dude, where did the year go?

Has anyone else noticed how INSANELY QUICKLY this fall has gone? Or how INSANELY BUSY these last few weeks have been? It can't be just me.

There are officially two weeks until my production goes up. And 19 days until my semester is officially over.

My three brains are spinning; let's take a moment to reflect on how:

Work Brain: RM has also been INSANELY BUSY, and when I'm at work I am juggling emails and special events and her incredibly full calendar. Her spring is going to be ridiculous, with a special event in January, a full production she is directing in March, and the two classes she will be teaching here. Plus, she has been doing a ton of traveling, and she's on like 800 committees. The woman can't say no.

Class Brain: I have a final paper due in less than two weeks. I've got the format and the subject of it but have no idea how to begin or what exactly the content will be. Needless to say, this is sort of taking a backseat to my...

Director Brain: I keep thinking that things will settle down but there are 10 people in my cast, which makes it essentially impossible to get everyone in one room together at one time. Not to mention the fact that we've been rehearsing in a hallway for months, which, actually is pretty normal in my experience. I spent this week and last scrambling to find a "versatile and unconventional" space to put up this conceptually site-specific piece. This has proved much more challenging than I anticipated, so, of course, I've had to and am willing to compromise. Today is the first time that I've gotten any confirmation that we might actually have a space. This brings me some relief.

As does the fact that I'm taking tomorrow completely off. Except for maybe trying to write my final. And sending out scheduling emails. And probably doing lots of other responsible things.

Whew.

honestly?

It was probably angry at her for deep-frying all its cousins.

I'm going to hell, aren't I?

I'd buy this album.

I can't believe I haven't met him yet. I'm totally friends with good friends of his.

I am a Pop Culture Genius, vol. IX: The Dark (Dumpling) Knight edition

Last night was DUMPLING NIGHT at the cousins' house. It is their tradition to make ridiculously amazing dumplings FROM SCRATCH! So I drank red wine and photographed the activities, then ate my weight in pork-shrimp dumplings.

By the time we sat down to eat, I was drunk, and The Dark Knight was on TV. I know, I know. It's been AGES since my last Pop Culture post!

I recognized this guy who is neither Russian, though he was playing a Russian thug in The Dark Knight, nor Scottish, though he played Trey's Scottish cousin Caleb in the episode of Sex and the City where Charlotte and Trey get married.

I also recognized her playing Commissioner Gordon's wife. She also played Bobbie Barrett, the wife of the obnoxious Utz spokesman, on Mad Men. She was part of Mad Men's Top Ten Shocking Moments, apparently.

Some day soon I will give you an update on the craziness of this semester. Alas, that is not today.

Insane.

Death-defying?

Word of the Day, vol. IX

Word of the Day: CLOTHES

There are moments in my life when I physically feel it changing. It’s like something shifts into place again or a chord is struck within. This happened a lot when I was living in Apartment 8. I could sit and look around and realize how much work I had put into the person that I was, the person that I was becoming. These friends that I had met, this home I had created, this art I was making. It all felt so different from what I had ever experienced. Better than what I’d expected life could be like.

My relationship with clothes is volatile. Because it’s so much about my relationship with my body. And I’m only recently just beginning to really figure out how to live in this one.

I guess I can look back and realize that I spent a lot of time hiding in my clothes. High school was tough because I was the New Kid all four years. I didn’t know how to make anyone see me in the ways I wanted them to. I was just trying to get out of my house and the small town I saw so many people get stuck in. I rarely thought twice about “what I looked like,” because I always asserted that I wanted people to accept and want me for more than that. It was a preemptive strike. I beat people to the punch by putting on clothes that made me disappear. They weren’t noticing me anyway, I proclaimed.

In college, I lived with people who were consumed with their outer appearances in ways I actually resented. We all know how much I love S, but it still boggles my mind that a casual outfit to her is fitted jeans, a detailed blouse, and low heels. In college, when I was throwing on frayed jeans, polo shirts in sizes too big, and running shoes, this made me feel incredibly inadequate and unnoticed.

I hated shopping because I could never find things that fit and I never had any money, but one day during winter break, my friends dragged me to San Francisco where I spent literally eight hours in fitting rooms, while clothes were piled up and thrown at me to try on. I spent my entire budget of $500 on a new wardrobe and the rest of the night sobbing that I didn’t know how to let go of the old me. It was a full-on breakdown, one that scared me and my friends. It felt intensely scary and risky to try to have people see a me I didn’t know was ready to come out yet. And incredibly sad to realize that, in a lot of ways, I didn’t think I deserved to feel like a better version of myself.

As I started regularly wearing clothes that really fit me and began learning how to shop for myself, I slowly began to realize that feeling good about one’s self on the outside does trickle in to what’s going on inside. It doesn’t have to happen every day, and it doesn’t have to be a lot of work. It’s important for me to dress the body I have because those clothes are the most flattering anyway. And it’s amazing what finding the perfect pair of boots or a really amazing blazer does for one’s self-esteem. I can’t deny that.

Last weekend, I attended a party alone. It was a pretty low-maintenance grad school gathering, but I dressed up because it finally feels like fall, and I did just purchase a fantastic pair of boots. I threw them on with black tights, a black and white plaid skirt, and a royal blue sweater. As I was getting ready to leave my house, I felt a hearkening back to physically feeling my life change.

It was like my body realized how much further I have come. Realizes again how much work I’ve put into the person I am, the person I’m becoming.

Word of the Day, vol.VIII

Word of the Day: TRAVEL

Until I was 20, my passport picture was of me as an infant. I look miserable, like I am sick AND just woke up from a nap. I got a passport as an infant because my family lived in the Netherlands for a year then. We were there long enough for me to start speaking in both English and Dutch. It’s part of the family lore that my brother and I would jabber away in Dutch, to the utter confusion of our mom. The other standard story is that we got caught in a rock slide there. Obviously, I remember none of this.

I do remember spending a family vacation in Florida once and being sorely disappointed that we didn’t visit any sites, just stayed in our hotel and by the beach. Sea World? No. Disneyworld? No way. Miami Beach? Nope. We might have gone to exactly one zoo.

I’ve never done the tourist trap things in Los Angeles, even though I feel like I always plan to.

I’ve been to Disneyland exactly three times. The first time was when I was probably under 5. One of my first memories is the Small World ride. I went again as a high school senior for Grad Night and had, what I understood later to be, a panic attack on the crowded line to Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I went again with friends in college and we spent 11 hours there, riding the Winnie the Pooh ride several times in a row for no other reason than that there was no line, at the end of the night.

I didn’t travel out of the country again or get a new passport until I was a junior in college and spent the summer in London. It was a magical summer, full of revelations about living on my own, feeling like a woman, like an actress. Seeing thirteen plays in four weeks. Learning dialects that I teach now. Doing some of the best acting I’ve ever done in my life. I always say that if I could afford it, I’d move to London in a second.

I spent a tense Thanksgiving in Portland, Oregon one year, cooking because it didn't seem like anyone else would. And a lovely week in summer there another, when my brother and I had an amazing time at the local zoo and played a lot of Guitar Hero.

Honestly, though, I hate traveling. I hate airports. I hate flying. I hate couch-hopping. I hate spending so much money. I hate being away from my own space, my own things. I have a hard time being on other people’s schedules or visiting places where I have a ton of people to see and feeling like I’m performing for them and them for me for days.

S is probably the only person I’m really good at traveling with. We realized this when we traveled to NYC before moving there and consumed only alcohol and Trader Joe’s oriental rice crackers for nine days straight.

I think I don’t like traveling because it makes me feel displaced. Traveling feels too much like moving and I’ve certainly done enough of that for two lifetimes.

Still, some of the best family memories I have are when we would all travel to my mother’s family’s hometown in upstate New York. For years in a row, we would have large family reunions there. Reunions that I was too young to resent or be bored or stressed at. I would bunk with my cousin, dress up for large dinners, play games late into the night, sit in the sun, swim in waterfalls. One summer, my mom, her sister, my brother, and two of three cousins stayed in a house by a lake and we’d fall asleep to the trains rumbling by and wake up to go swimming first thing. We were all giddy with the safe freedom of those days. We’d float air mattresses into the lake. We’d make up ways to make each other laugh. We’d play Charades and music until the summer heat cooled at night.

I remember that as one of the best times of my whole life.

Is it still considered traveling if it felt like home?