Cool stuff!

Chris Gethard - someone who I 'know well enough to say hi and stuff to' from around the UCB Theater, and who is a truly hilarious and nice human being, has published this book. It looks awesome. I'm going to buy one, you should too! Hooray!

Really.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

- Margery Williams, "The Velveteen Rabbit"

Caption Contest

"Well, Doctor, I'm sure we can proceed with the separation surgery, but there's an exceedingly high likelihood of brain damage....oh, you're saying there's already a high likelihood of brain damage. Carry on."

More inspiration (curious, that second one)

From Raymond Carver, the writer, rather than his characters (from thinkexist.com)

"Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that."

"I never wrote so much as a line worth a nickel when I was under the influence of alcohol"

I go,

''That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

I go, 'Holly, this can't continue. This has got to stop.' ''

- Raymond Carver, "Gazebo"

Recipe for when life gets to be too much

2 eggs, scrambled in the pan with onion salt and regular salt
3 pieces bacon, cooked to death
2 slices rye toast, buttered generously
1 cup reheated coffee with honey and milk

Serve on quilted placemat.

Prepared by slightly confused, often contentious, but still able to multi-task breakfast in five minutes, eighty-eight year old grandmother who can still come through in the clutch.

Where am I?

Two people in the last 2 days have asked me if I've lost a bunch of weight. honestly I don't know. I don't feel particularly smaller. My doctor, in giving me his usual hairy eyeball, suggested that instead of losing "X pounds" suggested I lose "Y pounds," Y being a number a great deal smaller than X; I thought he was just feeling sorry for me. Someone actually asked me if I'd been ill.

So I walked from 23rd and 7th to 4th and A yesterday, stopping for food only when I hit my neighborhood, only having consumed a banana and some coffee. No Food till The east Side!

I'm going to swim laps today if it kills me. My thighs are starting to return, but I have not yet redeveloped a butt. But, butt, get it? And I haven't yet relocated my swim goggles. Where the fuck would I lose swim goggles?

Don't worry. I'm still a fattie. With slightly firmer thighs, I'm hoping.

Maybe cutting out the quarts of booze really helped. Hmm.

Physics wrought large

Did you ever notice that when approaching a project there is a finite well of energy that often gets diverted - ie, when trying to clean the house, you end up spending all the time on a single closet?

Or that when trying to engage in a creative endeavour, you can only do one 'type' (write, perform, direct) at a time?

Just something I noticed.

With apologies to Schrodinger and Planck....did you ever feel that life could be potentially wonderful and terrible at the same time, and, moreover, you weren't entirely sure of which?

**********************

It is entirely possibly that my analogies suck. Deal with it.

xxx

I am a shy attention-whore

Check out my interview in this fun blog!

I need to update my website with stuff I am in a little bit. (Not update it a little bit, there's stuff -a film, a sound clip - that I'm in a little bit.)

I want to be in more stuff.

Cleaning house

I have found

- borrowed software (sorry!)
- a CLE disk (hooray!)
- my UCBT t-shirt (hooray!)
- an ancient comedy notebook (damn)
- my marriage license (alas)
- two cans of Static Guard (what the fuck?)
- The Sims discs (dangerous....)
- my lost cellphone
- a lot of broken jewelry

I have not found
- true love
- sanity
- organization
- hope
- a notebook that i really need

Auuugh!

Stolen from someone else's blog

Note: my blog is on hiatus until I stop being such a misanthropic creature. I will steal freely from others until then.

I stole this from another funner blog.

1. What time is it?11:44 a.m.
2. What's your full name? Michelle
3. What are you most afraid of? Suffocation and rejection
4. What is the most recent movie that you've seen in a theater? Either Star Wars Ep III or the Aristocrats
5. Place of birth? Brooklyn NY
6. Favorite new food? Age (pronouced ag-ay) tofu
7. What's your natural hair color? Brown
8 . Ever been to Alaska? No
9. Ever been toilet papering rolling? No
10. Love someone so much it made you cry? Yes
11. Been in a car accident? Yes, twice
12. Croutons or bacon bits? Depends on the salad.
13. Favorite day of the week? Saturday
14. Favorite Restaurant? Union Square Cafe
15. Favorite Flower? Lilacs
16. Favorite sport to watch? Baseball
17. Favorite Drink? Jack on the rocks
18. Favorite ice cream? Breyers vanilla
19. Disney or Warner Brothers? Warner brothers
20. Favorite fast food restaurant? Subway or Wendy's
21. What color is your bedroom carpet? Green
22. How many times you failed your driver's test? Twice
23. Before this one, from whom did you get your last E-mail? Martha
24. What do you do most often when you are bored? Channel surf, internet surf, re-read books, write
25. Bedtime? When I finally get home at night.
26. Who will respond to this e-mail the quickest? N/A
27. Who is the person you sent this to that is least likely to respond? N/A
28. Who is the person that you are most curious to see their responses? N/A
29. Favorite TV shows? The Wire, RW/RR challenges, Making the Band 3, ANTM and a few other crappy reality-tv shows (Shut up), Arrested Development, Curb your Enthusiasm, The Sopranos
31. Ford or Chevy? NYC public transportation
32. What are you listening to right now? Brian Lehrer on WNYC
33. What are your favorite colors? Red, black
34. How many tattoos do you have? Zero
35. How many pets do you have? None, I relinquished custody of my cat
36. Which came first the chicken or the egg? I hate this question, it's the wrong one
37. What would you like to accomplish before you die? Something outstandingly famously brilliant, perhaps.
38. How many people are you sending this e-mail to? Zero.
39. Time completed? 11:49 a.m.

Is anybody listening?

What I really want to do is have a shower, hop on a train with a laptop and a charge card, and just keep going.

See you later, suckers. It's my turn to reject you all.

With gratitude and apologies to George Carlin.

Shit piss cunt fuck cocksucker motherfucker and tits.

That's all I've got to say. It's just about all I've got right now.

Shit piss cunt fuck cocksucker motherfucker and tits.

That reminds me of ...(an email to a friend which should really be a journal entry)

Madonna was the phenomena when I was in high school. she used to live in my (current) neighborhood when it was gross. it was very cool to publicly hate and secretly love madonna. my best friend/ex-crush/just-come-out-to-me gay prom date used to call me "mir-donna" to get me.

But i did drunkely dance to blaring Madonna remixes at Limelight in a white shoulder-padded extremely short minidress and red spike heels (with enormous hair, yes) after said prom with said friend (white shoulder-padded suit, skinny red tie, spiked hair), chain-smoking and piss-drunk on Long Island (authentic) ice teas, May 1985.

Soooo hot. No waiting behind the velvet rope for us!

Ah, memories.

That reminds you of the time that...

Novel ideas.

I'm going to do the NaNoWriMo thing again this year, for real. What the fuck? I've actually got an idea for it. They say it's ok to do an outline, at least, first. So I'm going to try. It's a little Angels in America, a little All that Jazz, a little real life, a little Christmas Carol, and completely fa-cocked.

Of course, I've said too much.

Do you think you're in it? Mayhaps you are.

Grasping.

I want some pancakes.

I kind of want that kitten that someone just rescued.

But what I really want is....

Titles are not the hard part. Or are they?

So, some smart guy said some cool things to me tonight. Lots of people, but one in particular did. And I want to remember them, but I'm horrible at exactitude in quoting, and, sometimes, in expressing myself clearly when it counts.

I'm taking a writing class, you see. And, well, the more you write something, sometimes, the worse it comes off. And it's kind of like, well, painful to read twenty-eight pages in front of people...and nobody laughs. A slight, but slight, exaggeration. And it's like bleeding through the eyes for me to sit in a room with people who are frankly better at something than me.

The 'old' me is a one-draft, never-look-back wonder, awash in sloppy work, tossed-off rants, and unfinished projects. The person who looked around the class on the first day with a sinking ill-feeling, ready to ask for a refund and run away. Index cards? F**k that, not me.

Tonight I walked out with a tightened up (from last week) but gloriously unfinished, dragging in parts yet containing actual funny elements, workable and fixable, structurally sounder and more complete than I thought possible, draft of a Curb spec script.

People talked. I listened. I only held my head in my hands in moaning despair, oh, once.

Twenty-eight pages. Three plotlines, three acts. Jokes. Written in other characters' voices that aren't my own. Identified the draggy parts and the parts that need heightening and elements to carry through and punch up. I let people help me. Nobody f**king died. Painful, but a good pain.

I'd thought I'd corrected some things, but I'd overcorrected some things. Okay, cool.

It's my first one and I learned how to do stuff. And it made me f**king happy.

And you know? I'm, well, proud of this.

I feel like I unlocked a few secret doors.

Liberally paraphrased.....badly requoted...and f**ing good stuff anyway as I heard it.

"It's a process....it's a first step...people are always gonna tell you, you're always going to be able to make it better. It's tough. But it's fun, and yeah, it should be, it should make you happy....And, you know? You'll always have this skill, no matter what happens, no matter what the hell else is going on, how sh**ty things are, how crappy life is, you can always flip on the computer and write."

Thank you. It's truer than you know, Smart Guy. Seriously.

I never did break open the index cards, though. Maybe next time...Still a bit of a rebel.

From the NY Times Magazine this past Sunday.

"Being in love," she announces, "brought out the worst in me. The thing for me with men has probably always been How much do they love me? As opposed to How much do I love them?"

- Diane Keaton

(Yes, I'm one of those horrible trolls that reads the magazine first.)

I do improv.

This post made bloody little sense. But I like leaving a trail to remind me of my own failings.