no-longer-mutual-friend:

Her: "We need to hang out soon." Me: "Definitely." (We never hung out.)

that was about two years ago. so i tried very hard to stop using that word, and then a few people said "definitely" and actually came through for me and i thought maybe i was wrong, after all. and very happy to be so.

until then this weekend, when it popped up in an e-mail from a guy i liked very much:

"...I definitely don't want to let you go..." --translation-- "I'm letting you go right now."

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty-one: use craigslist with severe caution

2009-09-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

or, you know, if you're bored and want to have some russian-roulette-type fun with your life.

you can get a GREAT DEAL on a dryer...but it might catch on fire the first time you use it (but hey, it cost my old roommate $50...and she was smart enough to do a "dry run" with no clothes, fixed the problem, and then it worked fine.). you may even find yourself in the despotic employ of the Saudi royal family...an experience that will in turn inspire a pretty un-effing-believable one man show. a woman i met told me she found an ad from a guy looking for a cadre of people to play all the fake friends he'd made up to impress an online girl penpal for $50 each (that this woman, who herself is in the top ten of crazies i've met, had thought about responding to.)

some people use it for dating or casual hookups...i've never been so bold (...is "bold" really the right word?...). but for just about all of the "bad crazy" people i've met in LA, craigslist was the magical portal i stepped inside of first, as i've exclusively relied on it for every living situation i've found myself in since moving here. (did i mention i now pay through my nose to live alone?)

so i submit to you a run-down of all the crazies i have met grace-a-craigslist:

-a pint-sized fake australian who fake-evicted me (for real, photoshop eviction notice and all) ten weeks after i moved to LA because i wouldn't sleep with him. (roomie #1...and the craziest pathological liar i've ever met and the inspiration for my first play, "For All The Straight Girls in Boystown", which no one has ever read, because while charming it is not good...and for which I had to cut all his BS in half just to make a somewhat believable character.)

-a stand-offish chick with a wall full of female power books who i paid half the rent for two years to hide in my room from...who when i told her all about my dream job i was applying for and spent 3 weeks trying to get, picked up a phone the week of my interview and got herself an interview, too. i was very into baking then and once when i went on a baking binge she said, "mmm, it reminds me of my mom when she used to go on baking sprees." to which i responded, "well, i hope it was a happy memory." to which she responded, "i didn't say that." (roomie #2)

(seriously, who has bad memories of their mom BAKING?)

-a narcy actress chick who went apeshit on me when i invited her to hang with my friends that i had "no tact" in social situations and that i kept interrupting her and made everyone uncomfortable (see "my" friends note...), who then made up this whole big lie that my entire cast hated me and were conspiring behind my back the entire run of my play RIGHT after my cast party, all to get back at one of the leads who slept with her for two weeks and then dumped her the night before the cast party (but at the time, i believed her.) (roomie #3)

-a guy who threw all my dishes on the back porch and broke them because a third roommate had used them without cleaning them and then sent a 10-paragraph e-mail to the house in mostly capital letters saying we had all lost our kitchen privileges (all after he broke the garbage disposal and didn't do anything about getting it fixed for 3 weeks, so we couldn't wash dishes.) (roomie #4)

-a leathery 40-year-old who looked 50 and fed herself a steady diet of 1/2 a bottle of jack daniels every day and an occasional steak. she pranced around in a string bikini and wouldn't shut up about how brilliant she was and went to prison for six months while i lived there and the rest of us were all like, YAY!, and then she was processed and released the same night. she never forgave me for beating her at the original version of trivial pursuit (you know, the one that came out when i was a toddler), and sued me after i moved out for some made up bullshit that i had to partially pay her for anyway because small claims court doesn't give a damn and she knows it so she basically does this with all of her former roommates for some extra cash. (roommate #5)

-an ugly yet affable totally bat-shit crazy would-be-con-artist who i was somehow obsessed with for an entire year (*not proud*) and took another whole year to get out of my life...when he was showing his apartment, which i ended up not taking (*thank god*).

but hey...in the PLUS column...i got a $2500 refrigerator for $500...all i had to do was pay up front...to a russian lady...and then wait longer and longer as her moving date got pushed further and further back...(not that i was freaking out or anything towards the end...)

a handy craigslist ratings guide:

for love: YOU'RE sketchy.
for roommates: mondo sketchy.
for jobs: sketchy.
for consumer goods: sketchyish.

but sometimes, sketchy's just where you have to start...

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twenty: we are all moonchildren

2009-09-05T23:22:00.000-07:00

when i was in college, a guy i hung out with for like, a week, told me how when public education was forced onto the inuits, they permanently lost their natural lunar cycle and thereby, to an extent, their entire culture in the name of compulsory state-run education. [this same guy then turned on velvet underground and slipped me the tongue...but hey, okay, i was young and impressionable and he was expanding my mind...] [*totally* the guy in annie hall who said to annie, "put your foot on my chest."] [we've all got one...okay...]

then, the idea that served as the catalyst for my play (that i seem to finally be edging close to finishing) was the tsunami in thailand several years ago--specifically, reports that every single animal headed way above sea level in advance, making humans, with few exceptions, the only casualties. why didn't people know, too? have we lost our connection with the universe?

(yes.)

another thing about LA, is that it probably has the highest per capita ratio of anywhere in the world of people who believe in astrology. i remain an astrology agnostic, but one of the reasons for this is that i've always felt like i am *incredibly* un-Capricorn (and yet this is the very much the way many people see me.) so then i move to LA and find out that both my moon and my rising sign are in Cancer...Capricorn's opposite sign...and the moon sign is apparently the behavior you default to when you're vulnerable and the rising sign is the way you aspire to be...and the idea that i aspired to be the way i was when i was vulnerable and also that i was actually Cancer...also the idea that the world saw me as the opposite of the way i really was...all resonated with me (as did my astrology friends basically being like, "ohhhhh, you're Cancer! that's why i like you.")

so um, yeah...the moon. (warning: this is where this blog becomes about my period, so if that's going to skeeve you out, please stop reading and go write me a blog entry about jock itch or your first wet dream or peeing standing up that i will in turn read with rapt fascination.)

i'd always heard it said that women are supposed to cycle with the moon, but that's never been true for me. ever since i got my first period (at the tender age of ten...fourth grade...on an airplane...on the way to moving to japan...but not before we stopped for a hawaiian vacation!), it was always totally irregular from month to month. it wouldn't be odd to skip months, it was most often incredibly painful, and impossible to predict for nineteen years going.

but also, if i think about it, my life was in a near-constant state of mondo stress for basically all of those nineteen years--actually until this past late january/early february, when the sky finally opened up for me (literally!). because exactly at the time i stopped stressing out (because the constant if everchanging sources of stress put upon me finally abated), and i really started to really dig my life, is when i got my rag on the full moon.

and now i have gotten it within 24 hours of the full moon for eight months straight. whether that makes it 26 or 28 or 30 days apart.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson nineteen: west coast vs. east coast = EQ vs. IQ

2009-08-27T22:12:00.000-07:00

as i think has been safely established in this series so far, before moving to LA, i was basically your garden variety, antisocial nerd. i did smashingly on my SATs, and GREs, got "B"s in gym class and tolerated people who liked to talk in-depth about dead philosophers over espresso. i was always on time for everything, i had perfect spelling and i used words like "reticent" and "egregious" in casual conversation (i still slip sometimes...but only in text messages.)

moreover, i was obsessed with how smart YOU were. i was constantly analyzing how smart everyone was compared to me (but i was always the most smart! ta-da!) (um, i mean smartest!)

add to whatever external social cues i was getting or not getting, i was raised in a home where feelings were not generally encouraged nor appreciated nor considered. nothing mattered except the iron law of logic (as subjectively defined by my father, who was converted to Christianity by a door-to-door bible thumper when he was 26, but i digress), and when i tried to argue with it, my protests even obtained their own condescending moniker: "Christy logic" (which means, in case you are confused, "that which stands in the way of true logic.").

now, there are very well known stereotypes at play here: east coasters think west coasters are a bunch of flaky airheads. while west coasters think east coasters are rude. and while midwesterners are widely considered incredibly even-keeled, the moment they move either to the east coast or the west coast they immediately become more batshit crazy than anyone else (or maybe just because it's the batshit crazy ones who leave? oh, the hamster wheel of human philosophy...)

anyway. all these stereotypes, in my opinion, are true. at least from the perspective of the people who espouse them, and what other definition of truth is there really than every individual person's truth? west-coasters do seem less concerned with test scores, and east-coasters do seem less concerned with other people's feelings (and their own.)

i was junior high-ish when the study of Emotional Quotients (EQs) was popularized as a companion measurement of intelligence to IQs, and now it is often considered much more important in determining a person's success and happiness in life. I vaguely remember taking one of these tests at the time and scoring incredibly low on EQ. (but, no matter! i was, after all, brilliant...and you gotta deal with life's give and take, um, right?) (wrong.)

well luckily for me, i got the one you can't develop over time.

also luckily for me, five years ago i moved to a place where almost everyone was suddenly more intelligent than me! and for the first time in my life!

early on here, when i would be asked why i didn't act, i humorously responded that an actor needs to be "in the moment", and i never know how i feel in the moment until two years later. and i used this response for years...until i realized it wasn't true anymore. what had happened to me?

two years ago i lived with an actress roommate and one day we were talking about how flipping stupid scarlett johanssen must have to be to get rejected from Tisch at NYU after already being an established actress at the age of 18.

so instead of going to college, what would have been her freshman year she starred in two different movies she got academy award nominations for.

which led me to the realization, without even thinking of EQs or IQs, that while maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer, scarlett johanssen is probably emotionally brilliant.

i mean, isn't that what actors do? channel character's emotions? "get" a character from a few lines of dialogue so much that they can embody someone entirely different than themselves? it may take IQ to write the lines but it takes EQ to sell them (don't get me wrong here, a whole lot of actors have very high IQs, too.)

and i realized, well...who have i been hanging around this entire time? just about everyone in LA is an actor! (well the attractive people at least, and let's face it, i prefer hanging around attractive people!) and i guess hanging out with all these emotionally brilliant people finally rubbed off on me to the point that i realized...

I have feeeeelings!

now don't get me wrong, i'm not suddenly going to go crazy with my new found self-knowledge and take up acting or anything. if i tried acting again i would probably learn quickly i have progressed from terrible to mediocre (sweet!).

i mean, it took me 29 years just to know how i feel in the moment as myself! i think i'll just cash out now and ride that accomplishment off into the sunset...

one of the reasons i wanted to do this series is because LA gets such a bad rap everywhere else, and until i was established here i was probably one of the worst culprits. but it's been incredibly good to and for me...you know?

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson eighteen: some people are already friend-married

2009-08-12T17:50:00.000-07:00

when you move around every three or four years until your mid-20s, and are inherently shy and full of social anxiety (just had an exchange on the facebook with a woman who's known me since i was 10 that she can't believe i'm an I (Introverted) on the meyers-briggs personality test. but yes, i am strongly I), it makes you both really good and really bad at making friends.

really good: it forces loners like me to develop mad social skills (at least...my mom would say that's good). it introduces you to a wide variety of people in situations where you want them all to like you, when your mind is still open to being open- or closed-. and after about a thousand forced social interactions with people you don't really know and probably don't like you get an honorary title of "extrovert".

really bad: it makes you so god damn lonely that at times you can barely breathe, much less leave your home to go and mingle, because you know (from experience) people can smell this need and it simultaneously attracts all the wrong kinds of people and scares all the right kinds away. but these people are your training ground...and of course you hang out with them for a while just because there's no one else offering. but along with the emotional damage they're going to do and eventually (once you've learned a few things) fail to do to you they're going to give you a leg up...because now you're more comfortable and confident and not needy anymore because after all, bad friends are still friends, and now you've been around a while, which gives you some cred with everyone else. so you get better friends and slowly but surely burn off the ones who were never really your friends to begin with, or maybe they actually were but you outgrew them, etc.

this "burning off" is something that was new to me in LA...and as painful as it sounds. but i had never actually lived anywhere before where i stuck around long enough to lose friends. i just thought, once you were friends, you were friends for life. period.

but what i've learned is that friendships are an awful lot like relationships...there's a courting process, a seeing what's up--most people are just looking for something casual, and it's hard to find people who are "friend-single" who are also looking for a long-term relationship. and just like dating, you're not going to find the right people for an LTR until you take care of your own shit. which, as delineated, is a process.

and i realized about a year ago that early on in my stay in LA, and when I was in Philadelphia, and even earlier on (although just like real marriages, the younger you go back, the more people are single and looking), i was still, in my late 20s, making the rookie mistake of going after people who were already friend-married.

i mean...it makes sense, right? you know what you want and you see people who are capable of that kind of relationship so you say, GREAT!, that's just what i'm looking for! but...they are already taken.

i think people move about quite like atoms in space. we all have so many electrons in our outer valence shell, and if we bump into people with an electron match we can combine with, we combine. and then when you have all your outer valence electrons (there are 8) filled up, you can ultimately only reject other atoms.

for years and years i felt like i was a noble gas: an atom with *no* outer valence electrons, who because of this unfortunate property was forever unable to connect with anyone else...both romantically and in terms of good friends.

but...as it turns out, my chemistry was a little fuzzy. noble gases are actually the opposite--atoms whose outer valence shell is full, without combining with any other atom. the chemical equivalent of people who don't need anyone.

so guess what? i am definitely not a noble gas! and as it turns out, if you just stick around long enough, you start to attract the right kinds of "atoms" and form "molecules"!

=SCIENCE! (where is my baking soda and vinegar volcano for this demonstration?)*

*geekiest post ever! and when i say ever...i mean yet.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson seventeen: be a fan

2009-07-29T01:32:00.000-07:00

compliments were scarce where i grew up...my father (god love him) even said in college when confronted (by me) that he didn't want to come across as accepting someone's achievement in any area when they could always do better (why, again, am i not an olympic athlete?).

so i think that unfortunately on some subconscious level i carried this trait with me into adulthood. i have only the vaguest early recollections left of never thinking anything complimentary about anybody (i used to say that through high school, i was "daria".)

i mean, after all...take this to the street level: why compliment someone's shoes, when they could be wearing better shoes? or outfit, or hair-do? why ever make someone feel good about themselves when you could instead encourage the creation of a "better" person with the same breath?

well that's all changed, now long ago. and i think my dad's rigid lessons even serve me well in hollywood...don't *pander*...just be a fan (and i seriously walked out of my first show this past year, that many people i knew were in, too...it just had to be done.)

but you know what makes it soooo easy to be a fan in LA?

a lot of people in LA have talent that will knock your socks off!

i am very often in awe of my super-talented friends here...who often enough also have great shoes, great clothes, great hair, great senses of humor, great laughs, beautiful faces, great smiles, are eminently good people...great fill in the blanks. so yeah. i am frequently high on my friends, and that feels damn good.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson sixteen: i'm going to have to work a lot harder to get where i want to be.

2009-07-28T22:26:00.001-07:00

hmmm...and where is that? well, to be a paid writer, in general. in some capacity. but which one?

in the five years i've been out here, i've dabbled in tons of genres:

-i came out armed with TV specs. still have a never-submitted, kickass pilot for a sci-fi/teen soap series. i also have a spec for 2 1/2 men (is that even still on?) that was a finalist in a competition, and a truly godawful law and order: svu spec that i will never show anyone and will instruct my estate to destroy unread upon my death (which they will then read and understand why).

-i have three or so screenplays-in-progress, and several more undeveloped ideas for screenplays.

-i [dropped] a novel writing class at UCLA extension, but have a very kickass 50 pages or so of what i would like to turn into a kickass young adult novel then turned into a kickass motion picture (seriously though, this idea is kickass. did i mention it was kickass?)

-i put up my own play in hollywood a few years back, and am currently, seemingly, completely unable to just freaking finish my new one, which is really the best thing i ever will have written so far, which i have 70 pages written and the rest extensively outlined to the point that i just need to freaking write it...and i can't. i have play-impotence.

all the while thinking, maybe a switch to genre fiction. young adult or mystery or maybe even sci-fi. or should i go the freelance/journalism route? (i did after all start as an op-ed contributor for the philadelphia daily news!)

all the while, not writing a blooming thing. except, i guess, this. and even trying to summon the resolve to rewrite a 7-page late-night theater script well in advance of the deadline...i did, after all, successfully submit the first one four months ago already.

and it. is so. frustrating. kind of because, i'm not getting paid. if i were, i think i could happily and busily do any and all of the above, very well. and freaking PRODUCE! but when you're broke month after month, and writing for no one, with no one to hold you accountable, and with no opportunities on the horizon, and no deadlines...

yeah. so that's where i am. and i need to get out of this slump!

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson fifteen: you gotta be sincere

2009-06-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

very early on in my tenure in LA, i very briefly dated this very strange guy.

he was crazy about me. he kept trying to turn our non-dates into dates (awkward!) (i don't think we ever really had a REAL date...never kissed or anything...i was totally unattracted to him...so i guess we didn't even really date but i found him mildly interesting and i didn't really know anyone else, which was apparently enough at the time.)

he told me he felt the calling to be the voice of his generation. he said he always knew he would die young. he stuttered when he got nervous (which was basically all the time.)

i think i probably only hung out with him twice, or come to think of it maybe just the once, and yet there was something about him that kept irritating me for weeks afterward that i couldn't put my finger on.

it finally congealed when i was talking to a friend maybe a month later:

this guy doesn't know the difference between what is sarcastic and what is funny and what is just plain random.

this discovery led to a ruthless self-evaluation. you know...did *i* know the difference?

so i entered into what i can only label as a bizarre social experiment now, though it seemed like "the new, better me" at the time (it wasn't.) but i decided to only be sincere, all the time. any time i would have been sarcastic, i would say something sincere instead, based on the following formula i came up with in my early twenties, before i (gratefully) moved to LA and (gratefully) lost a few IQ points and (gratefully) became socialized:

literalism beats sarcasm beats sincerity beats literalism in a semantic rock-paper-scissors.

but um...have you met me? i can't say for certain because no one ever called me on it (they were probably too terrified), and before too long i took whatever i had learned (oh right, that i knew the difference all along) and hightailed it straight out of that social experiment...but i'm pretty sure that for a while there i was freaking everyone the f*** out.

and yet...i kind of really had a point, too. to be continued...

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson fourteen: you can get over your daddy issues

2009-06-26T02:10:00.000-07:00

[did i say something about softballs? just keeping you on your toes, people.]

this past sunday, i didn't call my father for the first father's day ever. i didn't forget, it just felt somehow like the wrong thing to do.

now i have to preempt this. he was not a bad father. in fact, until i was ten [when we moved to japan/i went through puberty/he started working 18 hour days all at the exact same time], he was an absolutely perfect father. but right when i needed him the most, we just lost each other and never quite found our way back.

[sidenote: i am the only person on the planet remotely like my father in some unknown way which he has always prided himself on not being figure-out-able...the very way in which i am exactly like my father. i can get this unflappable master of industry to throw a temper tantrum like a constipated four-year-old in less than five minutes (not intentionally), and he can get me, a woman who prides myself on being incredibly even-keeled, to burst into tears like a constipated four-year-old (as he did, last christmas...also not intentionally) just because he doesn't want to watch my favorite movie with me.]

two days after father's day, he called from a ball game because "our song" ("abracadabra" by steve miller band) was playing [i couldn't hear anything. i thought, "well played, dad," then double-checked to make sure he hadn't after all called from the home phone.]

the day after that (yesterday), he called me and talked to me for TWO HOURS. this man who i have probably only spoken to less than ten hours per year for the last ten years, and those ten were often fighting or arguing...or you know, discussing my car, my college loans [i still owe him for], my job or lack of, my insurance or lack of...aka my least favorite subjects in the entire universe.

so when dad actually wanted to talk to me...i was 1) "awkward!" and 2) "oh no..."

but [gasp! shock!] these are the things he said to me:

i want a relationship with you. we need to call and e-mail each other often. i don't want this to go through your mother anymore.

and maybe the most shocking/important revelation:

i had no idea you are happy. i've been so worried.

when i started to write this blog post, it was going to be all about *how* i got over my daddy issues (last year). about how it was my age 28 epiphany. about how your spirit guide can strangely take the form of the biggest asshole you have ever been blessed/cursed to associate with (and who still owes you $300.)

...but who cares? what matters is i got over them all. and that i love my father very, very much.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson thirteen: when some one offers you a breath mint, take it

2009-06-25T17:22:00.000-07:00

[yes, i am on vacation. you'll have to deal with the softballs.]

back in my awkward teenage years, whenever someone would offer me gum or a mint, [i cringe as i think about this now], i would sarcastically say, "are you trying to tell me something!" [wincing cringe...omg]

there are three reasons someone will offer you a breath freshener:

1) they are partaking of one themselves, and being polite.
2) they are sick of smelling your stanky breath
3) they are sick of smelling your stanky breath, AND are being polite, as to make it look like it was their idea to have a mint or a stick of gum all along.

but a word to the wise...if you have one, i'll take a mint. i can only chew gum for about a minute or two before it hurts my jaws...i have TMJ.

[i have no idea what about reading mystic river made me think of this...there was nothing about mints or anything in it and yet this blog post fully formed while i was reading about celeste washing the blood and brain out of dave's murder clothes]

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson twelve: halloween is so much better than christmas

2009-06-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

don't get me wrong, i was always a big fan of halloween. but between those plastic masks that made my face sweat as a little kid, having to drag my little sister along (less speed=less candy), my big brother's friends spraying people with shaving cream (and me being too young at the time to understand the bro code, that they would NOT spray me), my otherwise moderate parents forcing us to go to a church where most of the adults and some kids, too, never failed to bewail "satan's holiday" each year, being forbidden from trick-or-treating because the yakuza was passing out 10,000 yen bills (=$100) down the street (totally true story) (my friends got to go)...

i never TRULY embraced the spirit of halloween until i moved to LA.

but question: does it get any better than this? like seriously, does any day of the year really even come close?
answer: you ain't seen nothing yet, baby. halloween 2009!!!

(yes, i just ordered my costume...or as i like to call it, "the base coat". and with the same sense of knowing as when i picked out my puppy...)

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson eleven: sometimes a blessing feels more like a curse

2009-06-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

don't know why, i just seem to be having one of those days (or "just one a' dem days", thank you, monica) where every new positive thought, when followed far enough, just seems to lead to a new negative one...so spoiler alert: this one's a little melancholy. sorry in advance.

(but hey, these are lessons from lalaland, right?...it's not like it's disneyworld or anything...)

it was very early 2006, and i was having some scenes from the play i would put up that fall read that night. i'd given the actor who had read the lead part for all of such readings his pages, and was sitting next to him quietly sipping my cocktail just waiting for things to begin.

and this actor...we'd always had an unspoken flirtation, but it never went anywhere beyond that. for starters, since i'd met him, he'd been with the same girl, and even if he wasn't, there were plenty of reasons i could think of (and at some point i'm sure i actually did) why it would never work anyway.

then suddenly, in the dim light of the room, he looked up at me, wild-eyed, and said:

"this is me!"

caught off guard, i said that yes, that line was probably the heart of the character.

"no, no, no!" he was frantic. he read the line outloud:

"I feel sometimes like I must be the loneliest person on the planet. And I feel like it’s this cave, like I’m trapped in this cave and I can’t get out because I need someone to help me and I can’t bring myself to talk to anyone because I feel like I am so, so fucking lonely that I will either A) scare them away or B) they will take advantage of me."

he continued, "this is ME! this is G____!"

and in the darkness of that room, staring at him, i was having a serious moment.

"that's me," i said. then after a few more seconds of speechless staring, i dismissively added, "i think that's everyone."

and i looked away. and in that moment, he reached out to his other side, needing to hold the woman who was then his girlfriend, now his wife, now the mother of his child.

i think that was the single loneliest moment of my life.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson ten: less makeup, more skin care

2009-06-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)
not that i was ever that high on makeup.

as a matter of fact, not wearing makeup was about the best way for the fourteen-year-old me to rebel against a woman whose most embarrassing moment in her life was her sorority hazing where she was forced to go to breakfast without makeup on (true story). (also true...they were not so cruel as to make her go in her PJs...they let her change first. just no makeup.)

(also a true story...that fourteen year old was pulled aside by that woman and told point blank that a woman needed to wear makeup to be beautiful...in those words.)

(after which i started wearing a little makeup.)

(sidenote: this same woman spent my entire childhood chiding me, "a little vanity is a good thing." but when i moved to hollywood and actually *got* some...well...she chided me for that, too.) (and yes, i'm much more vain than i was before i moved here, i admit. but i also have to give kudos to my mom. i think now i was both not vain enough growing up, and too vain for a while after initially drinking the kool-aid of hollywood.) (hopefully that's all leveled out now...you know...in an "LA" way heh heh.)but as far as skin care...until recently, i always had kind of bad skin. not charles bukowski bad or anything, but very dry, very sensitive skin prone to frequent hormonal imbalances...and nothing worked on it. proactiv peeled my face off, moisturizers made me break out...awful! not to mention a healthy dose of delusions of invincibility combined with pretty nordic skin and a few worst-case sunburns along the way (but all of those i think before age 18).

(sidenote #2: last time my mother came out to visit me in LA, she took me out to dinner at which time she decided it was right to mention how my uncle had a malignant spot on his skin and started bawling out of nowhere that she was terrified i was going to get skin cancer because of my sunburns as a child.)

(sidenote #3: i will never get tired of lovingly mocking my parents both on my blog and IRL.)

(sidenote #4: and they will never stop giving me fresh material.)

but anyway...bad skin is pretty much a thing of the past, now, even to the point that two makeup artists on movies gushed about my skin at a premiere party not long ago (YESSSS!)

part of that is just growing up...part of it is just de-stressing after years of neurotic levels of stress stimuli...and part of it is listening to enough people in hollywood who are truly obsessed with skincare to find a product line that really works AND is affordable (i won't whore out my blog, but if curious, ask me.)

a few months ago a friend who is turning 30 six months before me and i were at sephora holding each other as a clerk (in his forties with GREAT SKIN!) gave us the doomsday prophecy:

your skin will do everything in it's power to try to renew itself until you turn 30. around that time, the skin you have is the skin you keep, and from then on it's merely a game of loss-prevention. (or plastic surgery.) (but no, really, i've always hoped to age gracefully...not become one of those tight hollywood ladies.) (...i say now...)

so, anyway, here's to six more months of restoration before my skin starts to...die.

(and well after that, i guess...there's always makeup...?)

lesson nine: everything you need to know in life, you can learn from a character actor

2009-06-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

(doubling up today 1) to catch up and 2) so no one thinks i'm hating on actors, over here. 'cause i love you guys, big time.)

(and by "you", i specifically mean the actors most likely to be reading this right now...not making any blanket statements, here.)

a few years ago i was privy to a very talented and very working character actor giving a young actor the following audition advice, that i happened to find rather sagacious in general:

know what your thing is, and do it well. if you try to pander to what you think they want to see you're dead. let them accept you or reject you. if they reject you, don't take it personally, they were just looking for something else. but as long as you're *you*, every time, the people who are looking for *you* are going to know it when they see you...so all you have to do is do your thing.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson eight: taking an acting class is not going to make me a better writer

2009-06-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)
on my list of hollywoodland pet peeves, this ranks somewhere beneath professional actors who buy final draft one day and are suddenly "actor-slash-writers" and above writers who gush about how the acting class they're taking is really helping with their writing.

they're careers that require two completely different skill sets and to be great at both of them, to my mind, would be almost as random as an olympic skier who is also a world-class chef.

for instance. let me promise you that i am a truly, truly horrible actor. (and just as no one can teach you to write, really, no one can teach you to act, really. i really believe that. really. okay i'll stop now.)

but acting is all about being "in the moment"...i won't necessarily even know how i feel in the moment for like, two more years. did you share a moment with me before 2004? if so, i may have been preoccupied thinking about something that happened two years before. sorry. (it really might be a brain condition over a career path.)

(sidenote: 2004 marks my move to hollywood as well as the beginning, or near-beginning, of my education in this area and i have now mastered being "in the moment"...AS ME. forget now trying to do it as someone else, i'm cashing out and going home a winner.)

so to the people (=professional actors) who suggest this to me, i always respond with this question:

"do you think taking a writing class would make you a better actor?"

lesson seven: love isn't fair

2009-06-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)
misinterpreted adages were a hallmark of my childhood. my parents spoke in them.

my mother used them as social control (heard 10,000x during my childhood: "only say something if it's kind, if it's true, and if it's necessary.") (to which i responded in frustration that nothing on earth satisfied all three requirements.) (which suggests she might have just been telling us to shut up, but no, she tried to follow this rule herself.)

my father, contrasting, only spoke in ones without hope of a moral that were either made up by his grandmother ("everyone eats a peck of dirt before they die."), by someone else ("two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.") or by himself ("you are your own biggest problem!") (interesting sidenote: he has since claimed he never ever said that, and that i must have made it up.) (side-sidenote: he said it at least once a week for at least ten years.)

but perhaps the most disruptive to my early development were the following:

1) curiosity killed the cat. interpretation: asking questions is deadly. accept things blindly.

i was seriously about 20 years old before i heard the ending, "satisfaction brought him back." it was revolutionary. i shared this with my mother, who had never heard that before in her life.

new interpretation: curiosity can get you into trouble, but knowledge has a power greater than death.

2) all is fair in love and war. interpretation: if you are patient and good, things will work out for you in love because that's just the way the universe works...there's even an idiom that says so.

it was only about six months ago i finally thought about this again and was finally like...w-w-w-WAIT. nothing is fair in war! or love! what the hell kind of crackpot philosophy had i been raised on!? (a: christianity)

so i looked it up online, and if any of you are clueless like i was, what it means is, "all is fair *game* in love and war."

new interpretation: in matters of the heart, it's a free-for-all. so watch the f*** out. and have fun.

lesson six: i love LA

2009-06-10T17:03:00.000-07:00

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)
in the arena of "things i didn't know until i moved here", this is a biggie. i even said "thanks but no thanks" to a non-minor hollywood lit agent in college (still the closest i've ever come to having one! ha!) because the idea of living here sounded that goddamn awful to me.

and for the five years i've lived here, i've probably, between you and me, hated it more often than i've loved it. but the tide has turned, to the point i'd be lying if i didn't say i keep having to remind myself this is NOT the 30-days of gratefulness blog series i finished last month.

but here it is...and i'm going to say it and hopefully get it out of my system:

i am grateful that i get to live in LA.

lesson five: standing up for yourself is not very hollywood

2009-06-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

this past weekend i got hosed via text message by a guy who i haven't even talked to in months. he's still pissed i kicked him off the screenplay we weren't-exactly-writing for over a year.

he said it was "very hollywood" of me.

and i remembered, i'd heard that before...but not since the last time i had to kick someone off a project for no other reason than they were trying to suck the lifeblood out of me and they were succeeding.

of course, to put it in perspective, and to exaggerate for the sake of a point, him saying that to me, now, is like someone throwing a marble at Scarface. whereas the first guy was more along the lines of offering up an infant sacrifice, of me (again, exaggerating...but probably not as much as i'd like to be).

he had been my first writing mentor when i moved to hollywood. he helped me rewrite a TV spec to the point that it placed in a competition, and did the thing that i've since realized *is* a "thing", the acting like the penultimate asshole who happens to see something special in *you* [insert snarky self-aggrandizing comment here]. but i could not have been higher on this guy.

so when he offered to direct my first play, i couldn't have felt it was in better hands. he said it needed to be rewritten, but i knew that already. he helped organize the first reading, and even hosted it (oh wait, no he didn't...he got one of his friends to host it for him.)

then he sat me down and dictated a scene by scene page one rewrite. he wanted the play to start with a scene at this guy's shrinks office! (the shrink was not a character in my version.) but how trite can you be? (later on when i ditched him he blurted out of nowhere, I WAS GOING TO GET A CELEBRITY TO BE IN IT!...i'm assuming to play this shrink...)

"christy," he said. "TRUST ME. i admire what you're trying to do, but i've never seen a passive aggressive shrink scene done before."

(to which, even the sweet, naive 26-year-old me was going "!!?!?!are you seriously being serious with me right now?!!?!?"...in my head.) (did i mention he was fifty?)

so as i was sleeping less and less and becoming more and more panicky and disillusioned, it finally took the following...only followed by lots of deliberation and conversation with trusted friends...to fire my former mentor:

"so christy..." he said one day at a coffee shop. "i really think, since you're not paying me or anything, that we should put up my play before yours every night of its run."

(wait...what!?!)

i even offered to let him put it up after. for free. he thought about that a moment and riled his nose.

"nah..." he said. "it's more prestigious to go before."

after that, on the advice of said trusted friends who were trying to prevent me from getting [insert violent and obscene metaphor] by this guy, i began talking to the second director (who turned out to be an even worse trainwreck...but i finally got it right on the third one).

that's when he also called me "very hollywood" (among many other things...)

then later, he stalked my reviews, tried to get dirt from my second director and even e-mailed me closing weekend that he was sooooo glad he didn't waste his precious time shining my "turd of a play." (charming!)

but anyway, that was baby-gutting guy. marble-throwing guy had merely strung me along for over a year making minimal contributions to a screenplay that was all my idea and i'd basically written all by myself, anyway. and i felt like all the good ideas were mine. all the good ideas he was axing were mine. all the bad ideas i didn't want to use kept being his.

and if i ever do go back and finish it and sell it on my own, he'll get a "story by" credit and a 10% cut (the only way i can rationalize that as being fair is thinking that if it weren't for him, i probably would never have written it. which is true.)

but even though i've (mostly) given up trying to change people's false perceptions, i feel like he actually heard me the second time...that it wasn't about cutting him out. it was about me needing to refocus.

(i'm getting really good at this, no?)

lesson four: you can go your own way

2009-06-08T01:31:00.000-07:00

it's a little trippy and actually kind of impossible to imagine my parent's life when they were my age. i try to keep that in mind whenever i try to have a conversation with them.

at 29, they'd been married for seven years, had a three-year-old and a one-year-old (me! yay!), owned a three-bedrooom house, and lived in a tiny town in upstate new york called ballston lake. my mother was a stay-at-home mom trying to make new friends in a kind of closed community (they'd just moved to new york the year before after living their whole lives in the south.) my father was a manager at a small local office of a fortune 500 company (at 29! he was the manager!)

they invested in stocks and were already saving for their retirement. (at 29!) you know, wow. good for them. (whereas my retirement plan goes more like, "well...by then i'll be rich.") (note to self: rethink retirement plan.)

so when they try to understand how i'm single, in debt, on unemployment, and thrilled if i already have next month's rent in the bank...well, yeah. i can kind of see why my life choices give them pause. and between you and me, i think they're pretty worried that i'm going to be 30 next year and am not married yet. (uh oh, old maid!) (joke) (but no, my dad has actually, recently, suggested i move to atlanta, where the "good men" are...) (because you know, i could totally pursue my writing in atlanta...) (sidenote: my parents have never even lived in atlanta.)

also between you and me: the idea of being married at 29 still sounds a little too "child bride" for me. even though my brother has been happily married since he was 22 (and well then my sister, married at 23, is about to be divorced at 25).

so what do you do when you're the black sheep? well, you leave your herd and go join the other black sheep. and after oh, say five years or so...you'll even forget that that was ever a bad thing to be.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson three: i am atreyu (and so are you)

2009-06-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

first off, big hugs and a giant shout-out and thank you to this guy for designing the handsome banner above (seriously, remember when i said, "so hey, anyone want to design me a banner?" he DID! one that matches the color scheme on my blog and everything=he is awesome! and apparently good with money, too...)

ever since moving to LA i've been constantly reminded of fantasia from "the never-ending story." a magical place threatened to be destroyed by the Nothing, that atreyu and bastian must save.

the answer, of course, is known only by the southern oracle, which to get to, you must first cross the swamp of sadness and then pass through two gates:

the first gate is the sphinxes with laser-beam eyes. the sphinxes know your heart and only the most noble and true of character stand a chance at making it through before the sphinx eyes open and fry you to death with their laser-beams, and no amount of armor can save you. and even atreyu *barely* made it past.

the second gate is the mirror gate, where you see yourself as you really are. as the old dwarf warns atreyu, "most people, when confronted with their true selves, will run away screaming into the night."

but if you can pass these tests--if you know who you are, are very brave, can endure and overcome sadness and learn to deal with your true self, you can stop the Nothing and make it in fantasia. and if you don't/can't, well...you've probably already left.

(someone once told me that the average length of time people stay in LA is three years, and if they make it past year three, they start to become successful between five and ten years.)

(and i kinda feel like i just passed the mirror gate.)

lesson two: don't mix red wine and vodka

2009-06-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

hey, just don't.

**important update from a reader: don't mix sake and jager, either. (PS send me your drink combo no-no's if you have them and i will add them to this list. don't need to be alcoholic, either...they could be, like, don't mix V8 with chocolate milk. actually, that sounds like a pretty bad idea. so don't mix.)
**from justin b.: "Don't drink Sam Adams Cherry Wheat, red wine, Kahlua, and Bailey's all in one night."

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lesson one: always say thank you

2009-06-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

there lives within this shining city an elegant music man named shark. in the summer of 2004, i was lucky enough to happen upon the just-begun tuesdays@9 cold reading series (westside), an offshoot of naked angels theatre company, the first week i arrived in los angeles (via the brother of the husband of a barely-friend from philadelphia...at that time the closest relation to anyone i had in los angeles, who i never saw again. strange how these things work.), and shark was the original music director there.

and i submitted some scenes, and at 24 years old was having my writing read publicly, and in front of *real artists*, both for the first time in my life. and it was going over very well.

and i was incredibly shy, socially nervous, and distrustful of LA people (if not all people) in general. after all, my grandmother called me a week after i moved out, having just seen my father, who bewailed to her, "i feel like i just sent my daughter to sodom and gomorrah!"

it had been made plainly clear to me...i had moved to a snake pit where no one meant what they said and everyone was just going to try to coerce me into taking my clothes off to take dirty pictures of me. simple as that.

but i was suddenly, and for the first time in my life, in an environment where everyone was validating me...and it was awesome.

so one night, after such a reading, shark came up to me. "you have no idea! people *glow* about your writing!"

i'm sure i smiled and looked away dismissively (shyly) and said thanks.

then he generously gave me one of the kindest and most important lectures i've ever gotten:

"christy," he said. "you have to be gracious!"

(ummm...did he mean i *wasn't* being gracious?...i thought i was being very gracious.)

so we talked about it a while, and he told me the way i was fielding compliments was coming off as smug to some people. funny how insecurity and disbelief can come across like snide arrogance. he mentioned specifically that the way i said, "thanks!" (which i had been saying a LOT) somehow had a snarky backbite.

i was very embarrassed about this and i thanked him and we decided that if i just said, "thank you," instead of "thanks", tone was nearly lost in the wake of meaning.

and ever since that night, i've always made a point to say "thank you" instead of "thanks" (including to him, when i ran into him again last year). it's such a seemingly insignificant difference, but i kid you not it makes all the difference in the world.

(for more on my countdown, 30 lessons from lalaland, click here)

lessons from lalaland: the pre-blog

2009-06-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

on july 15, 2009, i will celebrate my 5th year anniversary in los angeles. five years ago from that date, i got off the sunset blvd. exit on the 101 at rush hour, car laden with my worldly possessions, not even knowing a friend of a friend anywhere near los angeles (and moments from meeting my psycho, fake-aussie craigslist roomie who would later fake-evict me because i wouldn't sleep with him...but i digress.)

i feel like a fifth year senior...you know, the kid who can't quite get her act together and sleeps through any class that starts before 11 AM, but gets by mostly because professors seem to like her for some reason (oh wait...i *was* that kid in college...)

so it's taken me all five years to *kind of* get my act together...and as recently as a month or two ago i was still deathly afraid i still wasn't going to graduate...i was going to move to new york city, or london, or australia...anywhere. but that has passed. i'm going to graduate after all.

(now watch me become the kid who keeps hanging around after graduation, and winds up getting a ph.d. just to stay in college...who then becomes a professor...just to stay in college...)

so anyway. these five years have been huge...they represent so much in my personal development...not just my mid-to-late 20s, but breaking completely from the ideologies i was raised with, becoming an artist, and also just things as simple as: i haven't lived in the same place this long since i was six years old.

so i've decided to do another 30-day countdown to july 15. 30 things i've learned in los angeles. call it my senior thesis project (you know, a creative way to make up for that whole semester i ditched sophomore year...)

(PS anyone with graphic design skills that wants to make me a cool banner?)

"but christy," you say. "july 15 is 45 days away."

well, i'm just lazy.

(and hey, my last 30-day countdown took 12 1/2 months...)

there are no atheists in cars about to run out of gas

2009-05-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

okay, so in the excitement of this i all but forgot about the miracle that was this morning.

i got in my car, on time, for work, just like any other day (that i'm working). only today i was going back to my bread & butter high school, to which for the first time EVER, thanks to too much wine and/or too little sleep last tuesday night, i either 1) turned my alarm clock off and passed out or 2) forgot to set my alarm clock (both have happened before, more than once) and only by the grace of my angry screaming unhappy housewife neighbor who shares a wall with my bedroom, woke up just in time to call them and let them know i would be late before they missed me...and was twenty minutes late.

and i have a really good relationship with this school, and they couldn't have been nicer about it...but subs are almost as disposable as toilet paper, and the office manager who calls subs who since booked me for this very nice 3-day gig gently chided me on the phone not to be late this time.

so...this morning, of course, i got in my car, and realized i hadn't gotten gas yesterday like i meant to.

"oh well, it's only five miles. i'm sure i'll be fine..."

that's about when the puttering started. and then, i kept getting red lights. there was no gas station in sight block after block. i admit to you here, i was praying hard. the stakes could not have been higher...the bulk of the money i actually make (that isn't enough) comes from this one school, and i absolutely COULD NOT BE LATE!

then came the dreaded moment...you know, when all the lights come on, and the wheel locks up. i start to veer off to the side of the road, despairing, when low and behold:

i suddenly see a sign with gas prices A FEW YARDS AWAY. and i have JUUUST enough steam, JUST enough steering power to roll RIGHT UP TO AN OPEN GAS PUMP!

now here we have another dilemma. I LEFT MY WALLET AT HOME (on purpose, i'd brought my lunch, already bought my coffee before i left home, so no reason to risk it getting stolen...)

BUT...for reasons unknown, I had at the last minute decided to stuff my $5 change from 7-11 in my purse instead of my wallet this morning...I had $5!!! so i ran in, put $5 of gas in my tank, and got to school on time (even in spite of STILL getting every red light imaginable post-miracle...)

so to the powers that be, or to random luck, or what have you...THANK YOU!

every once in a while, murphy...

strange days

2009-05-28T12:35:00.000-07:00

and by strange, i think i mean good.

i think dreams are a gauge, kind of a daily report card of how things are going with your psyche...and in the past twenty-four hours, i had the most peaceful, rejuvenating dream i can remember, followed by a kind of ground-breaking one last night.

for the past year or so, i'd say, i've had the recurring dream that i'm back in high school trying to graduate (i think actually a pretty commonish stress dream). and i'm always so frustrated, sitting there in class, thinking, wait! why am i here? i already graduated college, which means i must have graduated high school...

i think what it means is that i've felt frustrated, like i haven't been making enough progress in my life (makes sense, no?)

well last night, i was back in high school again. math class (it always is math class). angry because i don't see why i have to go back and relearn geometry when everyone else who ever graduated high school doesn't have to.

in this dream, last night, i'd already decided i was going to leave campus because i was positive this time i didn't belong there. but the gates were locked until the end of the day, so my car was locked in. so instead of going into class, i sat out in the hall.

but some girl kept waving to me from inside the door and caught the teacher's attention. she came out and was about to yell at me when i calmly explained the entire situation to her. "lady, look--i teach high school!"

and she let me go!! then i had to engage in some serious hijinks to outsmart the campus cops to get out of the gate before the end of the day (they, of course, wouldn't believe my story)...but i did. and at the end of the dream, i drove away from high school, a free woman!

and somehow i don't think i'll be having that dream again anytime soon...

(or maybe my gmail inbox said it best yesterday: Lady Luck is now following you on Twitter!)

pretty cool, huh?

i caught the fairy! i caught the fairy!

2009-05-23T08:10:00.001-07:00

i've been waiting in the great gnarled tree for 3 1/2 weeks!!! with six bites up until now, but no catches! in spite of a "40% catch rate"!

(yes, i am a huge geek. you didn't know?)

6:00am

I checked my trap and found that I had caught a mouse! I caught a 7 oz. Fairy mouse from the Great Gnarled Tree worth 5,769 points and 937 gold.

The mouse also dropped the following loot:
1 map of the lagoon.

My weapon was very effective against this mouse.

i am very important

2009-05-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

seriously people, there are only a few ways i know of to have more fun than this in seven minutes:

"RT @communicatrix @bonniegillespie: http://tweetingtoohard.com. watch this space as i now attempt to make it onto this list.10:50 AM May 20th from web

OMG i was saying how i couldn't afford the gas to fly daddy's jet to the riviera this summer, and this barista totally rolled her eyes at me10:51 AM May 20th from web

it's so life affirming when the poor fall in love 10:57 AM May 20th from web

this morning i passed what i thought was a calvin klein ad, but it was just a mirror...how WEIRD!10:58 AM May 20th from web"

who knew i would get 700+ "back pats", 3300 blog hits, 150 new followers on the Twitter, scores of angsty, humorless people fantasizing my demise in their twitter feeds, even a few direct (if questionable) hit ons...

i'm told i peaked @ #1 for a while around 5 AM this morning. out-douching (and still out-douching) John Mayer! out-heroding herod!

(there's gotta be a way to turn this into cash flow.)

yours always, and apparently way too good at being a douche...

babes

gratefulness (day 30 - the day that wrote itself)

2009-05-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

phew. this is it. 30 days of gratitude.

so what am i grateful for today?

i am grateful that the thirteen months it took me to blog 30 days of gratitude are OVER!

onward and upward. over and out.

gratefulness (day 29: a healthy self image)

2009-05-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

so i'll try to keep this short, as not to inspire the world's smallest violin concerto:

-when your mom was a Southern beauty queen (as in, the winner), you just get weight and self-image issues. you also some great genes, which might be the universal equalizer. (and hey, my dad is pretty cute, too, so i further escaped the alexa joel syndrome!) but my mom's BMI in college was clinically underweight without dieting or exercising (so she says, anyway), commonly referred to in social dialogue as, "that lucky bitch."

-i had an eating disorder for four years starting when i was 14. i thought i kicked it on my own, before anyone ever knew, four years later, and i *kinda* did...but it took quite a bit longer to REALLY kick it. as evinced by a period four years ago when i, looking back, was basically an undiagnosed exercise bulimic and thought it was awesome to be falling through size 0's. once i planned an entire, panicky week around eating a personal pizza from CPK because my friend really wanted to go. and when *many* people started telling me i'd lost too much weight, i only found it flattering.

-this is the first time i've had the opportunity to realize i really have kicked it. in the last six months or so i've gained some weight without realizing it...and i don't really care. i mean, i care enough to lose it, but not like i think i look bad or it's messing with my confidence or the scale is some evil monster out to destroy me (really, that's what having an eating disorder feels like). but seriously, after all that, it's really a great feeling. (and really? the only notable "benefit" of being a size zero was having that many more superficial losers to wade through...)

-i've also, through all the years and various phases of getting healthy, learned so much about my body, and now have such an arsenal of information that losing weight is so easy. boring, even. paperwork. done. (woo!)

(and in the meantime, well, i happen to think my little potbelly is kinda cute, actually...just not quite cute enough to keep.)

gratefulness (day 28: perspective)

2009-02-13T08:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, one of the honors ninth grade classes I have again today was having a lively discussion about the assignment: ten things they want to do before they turn 21.

Their answers, for all their sweet, rosy lack of realism, threw me into a momentary state of panic: "get married", "graduate college", "drive a nice car." It was a guy who said, "meet the person I want to spend the rest of my life with."

(Later classes who were less ambitious had answers I liked much better, like "have a one night stand" and "make a time machine".)

In part, what made me panic was that it reminded me of being a senior in college, having a guest speaker who had made us all say what we wanted our lives to look like in ten years from that day (so, by age 31). He said, that was the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people. Successful people visualized their future, and then did what it took to get there.

(Sidenote: in his 45ish years, this guy had apparently visualized getting divorced, losing custody of his daughter, and having a "dream job" hawking marcosite on QVC.) (which he was fired from later that year, and was suddenly kissing the ass of his friend, my professor, who he totally condescended to this entire visit when he spoke to our class, to help him get a job in NYC.)

(Tangent: I stopped talking to my professor, who was the friend of the douchebag, years later when he told me he'd be in LA and asked if I wanted to meet for coffee. I said, sure, and he followed up with: "How about my cream, no coffee? I'd love to deliver it in person sometime.") Click.

(Side-tangent: In college, he made no secret of the fact that due to chemo, he'd lost a testicle. To the point that his AOL screenname was "Uniball".)

Anyway, I remember distinctly what I'd said to the Marcosite Man: I wanted to be writing, married with one of two children already born, and living in a small town in New Hampshire.

So yesterday, at 29, I was remembering that that's what I'd said I wanted eight years ago and realizing I was definitely not going to achieve that.

(Even though, as one honors girl pointed out, I still had time if that's what I wanted.)

I also looked in the mirror yesterday and thought, wow, I really look like shit.

So I thought through these things throughout the afternoon, having a mini-crisis of courage. (A good/bad aspect of subbing, depending...it affords you TONS of time to think...)

And then I realized:

I don't WANT those things anymore! I actually haven't WANTED them since I said that!

Actually, if memory serves, when douchebag gave us this spur of the moment assignment, I was filled with panic because I DID NOT KNOW what I wanted to be doing in ten years. So I just reached for something that sounded good.

So I had gotten all angsty for not having achieved yet what I never really wanted to achieve, and still, theoretically, have almost three years left to achieve.

Moreover: My head has been guest-housing a lot of mucus since Saturday that has overstayed it's welcome. Yesterday was my fourth day in a row waking up at 6 AM after not working four days in a week in six months. I was sick, not wearing make-up, my hair, which I haven't gotten cut in who knows how long (I can't remember), was not brushed seriously, and just pulled back in a knot, and I was looking at myself under the dull fluorescent lights of public education which make everyone look bad and which Norman Mailer predicted will be the downfall of American Civilization (because China only uses halogen lights, apparently, which are much more flattering).

So, in short: yesterday, I *DID* look like shit!

(Get it? i put things in perspective.)

So I took action:

I called and made a hair appointment for Saturday. (plus free conditioning treatment for Valentine's Day, a $50 value.)

I crashed at 7 PM last night, to try and get over this cold. (wasn't actually intentional, but probably a good call...)

I remembered to apply my (fabulous!) eye cream and moisturizer, and I put on a little eye-makeup before leaving the house this morning. And brushed my hair.

I came up with a new list, of things I really want to have done by age 40.

It really isn't that long. Phew.

gratefulness (day 27: concrete pillars)

2009-02-10T22:16:00.000-08:00

So...maybe there is something to this whole PMDD thing, seeing as how, for three or four days there, I was pretty much clinically depressed for no particular reason, and now suddenly, on day 3 of my rag (is that gross to blog about?), I'm practically jumping out of my skin with hope and optimism and exuberance for life. WTF!?

Maybe a trip to the gyno is in order...(is that gross to blog about?)

I also just burned 800+ calories at the gym (and on the kind of equipment you always think is underestimating you), so very high on endorphins. And have freshly withdrawn from a long, hot bath and consumed a big glass (read: two glasses) of very good wine (read: "not charles shaw").

I guess the good news, or the news, is, a serious change in mood has not affected my plans to maybe, perhaps move to NYC in a year or so. Although I also think maybe, perhaps, if I were to spend a week, or just a weekend, in NYC, during bad weather, I might be inclined to love LA just a little bit more (but that would be without the factor that one of my very best friends ever in the world from seventh grade would also be moving to NYC the same time as me.)

This morning I got mucho stressed out thinking of teacher credentialing, how I would make a living in NYC, etc., etc. and even was going back on the route of getting my credential before I go (read: $20,000), to have job stability when I arrive. After going so far as thinking I would pay the $230 today to take the CSET next month and re-enroll in the program...I remembered something important:

HEY. WAIT. I DON'T WANT TO BE A TEACHER.

Which led me to my second epiphany on the day:

I'M JUST GOING TO QUIT WORRYING. ABOUT EVERYTHING. COLD TURKEY.

And I did. Just like that. And worry (and feeling old, which I've been feeling way too much lately!) was replaced immediately with glowy optimism, hope, excitement at all the adventures that lie in store...

Oh wait...so the concrete pillar thing. After work, I drove to Borders to buy a new journal (I actually bought two, one black, one brown, both soft-cover, faux-leather, gold-leaf, although slightly smaller than the others and yellowish paper which I'm not crazy about but it wound up being most important that I buy them BOTH, so that whatever journal I buy next, these two will always go together, as to not be that weird, lone journal that stands out.) (true story, I seriously considered both softcover black and brown gold-leaf fake leather journals of EXACTLY the same size as my now defunct/lost-to-the-world line of softcover black and brown gold-leaf fake leather journals, but ruled them out, in the end, because they were both weird crocadile-print embossed or something...so the smooth, basic stitch cover with yellowy papes beat out the size, even though it would have been PERFECT if these were the same size...)

Did you just read that? That was a very, very long paragraph about a journal purchase.

Oh so wait, the concrete pillar. My car has a weird glitch where I can apparently turn the engine off and take my key out sometimes when it's still in Drive, which I apparently did when I went in to extensively compare journals and eventually purchase two, because when I came back out my car was ACROSS THE PARKING LOT backed into a concrete pillar, which stopped it.

If I had parked in any other space in the entire lot, which I had if any other space had been open, because this was the farthest, farthest space...my car would have rolled back into ANOTHER CAR.

But it didn't. It ran (rolled) into a concrete pillar, that doesn't give a shit and doesn't have an owner who gives a shit, either. (And i certainly don't give a shit...the exterior of my car already looks like it should be a set piece for a movie set in late-90s Bosnia.)

So, on the day, I think that's still the best news.

gratefulness (day 26: options)

2009-02-09T23:35:00.000-08:00

I just realized that in my last move, I lost a box full of brand-new, gold-leaf, faux-leather, close-ruled, soft-cover journals (the only kind I like to use). I don't know how that's possible, but this box that had 30 or so of the now out-of-print journals I bought up from some third-party seller on Amazon.com back when I had that kind of money to throw around...is gone.

I remember looking at this box of unused journals, when they came, thinking, "This is the next 15 years of my life. This is marriage, this is children, these are the pages unfilled."

So...in that way, it's kind of freeing and wonderful, actually. Like, I had locked myself into some way of thinking just based on some blank pages.

So, they're gone. For good or for bad. For $300.

Maybe that moment itself was worth $300. Looking at my (one, potential) life, yet unwritten.

And maybe it's worth $300 (or $3000, or $3,000,000) to have that option, for all it's openness, dematerialize.

Maybe I can just take it one journal at a time. And they don't all need to be the same...or stop journaling all together for periods...or anything. Anything at all.

(Is it possible a box of empty journals was already, somehow, weighing me down?)

Oh, box of journals. We had our moment in the sun, didn't we?

But why was I grateful for options? Nothing to do with journals. I've started to seriously think about moving back to New York. And I'm grateful for that option.

And, I suppose, all the journal entries to come...in whatever non-anally-retentively-homogeneous out-of-print, pre-purchased journals of the future (or not) happen to be for purchase on a random walk someday, say, in the East Village, maybe at St. Marks Bookshop?...when wouldn't you know it, I'll just happen to need a new journal and have a few to pick from...

gratefulness (day 25: resilience)

2009-02-08T23:04:00.000-08:00

"I'm having a hard time here. I'm having a real hard time. Could you please just go?"

So said some lady in a raincoat walking her three dogs, also in raincoats, while my dog stopped to take a piss in front of her dogs and me, not realizing it was raining and freezing when I left the apartment, wearing nothing but a fleece sweatshirt, pajama pants, and flip-flops.

Two of her dogs (wearing raincoats) were Westies. My childhood dog who was just put to sleep on Tuesday at the age of 15 1/2 was a Westie.

"Oh, Westies!" I stopped and looked at them, remembering my dog.

"I'm having a real hard time. Can you please just go?" She repeated. So I yanked my dog by the leash and kept moving...sadly.

I'd been thinking about blogging about resilience, which I am grateful for. Even though it's a little premature right now. It just never ceases to amaze me how many--MOST--people out there just don't even begin to get it.

I've been going through something this past week. Lots of sadness and crying, not always directed at anything in particular. And severe PMS (I think really PMDD) certainly played a part, but it would be pretty misogynist of me to say that that's the reason. So let me try to pick it apart...

Two weeks ago, I had a date that lasted from 9:30 PM to 6:00 AM (only because I left, the guy wanted me to stay). He was the last guy I can remember dating I was actually instantly physically attracted to. We met at a bar, had just two drinks, talked, went for a walk looking for something else to do. He suggested bowling, but in my miniskirt that wasn't an option.

So a little embarrassed, he suggested we could go back to his place and play his favorite board game, which we'd talked about and I'd never played. We did. We drank tea, played board games, talked and talked...and finally wound up on his couch, making out for an hour (an hour).

Then he falls asleep for a few minutes, with his arms around me, and wakes up. Looks at the time. It's after five o'clock. I say I should probably go, and he makes me some really strong coffee to get home (even though he suggested we should take a nap, but added, "I'd probably just try to get in your pants again...which yes, he had, but not so badly.)

Around six, we finally walk down to my car, half-asleep, and he gives me the nicest, squeeziest hug and a big kiss goodnight (good morning?).

I was glowy for six days. SIX DAYS!

But why am I talking about this? The guy never called me!! Other than a text (back, a day after I texted him) to say he had fun (too), he disappeared. That Friday, after not hearing from him, I said what the hell and I called him (I've never called a guy after a date, perhaps to my detriment.) Left a short, sweet voice message. Nothing. Nada. Not even an e-mail to let me down.

Was he gay? Was he just looking for sex (in which case: try a second date, GENIUS! I mean, if it was that agonizing to spend time with me, such that you couldn't bear clocking a few more hours in your lifetime with me in return for getting laid, you shouldn't have convinced me to stay when I tried to leave at 2! Girls will call that "giving mixed signals"!)? Did he meet the true love of his life in the grocery store the next night? I will never know.

But anyway, I digress. This, in the end, was just some guy. Just another guy. Plenty of Fish in the Sea.

Sorry if I'm starting to think the sea is polluted and all of the fish are mutated as a result.

The Positivity Police who patrol LA with their riot batons might urge me to be filled with gratitude just for having such a good date, finally, and appreciating it for the night that it was without expecting it to be anything else. But I say Fuck Them.

This guy, who is nobody at all, managed in his loserness to drive home the following points:

1) I haven't had a boyfriend in 9 years.
2) I haven't slept with someone who cares about me in 9 years.
3) I haven't gone on a first date where the guy called me afterwards in a year and a half, despite about ten first dates in that time period. And even that one didn't call for five days.
4) The last guy I slept with put his pants back on and left right afterwards. And I was relieved. (But also infuriated...)
5) I am 29, and I want to get married and have a family before I'm old, and one of the best dates I've had in almost 5 years in LA never even spoke to me again.

That have managed to repeat over and over in my head, with the help of PMDD and also, I suppose, Valentine's Day.

(Oh and did I mention, coupled with being forced to write a ten-minute play on the theme of Love last weekend, while part of me was still holding out some hope this guy would return my phone call...that I DID, and was then rejected with this very weird/awkward letter that said they felt the "extent of devil-worshiping" was too "dirty".) (p.s. there was actually NO devil-worshiping in this play.) (p.p.s. devil-worshiping is not DIRTY. pick another word.) (p.p.p.s. this was NOT for some Christian organization, and my pastor friends who are married to each other both found it patently ridiculous.))

It's supposed to get better, not worse, isn't it? Isn't that what putting in all those years was supposed to be all about?

Is the idea of finding a great guy in LA really impossible? If that's something I want in life, do I need to move? Aren't I way, way, way overdue for some romantic happiness? Isn't there some checks and balances system? Is there a law of averages? How am I supposed to forget how much I want it and concentrate on my writing, or try to pretend I don't want it? Or get back to a place of not wanting it?

I can't lower my standards (thank god.) I don't have self-esteem issues (thank god.) I've spent lots and lots of time--years and years--working on myself, inside and out. To the point that I know, always at least somewhere, that I'm totally amazing and that I deserve a really great relationship with a really great guy.

I had a dream last week I woke up and all my pubes had turned stark white.

WTF!?

gratefulness (day 24: 2009)

2009-01-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

okay, okay. even i realize the silliness of continuing the 30-days of gratitude i began oh, ten months ago...but i really want to finish.

i'm grateful it's a new year. i'm grateful that:

- i'm 29 instead of 28, even though that's one year closer to 30.

- i have a great apartment by myself (that i will figure out each month just how to pay the lease on til its up...)

- i just joined gold's gym for a dollar, and will shortly be going to my 9th workout in 2 weeks, and that in some number of weeks i'm going to have back the body i want and the one i associate with myself and the one that i don't NEED back like i once did in order to have a healthy self-image.

-that i might just work four days this week, which would be the first time this school year doing so, even with the martin luther king, jr. holiday and subs bitching right and left that there is no work. (PS 4 days means i'll make MORE than my unemployment check for the first week this year...if it happens. i'm strong for three but friday will put me over the top.)

-that i have a first date this friday (which yes, even though it's my 3rd first date this month, and i'm kinda very, very over the whole first date thing, because i've definitely gone on at least 50 of them in the past 4 years, i do realize that a 1st date is a necessary step to a 2nd date, etc...also that it's with a guy i know i'll have a good time with, even if we don't hit it romantically, and who is actually willing to buy a girl dinner on a weekend night as a first date, and i already know is not JUST trying to get in my pants.) (because, after all, the goal really IS to get a guy in my pants, eventually.)

-that i HAVE unemployment to get my through until august 1. then i really have to hussle.

-that i am, at least theoretically, writing a play and two screenplays, with a bunch more ideas in the works, even though i've barely written in six months. and that with all these life things that have been stealing my attention and energy smoothing out, i'll get back to it.

-that i have friends in my life, to a degree i haven't ever before in my life (so, even though it's still not where i dream of it being, it really is MORE than it's ever been...which like a first date, you have to go through necessarily to get to where you want to be...)

-that obama is my president, and that george w. bush will NEVER, EVER EVER be president again.

there's probably a lot more. and plenty of things to stress me out still, too, like "why me?" crazy things! but i've still got to get through six more days of gratitude before i can bitch! ;)

gratefulness (day 23: LA)

2008-09-17T20:33:00.001-07:00

god, i love this crazy, flakey, lonely town where the bars all close at 2 Am.

i feel so grateful tonight i don't really know where to direct it.

(at my second, STRONG, rum and coke that sits almost finished on a coaster in front of me?)

but hey--you know when the chips are down and the last thing you want to do is run away...i think you know you're home.

(i just finished it off. goodnight.)

not so grateful this minute, this morning

2008-09-16T06:21:00.000-07:00

it's tuesday morning, and i'm not getting a phone call to go into work. i know it won't come...one didn't come yesterday, and if it was going to come this week, it would have come on monday.

maybe on friday...

so i'm sitting here, going broke fast in the dark. i just shot off an e-mail to la high...one month, twenty e-mails and a few phone calls has not been enough to get the $1500 i'm still owed from july...

just checked my bank account balance. how did i spend $500? and is it legal to take seven weeks to post a credit card transaction?

today i have to spend more money...either to buy an ink cartridge or print up a bunch of flyers at kinko's. then i have to spend time and gas money, driving around to schools and marketing my services to new schools like a schmuck.

the financial stress (and my period currently close to two weeks late, and counting) has gotten in the way of everything. hopefully this is all still about it being the 11th or 12th day of school for 95% of the district...and with my tenure of 1 1/2 years with the district...if i'm not getting calls yet, all those people who became subs after me aren't getting calls, either.

i did go into work thursday and friday, and saw what the deal was--at least at LA high, all the sub work is being gobbled up by off-track teachers, needing the work. how is that for a sign of recession? none of us can make ends meet.

my father's said, "it isn't the republican's fault california's education budget (and LAUSD's by proxy) got slashed 10% all at once. it's the democratic congress's fault for authorizing a budget that sank the state billions of dollars deeper in debt."

(i think it's the republicans' fault.)

i have to pay $2000 down on my new apartment next week. i have it, easily, but not the month after that. i'm the type of person who can't help but freak out if i don't have the month after that.

just sent in another unemployment claim--claiming a partial for last week, to stretch out my benefits--meaning that i won't get those two days of pay until october 5, now. as opposed to next week.

so it sure doesn't help when i lose it to my mother on the phone, and she says in near-monotone, "your father and i would like to see you more stable."

um, thanks mom. because you know i'm doing this on purpose, right?

maybe next week is the week i'll go back to work enough days (3) to make more than unemployment...bump me up to four and i'm not starving. five and i'll stop worrying.

the secretary at la high asked me when i'd be available for a long-term sub position again, as if she really wants to put me in one. but that's her. i still don't know if i'm black-listed there because of the fiasco with the superintendant on the day of the earthquake. (my mom, who when she last visited me, over a nice dinner started crying as she told me how worried she was about me getting skin cancer...told me last week on the phone, i think they're blackballing you because of what the superintendant said.) (thanks mom.) (i don't think anyone remembers, to be honest.) (except my mom.)

all i know is my sign-in card is gone...and my mailbox has been given away to someone else...

it was a little unsettling to be back there. but not nearly as unsettling as not being back there.

all this of course taking me all the way out of my screenplay, for two weeks now...and having to put up with my roommate (who despite her recent move to become my bff, is the sole reason i'm moving out) lecturing me how impossible it is to break in as an unknown writer in hollywood...

(i have zero patience for these people who think writing is something anyone, including her, can do. she mentioned to me she thought my best bet was to drop my great, produced-screenwriter writing partner and get a hardcore female writing partner and get staffed on a tv show. she said that was my only way in! i'm pretty sure she was referring to herself. she's always on a loop to everyone, saying "follow me around with a pen and paper!" YIKES to both to her and to writing for tv.)

(why can't anyone just give me a vote of confidence, and say something like everyone goes through rough patches. you're almost out of this one already, you just can't see it yet. everything will be fine. you're making good decisions. why do i always have to be the only one saying that to myself?)

it's seven o'clock. no call.

maybe next week...

i'm going back to bed! if i can't sleep in, where is the joy?

gratefulness (day 21: getting fired)

2008-09-04T18:51:00.001-07:00

today, i don't know why, but i was just filled with gratitude that a little more than four years ago, i got heinously and unfairly fired from my brand new job, at what i would come to learn was a corrupt financial services company in bryn mawr, pennsylvania, who intentionally overhired and let me and two others out of twelve go halfway through our training.

seriously...me. at a financial services job. in bryn mawr.

and i went into the training week with all the verve of a brand new Apprentice contestant.

i was early every day. i took copious notes. i asked lots of questions, got to know all the other recruits by name, along with details about their lives. i answered lots of questions. when the call was put out, i was the first to offer to come in and work on saturday.

so, when i got there all spunk and determination on the monday morning of my second week of training, and two managers called me into the office off the lobby, and FIRED me, no reason given, no matter how much i tried to get one from them (the real reason: they owed the federal government $15 million in back taxes they'd lied about and found out i wrote for the second biggest paper in philadelphia)--i was, reasonably, devastated.

i'd quit my job with the nicest people i will ever work with again all at once to take this job!

i was going to buy a townhouse!

i was totally unaware that i already hated everyone at this new company! and that i would have been wasting my life and growing up way too fast if things had worked out for me there!

so when i got home that monday, i e-mailed my editor at the philadelphia daily news and asked him to please, please, please help me find a job.

he e-mailed back--"done. what would you like to do?"

i sat at my computer in my tiny apartment off of rittenhouse square, thought a moment, and e-mailed back the only honest answer:

"i have no idea."

a few minutes later, he e-mailed me back again:

"go to hollywood and get into show business."

gratefulness (day 20: being goofy)

2008-08-29T18:36:00.000-07:00

thank you, bonnie, for hours (yes, hours) of procrastinating fun...(after all, what is unemployment for if not wasting hours on the internet?)

i've been feeling in a good mood again today, for the first time in a while (it's been kind of a rotten few weeks...) - and my first instinct was to use all that positive energy on a marathon writing session on my screenplay...

it just. wasn't. to be. because i logged in to check bonnie's blog and well...that was it. so i've been giggling for a few hours instead of drafting my romantic woes into a three-act structure with a happy ending (which will happen...maybe tonight?)

so without further ado...my yearbook photos throughout the ages (courtesy of www.yearbookyourself.com)

1952
1956
1958 (besides the late 60s-early 70s, this is my favorite)
1960
1962

1964

1966 (if you ask me, i really peaked in the late 60s-early 70s)

1968
1972

1978

1994 (my fifth favorite!! 90210, anyone?)

1996

gratefulness: day 19 (that my dog didn't run away)

2008-08-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

so this week has been my worst week since...the week before christmas, 2006. when after the most emotionally draining charge of my life (producing my own play) was over, but not before being told by someone with an agenda (e.g. lying), immediately after the cast party, that everyone involved in it hated me, and then the next day having to figure out how to strike an $80,000 set (not mine, but given to me in exchange for me striking it) BY MYSELF in two days, and then after doing all of it and restoring the theater to the letter, being screwed out of my entire deposit (except for $30) anyway.

that was still worse.

but this week, on tuesday i was informed (along with another sub) that this job we've both been working (these jobs) since july 1, we are not eligible to be working at because of this piece of paper we didn't sign back in june because nobody told us to sign it.

and not only were we demanded to immediately leave our jobs, but we were told because we missed the deadline, we can't work as substitutes in LAUSD again until september 2.

AND...my period was due on tuesday. which is when all this went down. and i still haven't gotten it, meaning i've been dealing with all this unbelievable bullshit on an OD of girl hormones, which are so ridiculous they really should be harvested and used in biological weaponry.

so me, trying to find the bright spot in all this, thought, "hey--i'll have august off! and august is when my verbally and psychologically abusive alcoholic roommate is going to jail! house party!"

(sidenote: it was a top priority to move out of this situation, which i can now not afford to do.)

so THURSDAY, after an entire horrible day that included a fellow teacher kicking me and my kids out of the computer lab, when there were enough computers for both of our classes, because he "didn't want to share", and parent teacher conferences until seven o'clock, on my clogged, rush-houry drive back home my only thought was, "thank god (my roommate) is finally in jail."

um, no she's not. she was at the house. and now it sounds like she was only sentenced to 30 days, not 180 days, which means due to jail overcrowding, she will probably serve 3 days, not 18 day. damn. that's barely a break at all. and i have no idea when she's going.

(sidenote #2: the way she's been acting the past MONTH is conducive to someone who is about to go away for a very, very long time. crazy parties, crying all the time, general distemper, lots of alcohol...)

(but she's only going away for like, less than a week. apparently. at some time, but obviously not yesterday, which is the date i originally heard her say she had to turn herself in by.)

(i'm privately hoping that she DID have to turn herself in by yesterday, and now she'll be arrested and put away for a very long time because she didn't turn herself in on-time.)

(but that's all just fantasy.)

so anyway. my dog. after being away from home for thirteen hours straight, having one of the worst days i've had since junior high, i let my dog out, poured myself a rather stiff rum and diet a&w cream soda (yummm), and called my mom back.

then, having finished my drink, and hung up with my mom, i totally passed out at oh, nine p.m.

and left my dog outside.

now there is a latch on the fence to the gated dog run area i put him in at the side of the house. an old latch, that my dog has figured out, if he pushes his weight against the gate multiple times, the fence will unlatch.

he just did this about a week ago, and i heard the gate open, and ran outside just in time to see him walking out. he came right up to me then just as if he had only gotten out to come look for me, anyway.

so this morning, at 5:20 AM, when i woke up, i was pretty "oh shit" about the whole thing as i walked outside. he'd been out there for TEN HOURS.

so i went outside, and what do i see?

my little puppy dog, sauntering over to me from right outside the gate, coming up to me as if the only reason he'd escaped is to come find me.

(sidenote #3: my alcoholic jailbird roommate was up at 5:20 AM in the bar room, with all the lights on, which i had to pass both ways and on my way back in she managed to say very loudly, aggressively and condescendingly, in the manner she always speaks when drunk, which is all the time, something like, "you left him out there ALL NIGHT? he's been out there TWELVE HOURS?", to which i responded, "I passed out, (roommate's name)." To which she continued, "Yeah, well, get him some water or something." To which I responded, "That's a great idea, (roommate's name). Thank you." And slammed my door TOO LOUD. And she continued bitching about how i'd left MY DOG outside for "twelve hours".)

but he didn't run away. so that's something i have going for me.

a real journal entry from a 9th grader

2008-07-25T14:34:00.001-07:00

Question: What do you think is your best personal quality? How do you think you could develop it even further?

Answer: (typed as written)

My best personal quality is writting well. I will develop by keep on writting good and practice. Practice on paper and even write in different hand righting. In tell I get good at writting and in spanish righting as well. I will develop it even father when I get used to it.

gratefulness (day 18: my students)

2008-07-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

i played hookey from school on wednesday (shhh.) it wasn't planned. i'd just really, really not wanted to get out of bed, but i'd forced myself to, oh, about ten school days in a row. and wednesday morning, i just couldn't force myself to.

i called in sick (i don't get any sick days, so i was needing a day off enough to forgo a day's pay even with a ridiculous amount of weird-ass bills coming my way of late and no guaranteed employment except day-to-day subbing, as of yet, after august 29.). then i went back to sleep and slept UNTIL 4PM!!! (nothing *really* to feel guilty about there, is there?)

so the next day--yesterday--i woke up, and even after all that sleep i was back to not wanting to get out of bed and go to work. i was feeling mega burned out (i have five classes of 9th graders with 3rd or 4th grade reading and writing skills i'm trying to teach to write persuasively...).

until...i got to school. and my students were all thrilled i was back! they'd written "we miss you, miss bunny!" all over the board. some even said they loved me.

one of my girls told me i reminded her of alice in wonderland (and the other girls agreed!)

(and i'm apparently called 'miss bunny', 'miss playboy bunny' (a boy-student modification) or in more private circles, 'miss boner' (likewise) just about as often as i'm called my actual name. (none of which i really mind! hehe) )

and i went over the work--i'm trying to teach them the very simplest outlining and essay format--i'd gone over and over again on tuesday, to blank stares--again. slowly and clearly. then i helped all the students who still weren't sure (i had all the CONTENT of their outline already on the board in the front, and the exact FORMAT for the outline on the board in the back, so all i was really asking them to do was combine the two, and find their own examples from the text). for five periods in a row. and i wasn't tired. i wasn't impatient. i just kept calmly explaining the same thing over and over and over again, to a hundred students, all day. and i felt energized at day's end, not exhausted.

and today they turned them in. well, the ones that are ever going to get anything did. and they GOT IT! their outlines are BEAUTIFUL!! i'm so proud!!!

but my absolutely favorite line yesterday was from a girl named hannah. juan, who sits next to her in my honors class, was complaining about the sub, who apparently told him he needed to grow up because he was making farting noises (i told him i agreed with the sub.)

me: was he really old?
juan: yeah.
hannah: well, not really, really old.
me: how old?
hannah: he was like a, mid-life crisis type.

gratefulness (day 17: milestones)

2008-07-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

on july 15, 2004, i pulled into hollywood via the 101 right about rush hour and took the sunset exit. turned right at the home depot, and made my way sloooowly along sunset to my new home. a craptastic two bedroom right around the corner from the seven veils, with what would be the first truly insane person to traumatize me in los angeles--my fake aussie roommate.

with whom i stayed, without a lock on my door, for exactly ten weeks, before he fake-evicted me because i wouldn't have sex with him. (he had a knife that "cut through bone" and millions of dollars frozen by the irs from his days touring the world in his metal band, which is why he had to supplement his income with a part-time job at a silk-screening shop.)

i moved out here without a job, very little money (plus a few grand in debt...soon to become a few more grand in debt), and not knowing even a friend of a friend in all of l.a. and not only did i not have anything to *come* to...i didn't really have anything i was leaving behind, either.

a pretty common l.a. story, i think. i've often thought that no one really ever uproots their lives to leave something worth sticking around for.

and as of last summer, even, i was feverishly etching escape routes on the prison walls. i had the whole escape planned out--i was going to move to portland, get my teaching credential, find a husband and hatch a family and worship normalcy and the great outdoors until my dying day.

and actually going to portland last august was the surprisingly pivotal clencher in me staying (happily) in l.a. i went there for a week. even the airport in portland felt like home. it was gorgeous. it was wonderful.

i drove out to the coast and watched the sunset reflected in the pacific ocean as i drove across the elevated bridge between oregon and washington. i kayaked past mount hood at midnight, by the light of a full moon. i got way too drunk and made out with a cute brit who was staying in the same hostel, and went to some techno rave where everyone was dancing like sprockets (the dj, when i asked her, informed me that the genre was "german industrial post-punk").

i wanted to move there.

until i got back to l.a. and there in my second craptastic apartment, with my third craptastic roommate--i suddenly felt like i was home.

and now, a year later, there are still so many things to want. great big pillars of my life loom. and now that's really exciting, where as a year ago that would have been cause for duress (and hell, when i was 25 i was so neurotic, i remember planning my whole week around a pizza...) (but i mean, i would always be, oh no, i'm this old and i don't have x and y and z yet! but now i'm thinking, yippee, i'm this old and i STILL don't have x and y and z! what suspense! what a life!)

four years in, and i feel like i just earned my b.a. in hollywood. i'm finally getting the hang of just rolling with it. and in my more de-stressed state, i've had the mental calm to make some pretty astounding breakthroughs--like--there are other people in the world besides me, that are more interesting and talented and brilliant than i am! and what i have to say is not as important or interesting as what they can tell me about themselves!

this, at least, is the new magic to explore year five. yippee!

gratefulness (day 16: my journal - redux)

2008-06-06T13:29:00.000-07:00

seriously, people. just, wow. it's better than drugs.

(but not as good as sex)

i've got a lot of shit going on in my life, and in the last two days in particular, and wow. just, poof. gone. and i only had a few more hours to get rid of it, thinking that was impossible. not impossible!

gratefulness (day 15: my journal)

2008-06-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

things have been going pretty well for me lately. that is to say - i'm not unemployed yet. i'm not out of money yet. i'm writing what will be a fantastic screenplay with a fantastic writing partner at my fantastic house in the hills (which i really hope i can afford come - time for august's rent check, fingers crossed...)

i don't have a whole lot else going on. most of my free nights are spent either writing with my writing partner or recovering from writing until 4 am the night before and then having to work the following day. i've been to the gym once in the past month (may still make it today, but i forgot my underwear at home! i have all the rest of my necessary gym clothes IN MY CAR! so frustrating!)

but even still - i wake up sometimes and start to freak out about things and usually don't know exactly why. on any given day it may just be hormonal, or just a lot of little things that build up to significant stress, or one big thing that i don't know how to handle or how i feel about it to begin with, or one big thing i'm blaming a lot of other things on...

so i've kept a journal now for three years, pretty consistently. (to the point that, when i found out my favorite journal was going out of print a year ago, i bulk ordered every last one i could get my hands on online - got about 30 journals at about 60% off the in-store price! and i received them, and opened the box, and was like - "wow. i am staring at the next 15 or 20 years of my life right now, all empty pages. i'm probably looking at my children, and my first marriage." but this is a tangent.)

so sunday was one of those days. and i just had to go somewhere, get out of the house, sit down and write in my journal to figure out how i felt (which on some days can take pages and pages)

so i started. and i got a paragraph or two in and realized, "i don't even care enough about this to be writing it down!" and poof. that was the only clarity i needed.

and today. my thoughts on things i didn't have the clarity or need to deal with yesterday further crystalized today, and i did write several pages - and i ended up feeling pretty great about something i'd been all angsty about - not for no reason - but for reasons which i worked out in my mind, on the pages of my journal, which turned out to be nothing big.

and sometimes it does turn out to be big. i just don't know how i feel about it until i write it down.

i really think my journal is the number one thing that keeps me sane.

gratefulness (day fourteen: sex)

2008-05-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

that's it.

gratefulness (day thirteen: long weekends)

2008-05-27T22:41:00.000-07:00

today was rough. i only got one hour of sleep last night (between 12 AM and 1 AM) before finally downing vodka shots in the dark at 3 to pass out another two hours before my alarm went off - then had to teach boys PE all day!

but the reason it was rough, is because i got my body clock all out of whack this weekend (or, "in whack" for my normal body clock...this 5:30 AM shit is inhuman!).

i didn't even go to any barbecues this weekend. saturday and sunday nights i pulled all night brainstorming sessions with my writing partner in our boogie nights bar room.

other than that, i just slept late. ate out. lounged.

recovered from last week.

it was wonderful.

now i'm tired again.

gratefulness (day twelve: good timing)

2008-05-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

last night, i met a friend at the grove. we didn't have a whole lot to say to each other, and there was no movie playing she wanted to see (i really wanted to see indiana jones, on opening night, but downplayed it and was content to sit by the fountain and talk.)

until a guy from some radio station approached us and said, "we're having a test screening of indiana jones inside right now and some people didn't show up. would you like to see it for free?"

so i (of course) got all over it before my friend had a chance to respond.

and i loved it. pure, escapist entertainment featuring over-the-top soviet communists as the bad guys (what's not to love?) - my friend hated it. she said she was bored the entire time (seriously - bored?) and felt like it was five hours long - and further that she'd tried to get into one of the original indiana joneses and turned it off after three minutes because she hated it (for real!). (but for me, after a rough first act, the movie clipped right along)

and i am seemingly always the one who gets stuck having a miserable time so that someone else can enjoy themselves (girl bar, anyone?). so i felt i got a little cosmic payback for a change, however small. i got a secret wish answered without even openly declaring it. i got to see indiana jones (and for free) on opening night!

gratefulness (day eleven: the hustle)

2008-05-22T08:38:00.001-07:00

today, i am grateful that in three working days, i have been able to:

-apply to, be accepted to and enroll in a university credential program for special ed. (even though the admissions advisor originally told me the admissions process took 4-6 weeks - four hours before he sent me a schedule for my first eight courses)

-get a wink and a nod and a "make sure i have your resume" from the assistant principal overseeing special ed. for an RSP position at my school that starts july 1 (the monday after the friday that my current job is ending) (RSP teachers only teach three tiny classes a day with the highest functioning special ed. students, and spend the rest of the time being there as a resource for the general ed. teachers who have these high-functioning special ed. students mainstreamed into their class) (THREE CLASSES a day, with like, five to ten kids each!)

-call the district, schedule an interview, and COMPLETE an interview (sail through an interview) to obtain provisional certification status.

-pop in on the principal of my school (of 4000 students! she's a busy woman!) first thing in the morning AFTER the interview, who wrote me the necessary letter of recommendation (the last thing i need to submit to achieve provisional status) on the SPOT, enabling me to fax it to my recruitment adviser BEFORE 8 AM the day after my interview (which was 3 PM yesterday)!

-when i informed the principal i was interested in the RSP position and had spoken to the AP about it already, have HER tell me, "you know we still have to interview you, right? so nobody can argue.")

-work full-time (except the two periods i had to take off yesterday for my interview)

-figure out that a) all of the above needed to be done (as of monday morning, i had NO idea how to accomplish any of this!) and b) get all of the above done in lightning fashion.

-manage to get back to the gym after a 3 week hiatus (because no matter how busy i was, i was on adrenaline overload and seriously needed some calming down...)

so. the great unknown, which i have no control over, remains to be - waiting to hear from the district if they are even going to hire any provisional candidates this year (sigh). any other year, it would be a shoe-in (but any other year, my current position wouldn't have been cut, either). but no one knows what the district is going to do, budget-wise, until they release their 2008-2009 budget (mid-june) - and if there are ANY displaced special ed teachers due to budget cuts, they get first dibs at any new positions.

so the district says, okay. we have this many displaced teachers (a), this many district and university interns (b), and this many openings (c). so if a + b < c, we will authorize the hiring of provisional candidates.

(i'm seriously hoping that special ed. turns out to be a "protected class" as far as budget cuts go and i can still get this job because no teachers will be displaced. because you'd have to be a serious a-hole to go after special ed.)

so today, i am grateful for my ability to hustle. while at the same time, doing my little chants to the gods that the end of me having to hustle - at least until i am hustling for a writing gig (!) - is in sight.

gratefulness (day ten: no worries)

2008-05-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

okay, so the gratefulness blog is doing a flash-forward, just like "lost"!

today, i am grateful that through some combination of nature and nurture (add to that tons of drive and will-power, no matter how coyly lazy i make myself out to be (because i really feel like i am, not that i am actually being coy) most of the time) - i will always be okay.

that, a month after my rent went up $500 a month (my choice - it was a good choice), i found out that as of the end of june, my position (which made my new digs easy to afford) is going to be cut (along with thousands of positions across LAUSD) - and i'm not worried. (inconvenienced, for sure. let down, naturally. but not worried, in a financial sense.)

because i already have a plan - it's been in my mind to do for some time, but there was no motivating force to actually proceed (after all - why go back to school just to get a pay cut that will go hand in hand with way more REAL work? it doesn't make any sense!)

(but now that i'm looking at it as a pay raise, including teacher time off (which i don't currently get), NOW it makes sense).

one amazing thing this last year has afforded me (in addition to other major things, like a huge quality-of-life-boost, a cushy paycheck, lots of free time, a rewarding work week, great connections...) - is realizing a new, rare, natural gift of mine (that translates into major job security with a nice paycheck and a truly moderate workload no matter where i'll ever find myself in life).

nearly every time i sub in a special ed classroom, i get some kind of comment like, "the kids are better for you than they are for their real teacher!"

and i really love these kids. and i don't even know what their disabilities ARE (teachers have access to their complete IEP - in any classroom, every single kid could and probably is dealing with an entirely unique situation and subs don't even know what they are!!)

and something about me - just one of those natural knack things - i'm really amazingly good with them.

(to the point that i got a JOB OFFER last year, when i was a brand new SUB, as a full-time special ed teacher by the department coordinator (no longer here...sigh!) who just intuitively got that about me...way before i even did!)

and i just found out about an excelerated credential program where i can take one class per month (in the evening, one or two nights a week), and if i work it a little at the upcoming special ed career fair i may even be able to get a position as a university intern as early as september (or really, as early as july...) in spite of all the budget cutbacks in this very high-demand field.

(and being young and cute and well-spoken and charismatic never hurt anyone, either!)

as a friend of mine put it, being a special ed teacher when you're young is hot.

being a special ed teacher when you're old is not.

(but by then i'll be a super-successful writer, which is a hot-old-lady thing to be. so again...not worried!)

gratefulness (day nine: marriage)

2008-05-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

today, i am grateful that same-sex marriages are finally legal in california.

i lived in west hollywood for three years, a block away from the west hollywood city hall, and could never believe that two men or two women could not walk into the west hollywood city hall and get married.

and that kind of love - the "i want to spend the rest of my life with this person" love - is so ridiculously elusive to begin with - to actually find it, and not be allowed by the government to express it publicly and get all the legal protections afforded by the government to legally married couples - just wrong, wrong, wrong.

i remember being in high school, and having an argument with a lady at my parent's very conservative church (probably around the time i was president of the youth group at that very church...). she was adamantly against gay marriages and said to me, horrified and disgusted, "i don't want to have to explain that to my daughters!" (who are now, fyi, 1) a promiscuous high school drop-out living with her deadbeat boyfriend, and 2) a promiscuous bisexual high school student who spends her time going between mental facilities and group homes)

that was the second one-two punch, looking back, that screamed at me, "this is sooo not your thing, babycakes."

the first had been the realization when i was about fifteen that "god" (or, "the church") wanted me to marry a guy with no prior sexual experience. (seriously...ewwwwwww!)

but anyway. hooray! marriage!

gratefulness (day eight: hope)

2008-05-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

tonight, i'm grateful for hope.

not because i always feel it. or feel it tonight, for that matter.

but because i know it's there, even when i don't feel it. and because it's always warranted, even if in the moment i can't appreciate it.

(and by kissing its ass i hope i can coax it out.)

gratefulness (day seven: the good life)

2008-05-13T17:36:00.000-07:00

today, i am grateful for:

-my new roommate sarah, who just moved in, and is awesome!

-the money i made for watching Clue all day (making that a total of two days this month i have made money for watching Clue all day - the first half and the last half).

-the immediate, albeit frivolous turnaround of those funds into designer bathrobes (in sandalwood) for guests who will now get their mixed drink of choice in a williams-sonoma martini glass with pottery barn olive-skewers that might just hold olives-from-our-own-freaking-olive-tree while lounging in my pool-side jacuzzi!

-having enough money (for right now) to be frivolous.

-getting the baby batter out of my brain. finally! today!

-falling through my size 27 jeans all day (do i live in l.a.?)

(so, that even during this month of "unproductivity", and to read some of my diary entries - uh...really dramatically overexaggerated, endless misery - besides um, moving and submitting final grades for five english classes i had to take over for the last three weeks of school, i did attain the one goal i set for myself, which was to lose ten pounds.)

(all in the month that i felt i achieved nothing.)

-that i'm finally getting back to the gym. tomorrow. i swear.

-the sun, which decided to come out today before five o'clock.

today, i am grateful for the fact that i live a pretty freaking fantastic life. that when i am miserable, it is because i am really selfish and provincial because odds were statistically much greater that i be born in a poor rural town in china and could even be dead right now because the earth rose up and toppled me and everybody i ever met in an instant. (or just alive and impoverished, living in a communist dictatorship. or dead anyway from infanticide, because i'm a girl.)

we've really got it good, people. even when it seems bad. enjoy it.

gratefulness (day six: reminders)

2008-05-12T14:56:00.000-07:00

today, i am grateful for reminders.

a reminder from bon that i better get my butt in gear to submit scenes for her next showcase (i'd thought the deadline was two weeks later than it is.)

a reminder that no matter how often i feel isolated (too often) - just in last week's LA WEEKLY, TWO playwrights i'm friends with had plays reviewed, TWO actors i'm friends with who got their stills in, and i know of a third one who was in still a fourth play reviewed. that is to say, i am actually pretty (freaking) connected.

a reminder that out of those four plays, only one got a great review (/was not outrightly panned) for the writing (natch, kiki) - and hell, when my play was up, i got a a pretty freakin' nice shout out on the very same pages where writers who are way more accomplished than i am got/get totally panned!

(ego, anyone? well, sometimes you need to feel it again to get the engine going...)

all just reminders of what i am - a (freaking) writer. and it isn't an aspiration, it's a blood thing. it's something i will always do, and always be. and be good at it.

a reminder i haven't been doing it!

because i've been feeling isolated. and frustrated. and in limbo. (and okay, jilted.)

so i'm getting back to what i'm good at, damn it!

(and trying as always to come to terms with the dichotomy of being bad at life/good at writing that yes, does seem to exist and seems to apply to me too much of the time.)

gratefulness (day five: wine)

2008-05-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

(i am totally doctoring this post to make it look like i posted it on sunday.)

(but it's in fact monday morning right now.)

(shhh.)

okay so "today" i am grateful for wine.

a cop out post, really. like being thankful for air, or soil (both very important to the making of wine). but seriously? where would i be without wine? i might not even have been born without wine.

and "today", wine is (besides things i'm already grateful for, which apply today and all days, see #1-4) the thing i am most grateful for.

(i could be a bitch and say, snarkily, "i'm really grateful that my brother and sister-in-law received and loved their baby-to-be care package that i spent weeks putting together, and well over $100 on, as well as a long letter/card that i wrote by hand, twice, because i didn't like the first one after i wrote it, that they raved on and on to my mother how much they loved it (the gifts, not the card) and were thrilled by getting it but didn't even bother to send an e-mail or a text message to yours truly to even acknowledge they got it...right during the week when it would have made my freaking month to hear from them...)

(i also found out about that "today")

(or i could just be boring and be grateful for my mom "today", since it is mother's day. yawn. lord knows, i AM grateful for her! so, so much. after all, she flew out to see me for just the weekend two weeks ago WITH PAINTING SUPPLIES IN HER SUITCASE! and basically just helped me paint my old room and left again, cause she had to work on monday. but she's so important to me i will give her her own entry, not on mother's day, because it's too much of a cop out to be grateful for her on mother's day. i'm grateful for her every day.)

(even though i started this by saying it was a cop out to be grateful for wine.)

(oh well.)

gratefulness (day four: my shell)

2008-05-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

i had to get creative with this one.

because it's saturday night, and i'm once again in this big (still) empty house, alone, and all the lights are off and the only sounds are the whir of the computer, bukowski's snoring (which just stopped), and the typing of the keyboard, and i wish like hell i was out with people. downing shots with friends at a bar. making out with a guy in my car. just being out and young and alive. with people.

but i just had a whole heap of emotionally exhausting incidents hit me from every angle at once there for a minute (or...a month) and i think maybe i have pretty deep reserves, so when they get depleted it takes a lot longer than i'd like to fully recharge (and i thought they'd definitely be recharged by now).

but they are recharging, as fast as possible. since i'm taking care of myself and not rushing it and staying in instead of going out and forcing it before i'm ready.

so tonight, i'm grateful for my shell. 'cause it lets me stay soft.

gratefulness (day three: my job)

2008-05-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

today, i am grateful for my job.

because it's friday, and i'm not screaming, "thank god it's friday!" because i get paid better than any job i've ever had for the easiest and most fulfilling work i've ever done.

because high school kids are cool.

(except 9th graders.)

because if my position survives budget cuts to get renewed another year (fingers crossed, i'll find out next month), i'm finally in a position to quit the hustle and bustle of just surviving i've been caught up in and start to thrive - i.e. get back to writing in a major way, which is why i even got this "survival job" to begin with...

because the staff of the starbucks down the street from the school often has my order ready by the time i reach the counter (and because i can afford a pretty pricey starbucks habit).

because for all the dysfunction of LAUSD, and all the wackiness of my coworkers, and the weirdness of teenagers, and the alarm clock that goes off at 5:30 AM monday through friday, and the loss of my late-night life during the week (and the stress/damper that has put on my personal life...) -

i've been here a year now, and i feel like i belong here.

and for a girl who hasn't lived anywhere more than a few years at a time in my entire life, whose "best friends" are defined by a bond way, way more tenuous than what is probably the standard interpretation of the term...

it's no small deal to feel like i belong anywhere.

gratefulness (day two: bukowski)

2008-05-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

today about the only thing i am grateful for is that i know, when i get done with work, and i'm through at the bank, where i must change my address and request a new debit card because as of last night an identity thief in queens, ny was somehow using mine to pay for gas -

(it's called skimming. i know this because my credit card was just skimmed in march by an identity theft ring right here in LA-)

and then meet my ex-roomie to sort out the cable from my old house -

and then head home to my gigantic, empty house in a quiet neighborhood where i've been living basically by myself without cable or reliable internet for 2 1/2 weeks -

that when i get there, i won't be quite alone. in fact, i'll be with my baby, who since i got him in january has been trying to do a good job. that's just his personality.

so that's day two:
i am grateful for my baby dog, bukowski.

who, i haven't been spending enough time with lately. i have been neglecting the best thing in my life right now. funny how that happens....

i think i just had a breakthrough.

gratefulness (day one: the good'uns)

2008-05-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

okay. so this new blog is not a promise to get back in the business of blogging with any kind of regularity. but i'm going to for at least 30 days.

because. bonnie borrowed an idea from joni who borrowed the idea from annie who probably is just ripping off an idea from moliere or "i love lucy" (a quacky writing prof in college claimed that any conceivable story idea has been done by one or the other, so i'm ripping him off) -

30 days of gratitude. and as i was reading bonnie's first entry, i'd probably been finishing my last day of a personal, much less official 30 days of ingratitude. because sometimes, life just sucks all at once and you (i) keep saying, "life - you owe me right now. i'm waiting for the big pay off for all of my tolerance."

until you (i) realize life is not listening because it is not a freaking intercessor unless it's you (me), which it is, so then you (i) finally say, okay. so life doesn't owe me. i owe me. and i can make any great thing happen that i want the minute i stop whining about how i just feel owed.

because i've been sulking a lot about the (lack of) (quality) people in my life. how a guy who i considered one of my better friends in LA moved to london after taking me to a nice goodbye dinner and for unknown reasons, as soon as he got there, deleted me as a facebook friend, did not return an e-mail, and slapped me with a $200 contract termination fee he promised me before he left he was all over.

and how a person who i racked up $35 in overage charges on my cell phone last month listening to bitch and moan about her (almost exclusively self-imposed) problems for hours and hours on end - on a day last week when i just felt the bottom had fallen out, and no one else was answering their phone, and the people i care about most were all m.i.a. at once, and people who i was trying to be fair and civil with were being icy back to me, and i just needed to vent to someone for ten minutes about how bad i felt - hung up on me. (making her the first person in my life to ever do so. i suppose that's something to be grateful for?)

and then i read bonnie's blog about gratitude, in which, even though i haven't seen or talked to her in months, she mentioned me by name. as well as joni and annie, both of whom i've actually met and are lovely and touched my life in a positive way, however briefly.

so that's my day one:

i'm grateful for the good'uns.

because there are good'uns out there, everywhere. and even if/when they're not brushing elbows with me, they're brushing elbows with someone, and we all need to meet a new good'un now and again, even if just for the reassurance there are more out there than we can possibly know.

and when i put it in that perspective, i'd rather know they're out there. because it's a dark, dark world out there and precious few of us with paintbrushes.

and i've got my own, bitches!