Day 2

So it's after midnight which means I've already sort of failed, but it's still part of "today" for me, so I'm calling this not a total failing of the 30 day challenge.

Today's topic: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Firstly, the shallow but true: oh sweet Jesus I will be 31. THIRTY ONE. Oh god.

I've recovered now.

So the "answer:"

This is even more difficult than a non self-pitying answer to describing my single life. The ambitious answer - and I am ambitious to a fault - is that I will be on Broadway, in some kind of leading role, preferably Tony-nominated if not yet Tony-winning. Oh, and I'll be happily married. With a well-trained dog. And maybe also an adorable small child (very small child, if we're talking ten years from now).

The equally-probable answer is, in one of the following cities acting: Chicago, Boston, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Edinburgh, etc. In a sit-down production, or making a movie, or touring, or shooting a pilot, or on a cruise ship, or getting an MFA, or maybe even directing, or who the hell even knows.

The most likely answer is in New York. Doing theatre. Continuing to make this life happen, because, well... what else is there? (Which I mean in a good way.)

Sometimes I wish that I had chosen a normal person's life who could see a reasonable path of career advancement, hitting life's ordinary checkpoints, knowing the perfect home I'll live in with the perfect husband and our 2.5 kids and a dog (no seriously, that much I know - I will never own a cat).

But again. Then I think... what else is there than what I've chosen? There's certainly no turning back now. So ask me in like 5 years and we'll see how far I am to scenario number one. Then we'll chat about 5 more years from that.

Oh and by the way - I intend to be well on my way to scenario number one. Don't even worry about it.

Day 1

So about how I was going to do that 30 day challenge on posting just... well, because I wanted to/because I need a vaguely more intellectual exercise everyday than reading on the train (note to self: Start reading Shakespeare & Chekhov on train).

Lateness notwithstanding, as promised (to, um, myself - I have no delusions of internet stardom), post number one of the 30 day challenge.

Your current relationship status - if single, discuss your single life.

I've been putting this off in part from laziness, but mostly because I've been looking for an adequate way to describe my single life that is in no way bitter, self-pitying, or involves the phrase "it sucks." I am reeeeasonably sure that I can accomplish the first two, but as to the third, my single life, frankly, sucks.

I have been described in the past, rather uncharitably but also not wrongly, as too independent for my own good. I make friends easily, and I trust easily, but always to a point*. I am, I will admit, somewhat reluctant to let people in and the idea of having to fully depend on other people is something I have trouble accepting either practically (because I'm a control freak) or emotionally. This is something my last boyfriend, who for anonymity's sake we will name HSB2, found... annoying, to put it mildly, throughout the course of our 8 month relationship and subsequent period of... involvement ("It's complicated," as Facebook would call it).

*This in no way insinuates that I am a loner with no friends. I have lots of friends, many of whom are close friends whom I trust completely. Besides, if you're reading this the chances are you ARE my friend, so rest assured, you pretty much know my life. Moving on.

So you can imagine then, that I am not the type of girl who easily says the following: I. Want. A. Boyfriend. [Cue Carrie Bradshaw voiceover: "There it was. The phrase single, independent women in their [twenties] were never supposed to think, let alone say out loud."]

HSB2 and I broke up (discounting the aforementioned involvement period) - well, suffice it to say it was a long time ago. So I know from where I speak on singlehood. And there are aspects of being single for which I can vouch entirely: the, ahem, afforded opportunities for fun, never having to feel guilty for not having enough time for your relationship, the ability to know who you are as yourself rather than as part of a couple, spending less money, even.

I don't think, however, I need to list all the benefits to having a boyfriend, and all of those things are sounding really damn good to me right now. It would be nice - really really really nice, in fact - to have someone in my life to fill the boyfriend-shaped hole. Let's not forget, even "ultimate single girl" Carrie Bradshaw ends up living happily ever after with Big.

So I feel like I don't update this enough...

By which I mean that I often have blog ideas, but then I get too lazy to write them up and/or they percolate in my head but don't ever make it to this blog because I realize that what has bubbled around in my brain actually makes veeeeery little sense when I try and articulate it.

But then, on a friend's blog, I found this! Topics! For 30 days!

They're sort of random and esoteric and therefore interesting and yet still not the adult version of reading a survey on Livejournal. Wooo.

So without further ado, the challenge:

1. Your current relationship - if single, discuss how single life is.

2. Where you'd like to be in 10 years.

3. Your views on drugs and alcohol.

4. Your views on religion.

5. A time you thought about ending your own life.

6. Write 30 interesting facts about yourself.

7. Your zodiac sign, and if you think it fits your personality.

8. A moment you felt the most satisfied with your life.

9. How you hope your future will be like.

10. Discuss your first love and first kiss.

11. Put your iPod on shuffle, and write 10 songs that pop up. Without cheating.

12. Bullet-point your whole day.

13. Somewhere you'd like to move or visit.

14. Your earliest memory.

15. Your favorite blogs (I stole this from someone on Tumblr, which admittedly is a little more blog-community-centric, but let's be real, I do a lot of reading inanely on the internet).

16. Your views on mainstream music.

17. Your highs and lows of this past year.

18. Your beliefs.

19. Disrespecting your parents.

20. How important you think education is.

21. One of your favorite TV shows.

22. How have you changed in the past 2 years?

23. Give 5 pictures of guys who are famous and who you find attractive?

24. Your favorite movie and what it's about.

25. Someone who fascinates you and why.

26. What kind of person attracts you.

27. A problem that you have had.

28. Something that you miss.

29. Goals for the next 30 days.

30. Your highs and lows of this month.

READYGO, creative juices/intellectual curiosity/inane blathering about my life (listen it's a blog, these things, they happen.)

Obligatory First Week of School Post

Obviously, you might be wondering how I intend to do this when, for the first time, there's no school actually involved.

This September, there will be no evaluating of my classes, no grudgingly accepting the transition back into papers and homework and waking up at obscene hours for class. For the first fall in my conscious memory I have purchased no notebooks, pencils, or folders; I have not visited a bookstore in these last weeks let alone the NYU Bookstore in pursuit of something I forgot to get for much cheaper on Amazon three weeks ago.

In the middle of August I was having, to put it generously to myself, a wee bit of difficulty accepting that I wouldn't be returning to class. It felt like too much too quickly, too big a change, too overwhelming a concept to accept fully. I found myself, upon hearing my roommates lament "Oh my god I can't believe I have class next week", saying, "I'll trade you," words I was pretty sure I'd never hear myself say circa last April as I was eagerly counting the days to graduation.

I feel the need to clear up a misconception, by the way (hah, she wrote, as though she has so much of an internet following eagerly awaiting her next inane blathering) - I didn't graduate early because I hate NYU, or because I didn't enjoy my experience here. I did it because it made sense and it felt right to me, but it has no reflection on my NYU experience. Sure, I rag on it the way everyone does their school, but it's kind of like making fun of your family - only you can do it, when other people start in on NYU I will fiercely defend my school and the education I got there.

Yet somehow it still feels like fall. Not being a student, at present, feels in many ways like wearing the jeans that lay untouched in my closet for this entire sweltering summer - a little off and maybe not quite right, but somehow much easier than I'd expected. I described to a friend, also a new alumnus, that my sensation walking around campus was not unlike walking around an ex-boyfriend's neighborhood: familiar and easy, but somehow wrong and not a little painful.

There's an - oh my god, I cannot believe I'm saying this, kill me immediately - interesting essay we had to read in fucking Writing the Essay of all things that actually sort of adequately describes my new phenomenon, however. It's called "Shadow Cities" and basically deals with the phenomenon of all humans naturally superimposing the places of their memories on the places of their literal reality. And I think this is more it now. It's not painful to be on campus, but for the first time I'm seeing both "campus" and "Greenwich Village." And it's something I actually kind of love - that my campus, though a campus for sure by my way of thinking, never really was that. I just have to learn how to accept it as part of the city. I have to learn to see literally lower Broadway, not just "around Tisch."

And somehow, beyond thinking it might never again, what with a) there no being school and b) the absolutely BLISTERING summer, it feels like fall. I'm wearing sweaters. I'm drinking hot froufy drinks from Starbucks. And my calendar is filling up, which is always important to combatting a sense of general apathy for me.

Also, for shits and giggles, I counted: in this non-student summer, I read nineteen new books. This is not, in truth, all that much, but a once-avid reader, my school life had considerably slowed my leisure reading life. I realize that a good number of these books may have, ahem, been the novels that inspired True Blood, but in general, it's good to know I apparently still know how to engage my brain, school or not. Ah, growing up. You are a strange, strange phenomenon.

I have a new(ish) life goal

And it involves travel. Like, a lot.

See, here's the thing: I am an excellent traveller, which is to say that I am a pro at airports, I sleep on planes like a champ, I'm great at packing, I adore exploring new places, I'm reasonably good at not looking like a tourist, and I have a strong desire to learn new languages.

BUT:

I am coming to realize I am extremely poorly travelled. I have been to 19/50 US states, and only 5 foreign countries, 2 of which are in North America. In 21 years. More to the point, I have not been out of this country in THREE YEARS.

With so many of my close friends claiming living relatives in foreign lands, combined with the good amount of these people that spent their summers abroad or traversed the globe studying abroad, it's tough to not start to feel... inadequate, if only because my own intense desire to travel is, in truth, so thoroughly unfulfilled.

So I'm making some lists, because that's what I do - I organize and I plan and I create goals. I figure at least several of these are achievable through theatre and the rest... well, I'll make a liiiiiittle money eventually, right?

Current top 10 list of places I would like to get in the next 10 years:

1. Spain. Spain Spain Spain Spain Spain.

2. Italy

3. Ireland

4. Greece

5. France

6. India

7. Russia

8. Czech Republic

9. Bermuda

10. Jamaica

...I started off in a sort of mental block about this and didn't get to 10 that easily at first but now, I must include the honorable mentions which are: China, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, the DR, Costa Rica, Turkey, and Morocco.

Places I have been that I would like to return (this is to say, all):

1. Japan, to see it as a grown-up

2. Canada, to explore beyond Toronto, and because I haven't been to Toronto in 5 years

3. England, to spend more time - possibly extended - there

4. Scotland, to go back to the Fringe specifically but also to experience more of the country

5. Mexico, to see places that aren't Puerto Vallarta

So, WHO HAS IDEAS FOR MAKING LOTS OF MONEY VERY EASILY TO FINANCE MY TRAVEL PLANS?

Perhaps I make it my goal to get to one of these places on my list in the next year. Even if it's the returns list... Montreal is cheap from New York... hmm.

IDK, my bff coffee?

In high school, my friends and I made a bet I could stay caffeine free for an entire week. I believe the week ran Wednesday-Wednesday (see previous post about my memory for the inane and asinine - which yes, are faaaaairly synonymous but I love both of those words), and I was on the honor system for the weekend. Obviously therefore I cheated. Matt/Molly, if by chance you're reading this, my apologies.

I did, however, end up having to pay up anyway on the technicality that chocolate has caffeine in it, and since I had eaten chocolate during that week, I lost the bet.

The reasoning behind the bet was that at the time, at a mere 16, two local Starbucks branches already knew me by "name" and I was already well on my way to caffeine headaches when I did not start my day caffeinated. I had discovered, at the time, something that I know to be technically impossible but nonetheless still true somehow in my very backward psyche: coffee calms me down.

By this I mean to say DOES energize me (or gets me to zero, depending on the day), but since I was about 16, coffee has been a relatively integral part of my stress-management curriculum. I don't know what it is, but throughout high school and very often in college, those afternoons where everything seemed juuuuuust outside of my zone of rational control and I was dangerously close to lashing out at everything and everyone around me, a simple caramel macchiato/latte/hazelnut iced coffee/regular coffee usually did the trick to quell this antisocial and invariably counterproductive urge.

Logically and biologically speaking this should not be true and yet I find it is to this day. And yes, my time as an almost-psych major and then an almost-psych minor tell me that logically yes it's not all that strange it's the placebo effect and the strength of association and blah blah blah BUT I still think it's strange since chemically speaking, caffeine should make me MORE wired and inclined towards high-stress behaviors.

[If any of you hear a slight rotating noise, it's the collective sound of anybody who knew me in high school rolling their eyes that I bothered writing this.]

Mmmm, latte.

Eyesight's the first to go, and I forget that other thing...

Despite the similarity in titles, this post bears no relationship to my previous ruminations over a silly film starring Rob Pattinson. Also, I am keeping said post, but would like to at least partially renege on the position posited in it for the following reasons:

1) Siobhan. The film stars Robert Pattinson for god's sake. I think you're just mad that you spent two hours of your life watching it and expecting it to become a quality film.

2) Hear that? That's the sound of your bullshit meter BLARING at you for pretentiousness and super false nationalism.

So now we move on to today's subject, one about which I have periodically ruminated for some time.

Today I left to have lunch with a friend, realizing that I was wearing an outfit which, though I've worn the component parts dozens of times, haven't worn precisely together since just under a year ago. With this friend. The occasion on which I'd last worn it occurred to me as I was dressing, but it didn't fully dawn on me until such time as I was walking out the door that that was the last time. My friend, being male, did not, of course, remember my having ever worn this outfit and nor did he comment. Or if he did notice, he wisely did not comment and it was likely less awkward for both of us that he did not.

A few nights ago, my dad presented my mom and I with cards at dinner that featured a picture of me at around age 10 (this is my guess - I am still wearing glasses, which changed circa 7th grade, and I am pre-braces, a sixth grade development). My mom posited that she knew exactly where the picture was taken, to which my dad and I both disagreed - what was interesting, however, was that I could identify the dress. I knew my mom thought it'd been taken in Baton Rouge, at my cousins' house, because it was an Easter dress. And though I recognized it instantly as an Easter dress, I knew instinctively that I was re-wearing it for a particular occasion, though what it was I couldn't recall.

I have always, it seems, had a peculiar memory for the seemingly insignificant details of my life - particularly those that happened a long time ago. I could not tell you what I had for breakfast yesterday (okay, trick question, half the time the answer to that is nothing) BUT I can tell you a vividly detailed story about something that happened five or more years ago.

Incidentally this has served me extremely well in my studies of the Method - I am (or, well, was, I guess) continually surprised what I could dredge up in terms of insignificant but somehow very important detail in the context of doing, say, a personal object or a private moment or a place. Both the monumental and the totally insipid - if it happened a long time ago, I likely have it stored somewhere in my brain in at least fragments of extremely clear detail.

Nowhere is this more crystalline than in how I remember what I was wearing (note to self: should have seen that play, Love, Loss, and What I Wore - would probably relate).

I know what I wore for my grandpa Don's funeral (age: 4.5). I know what Lydia and I wore the day we planned to come to school dressed as twins (probable age: 6), and what we wore the time we truly endeavored to convince everyone around us we were twins (probable age: 6.5). Partially cheating, because I owned all the dresses for sometime after, but I can tell you IN DETAIL about each competition dress I ever owned for skating. And I could probably give you a rundown of most of the rest of my dresses as well. I remember owning an American flag print bikini when we still lived in Toronto that I clearly must only have worn once, the April that Jess and Rach came to visit and we had a contest, in the frigid Canadian spring-winter, of who could stay out of our (very heated) pool the longest. I won, by default of the two piece bikini. I notably CAN'T tell you what I wore the day we moved from Toronto, which these days strikes me as ironic.

I remember what I was wearing the day I got into NYU and the day I moved into Rubin, and I can tell you what I was wearing for each of my significant firsts with boys. If you're a former boyfriend of mine/boy I was involved with/boy I dated and you're reading this (hahahahah. so very doubtful.) you're probably rolling your eyes in disbelief, given my seemingly shocking lack of sentimentality, but it's true. Quiz me sometime (haha that'd be a fun game, because how on earth could a boy prove me wrong on this? It's not like they remember).

It stands to reason from this that I'm a pretty good memorizer, and it's true - I learn lines quickly, and I've never really had any problem memorizing for class either. Yet I can know you for years and know, for example, what week of what month your birthday is in (first, middle, near [insert holiday in your birthday month here]) but I'm telling you now, unless you've told me the date literally DOZENS of times or more, I don't know it. I must, by absolute necessity, write something down in my calendar and my planner to remember to do it. And I routinely walk out of my bedroom both at in my apartment or at home (or at home or in my house, depending on how you want to look at it - I've strayed) to other rooms only to forget what I'm doing there. These also are all detail oriented things.

This is surely only further proof that it's possible I'm insane. But hey! If you want to know a detail about an incident that you were involved in that I was there for that happened 3 years ago, I'm your girl.