You mean I gotta update this thing?

Oh blog-o-sphere.

I'm watching "Last Comic Standing" on Bravo. Soon, I will go to the gym. For those of you who don't know, I like to exercise. Thanks.

Whatelsewhatelsewhatelse. I know! I'll do a breakdown. BREAKDOOOOOOOWN!

These will be the categories....and I'm just making them up as I go, so who knows what I'll write! Omgosh the excitement.

Work
Health
Relationships
Friendships
Family
Home
Recreation

Also, I'm a dork.

Okay, here goes:

Work: I don't have a job. I can't wait to have a job. I want a job. I hope I get this job I'm being considered for. The second I get a job a huge weight will be lifted. I need to start looking for more jobs in anticipation of not getting this other job. Jobs. The word has lost all meaning. I've started covering sporadic shifts at a box office I used to work at in college and it's fun. Work = makes you feel like a person. Sporadic shifts = the illusion of an income where there really is no income.

Health: I have it. Good. I've been cooking a lot. (Me!) I don't eat things with high fructose corn syrup in them anymore. Never beeeen so healthy, I'd say. Hmph. Plus, the exercise. Toot!

Relationships: Oh boys. I love you all.

Friendships: Thank GOD. Am i right?

Family: I love you. But just stay in the midwest, kay?

Home: God this place is a pit. But Dan bought a new toilet seat cover. Does it get better?

Recreation: Sketch and improv! Oh it's all going so well I feel like someone should pinch me. It's really cool that I've found a niche like this.

Thanks. Bye.

This particular Thursday.

I'm home. In Chicago. I'm currently across town from my mom's house, at my Aunt Lisa and Uncle Kel's house, which sits on a cul-de-sac in typical midwestern fashion. Apparently some show called "Ugly Betty" is on in ten minutes and apparently some of us will be watching it. About 30 people (and one little baby) were in and out of this house today to celebrate the holiday. My Aunt Lisa's sisters and brothers and their wives and husbands and their kids have made a tradition in the last few years of flying into town for my Aunt Lisa's awesome Thanksgiving dinner, and my Uncle Kel's syblings (my mother is one of them) and parents (my grandparents) and all of us grandkids try to make it every year too. I have flown in from New York for the last seven or eight years to be here with my huge family, if only for a couple days. I love them all very much.

It ends up being an incredibly roudy time. The men get quite drunk, the women get quite tipsy, everyone gets loud, the kids get older and wiser every year and sit around and discuss how perspectives shift as we age. My cousin Trisha just got engaged to her boyfriend, who I met for the first time today. He's awesome. I approve. I'm a bridesmaid in the wedding. We're all getting older.

Now that it's almost 7pm (and dinner was at 2pm - and drinks have been flowing from 12noon to the present), there's a game of poker going on upstairs in the kitchen, some girlie chatter going on in the upstairs living room, a crazy old lady talking nonsense to a passionate middle aged man in the den, some people napping, some people laying on the floor in front of the fire, Mallory's reading a magazine, and I'm sitting here updating the ol' blog. How could you have it any other way.

Every year I dread the extra effort and inconvenience of two plane rides in three days and the predictable hellos and how are yous and the promises that we'll see each other in a few weeks at Christmas, and every year I end up feeling so incredibly blessed and lucky and grateful and glad to come from such hearty, happy, intelligent, lively stock who are all able to be here each year. I'm a lucky young lady.

In the car on the way home from the airport this morning I had to tell my grandmother that I got fired from my job. She didn't know yet. I was expecting her to be devastated as she concerns herself greatly with the details of my life. I wasn't looking forward to the conversation, but it ended up going quite smoothly. She's really mellowed out in her old age. Naturally, my mother told me later that my grandmother was fighting back tears in the front seat of the car, but I didn't notice at the time, so that's that.

At present, three people under 50 are giving an 82 year old woman a hard time about her new boyfriend, Clyde. Oh man, oh man.

I can't wait to get back to New York to my loving friends and my lovely life. But in the meantime, I'll do some relaxing, some shopping, some family bonding. And hopefully Grandma will slip me a few twenties before I go to the airport. :)

My BACK

I helped my good friends, Clayton and Carla, move yesterday and they didn't have a TON of stuff so we decided that just the three of us would provide plenty of man-power. We got it all done in a relatively short amount of time, but dammit if my whole entire body doesn't wanna kill all of you. Sorry.

It was fun, though, to be all super physical for a few hours, which apparently really takes your mind off everything else except for "OhmygodIthinkmythighsfelloffbackthere!" and my friend Carla gave me a really really nice and thoughtful gift at the end of the day for helping them. Their new apartment is gorgeous (if not up three flights of stairs - mythighs!) and we all earned the two cans of Bud Light that we downed when it was over. Then I went over to another friend's house who was cooking dinner when I walked in the door and it smelled like a home. We ate and chatted and hung out and he has too much left over Halloween candy. A lovely day, frankly.

I'm feeling a lot better than I was over the weekend. I think a weekend of partying due to a birthday, although great fun, can really make you feel like a loser when you don't have a job to back it all up with.

BUT, I signed up at a temp place yesterday and I have another interview tomorrow and I feel like things might start coming together soon. Awesome. I'd love to have something permanent before Thanksgiving so my grandmother doesn't keel over when I tell her I left my last job.

Pretty sure that lady's gon' keel over. She loved my last job. I think she's gonna be pissed. Needless to add, I haven't told her yet.

Today!: exercise, grocery shop, rehearse, watch comedy.

I've been sleeping in WAY too late. I got home at 4am last night. Q Train, you are my nemesis.

Things are on the up and up, people. It turns out, if you just shut up about it, you start to feel bettah. Hmph.

Anyone wanna watch The Little Mermaid with me? I got the DVD version for my b-day. Colorful!

Alright, Fuck.

I'm pretty sure I'm depressed. Smoking, drinking, doing nothing...these are all pretty good indicators that I'm wallowing in some self pity, some I don't wanna, and some this is really boring.

I haven't had a job in a month. I'm pretty sure that, barring any major obstacles that should arise, I'll be getting up a reasonable time of the morning tomorrow, putting on some nice clothes, and going to meet with a temp agency woman. I need to start doing something with my day time. My birthday is over, the party is over, the Weekend Of Shows that I've been anticipating for a while now is over and I need to fucking pull up my boot straps and shut the fuck up about it.

I seriously MISS having a semblance of a real life. Because as much as doing nothing all the time is rather freeing and as much as you realize, DANG that job thing took up a whole lotta time, those feelings wear off pretty quickly and you end up getting real used to sitting around all day, waiting for your friends to get off work. And you end up getting real used to hating it. I miss being super busy and not being able to stop to think about whatever the fuck I want to whenever the fuck I want to.

The worst part of feeling blue like this is that the little things people do that usually wouldn't bother you at all, or usually would roll right off your back, are the things that make you feel like shit for 12 hours straight. And that's just completely unfair to everyone. Especially your loving happy friends who have lives that don't revolve around you.

I NEED A FUCKING JOB.

Omg i need a goddammed job.

Here it begins again.

So, I have turned twenty-six. It happened on a rainy Tuesday. I spent the day with my best friends Billy and Adam and then I went to improv class and out for drinkings afterwards. Tonight, I'm going out with a group of people to a bar downtown, should be fun.

Ever since I got fired, I've been living a very purgatory-like life. This hasn't been an easy period of time and I have to constantly remind myself that I'm a worthwhile human being. Tonight will probably be my last hurrah for a while; I need to regain a sense of what it means to be me and start taking some things more seriously. I really am so blessed and I wonder if I just create obstacles for myself more than anything else.

I should have a job soon. The comedy stuff is really awesome right now, I'm feeling good about what I'm doing and how much I enjoy it. I feel so so so lucky to have weekly opportunities to perform. Rehearsing, performing, taking class, going to improv practice, watching shows...these things take up the majority of my time, occupying almost every night of the week. I wouldn't change it for anything. It's a fulfillment I never knew I was missing and to have been so deeply involved in it for the past two years, to keep finding new things I love about it, to keep being moved and excited by the old things I've always loved about it...is awesome. I feel really lucky that I went to a great school and ended up with some sweet training and always followed my emotional desires. As much as my emotions plague me and as much as I live by them in ways that I wish I wouldn't, following my feelings might have always been a strong suit of mine, whether I've allowed it to serve me or not.

Being twenty-six feels older than ever. It's kinda awesome though. I haven't minded getting older as I've gotten older. Street cred, I guess.

I have been struggling to hold on to value lately, to hold on to what I value and to remember to find value in what I know I value, if that makes any sense. The party is over, my birthday has passed, I've been jobless for four weeks exactly and I'm ready to start the next happy chapter.

Now I'm going to go to the gym and go shopping for a new top for my party tonight.

And I think I'll have a goddammed latte.

Yes!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

I gotta run, I'm late for therapy. ;)

Executive Decision

Tomorrow's my birthday.

I've been sitting here trying to decide if I should splurge on a $15 mani/pedi. Tomorrow's my birthday. Decision made. See you at the nail place.

xoxo

Disclosure

Gonna start titling these suckerz!

I'm trying to smoke less weed.

And now I think to myself, is there anyone who reads this who I don't want to know that I smoke weed?

Nope. No one. Freeing.

Anyway, I'm trying to smoke less of it. And here's a quick tip. If you don't buy it, you can't smoke it. Durrrr.

This morning, at 4:40am, I woke up, put on pants, got into a minivan with my friends Billy and Adam, drove to the West Side to pick up a bunch of bundles of magazines, drove to Valley Stream, Long Island to "dispense" them, stopped at Billy's parent's house for orange juice and conversation, and drove back to the city. Many laffs were had. Then I got home to queens at 11:30am and zzzzzzzzzz'd. We got paid a lot of money, relatively speaking, to complete this task.

I'm going to the gym at 6pm. I AM. I really am.

I'll be 26 in 4 dayz.

I had a pretty awful therapy session on Tuesday. She was just particularly hard on me about some stuff she thinks I've been "glossing over." There's something very strange about one grown person paying another grown person to get in their face when they aren't being honest with themselves. I was sitting in that room, all huddled over my cup of coffee, which felt like the only normal object in the room for a few minutes, wondering why this all suddenly reminded me of being reprimanded for not having my napkin on my lap when I was in the 5th grade. I'm sure she, the therapist, would certainly scoff at my making this analogy, since the very point she was trying to make involves me equating something serious that's happened with things that aren't serious. And perhaps she has a point.

But her point is not MY point. My point is, why do I pay someone a million dollars a second to make me feel like my mom flew in from the Chicagoland area, rewinded me to age 8, and sat me down in the living room to raise her cruel eyebrow and wave around the note I wrote about kissing Brian Robinson, the note I folded up into a precious little triangle so only my best girlfriends would know how to open it, the note she found in my pants pockets when she was doing the laundry and somehow cracked my fail-safe note-opening scheme?

My 26th birthday is in 5 days.

Goonies is on! It just started! Will I watch the whole thing? Who knows. But there's a good chance I will.

Ohh hahaha, when Chunk knocks the penis off the statue of David and then glues it on upside down? Hahahaha. Wheew.

I haven't blogged in over a week! Amazing. I suppose I've been busy.

I don't have a job yet, but things are coming together in that area. In the meantime, please send all $1000 checks to me.

So much has changed so quickly in my world and adapting to it has been different-feeling each and every day, but it's all good.

I wish I had something funnier or more interesting to write. I turn 26 in six days! There's that.

Please send all $1000 birthday checks to me.