Just Cause I Can

Haven't done any of these in a while:

You Are a Crocodile

You are incredibly wise and knowledgeable. In fact, your wisdom is so deep that it sometimes consumes you. People are intrigued by you, but you find few people intriguing. You are not a very social creature. You are cunning. You enjoy deceiving people a little. You are able to find balance in your life, and you can survive anything.

What Reptile Are You?

You Are a Chocolate Shake

You are a total hedonist. You are drawn to pleasure. You are an expressive, over the top person. You're naturally dramatic. You're the type of person who always chooses quality over quantity. Life's too short to not have optimal experiences. You're proud of being picky.

What Flavor Shake Are You?

The Storm Before the Calm

Sooo...what's been going on? Not much, really. Getting married, buying an apartment, moving out, moving in. Shot two national spots last year, appeared in one play, working on a cabaret-style show, cut my hair (though I need to get it cut again now, funny how hair keeps growing).

That's about it.

It's sort of funny how all the New York bloggers I keep tabs on fell silent all at once, as if by some prearranged signal. Are any of you guys out there still? Drop me a line if you are. Or have they moved on to Twitter? I'll admit, I took a look at it (and might play with it if I pick up a phone that can type stuff a bit easier), but the one thing I was left wondering was: how do you find streams to follow? Maybe there's a magic button you get if you download it that shows you people's streams.

And then, really, do I want to be Tweeting? It seems so pedantic, so very much like this, which absolutely terrifies me.

In some ways, I suppose this is the same trend that's been going since the evolution of the modern novel (Woolf, Joyce, Proust, et al); the elevation of the everyday. But when you're fed a steady diet of the mundane, your soul hungers for more; it hungers for the epic, the struggle, the black and white. Where are these stories? Perhaps truly great epics only come along once a generation, or even less. Perhaps this explains the Harry Potter explosion, a story which I would not necessarily refer to as great, but one which is decent and entertaining, and certainly has many of the hallmarks of an epic (aside from 200 some-odd-pages of, "They're in the woods...they're still in the woods...there's still in the woods...nope, not out yet...OMGIT'SRONNOWTHEYCANLEAVETHEWOODS," which I suppose is comparable to, "Frodo and Sam have made it to Mordor...it's really hot...there's nothing to drink...they're really tired...and hot...and thirsty...now they're tired, hot and thirsty...man that ring is heavy...OMGHAIGOLLUM," but I tend to flip really quickly through that part, too).

On that note, I think that this is something I will be trying out this year.

I suppose I will flesh out some more details of my news at the top of this post another time. If I feel like it/get people asking about it.

Still Alive

Books? Who reads books?

1. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Falling Man, Don DeLillo
3. The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft

I'll try to be more interesting tomorrow.

Star Light, Star Bright...

1. The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
2. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
3. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
4. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
5. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
6. Middlemarch, George Eliot
7. The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse
8. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
9. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
10. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford
11. Let Us Compare Mythologies, Leonard Cohen
12. The Sandman: The Wake, Neil Gaiman
13. The Sandman: Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
14. The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
15. The Sandman: The Doll's House, Neil Gaiman
16. The Sandman: The Kindly Ones, Neil Gaiman
17. Underworld, Don Delillo
18. The Sandman: Fables and Reflections, Neil Gaiman
19. The Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman
20. Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr
21. The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman
22. The Sandman: Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
23. The Sandman: A Game of You, Neil Gaiman
24. The Sandman: World's End, Neil Gaiman
25. The Sandman: Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman
26. The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Frank Miller
27. Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen
28. Different Seasons, Stephen King
29. Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
30. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson
31. Moneyball, Michael Lewis
32. American Pastoral, Philip Roth
33. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
34. The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem
35. Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
36. Orlando, Virgina Woolf
37. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
38. Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
39. Lizard, Banana Yoshimoto
40. Hardboiled Hard Luck, Banana Yoshimoto
41. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
42. The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
43. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963, Robert Dallek
44. Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
45. Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut
46. Stardust, Neil Gaiman

Stardust has been made into a movie which'll be released soon. It's an excellent book; Gaiman is one of (if not the, though of course any such proclamation comes down to personal taste) best living fantasy writers. American Gods and Anansi Boys are ok, but I don't think they're as strong as the more "childlike" stories: the Sandman comics with which he made his name and the novels of his which I've read this year.

Auditions here have been starting to pick up. Since returning from Europe I worked a couple on my own, but in the last week I've gotten 3 from my agent; two commercials and one movie. Nothing spectacular, but it's something - now all I need to do is get cast in one of them. Silence so far leads me to believe that I probably didn't get any of them, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Next week I'll be starting a class at the Professional Actors Lab. It's been some time since I've been in a classroom setting and had someone picking my acting apart. Kinda nervous, but confident; based off of what I saw when I audited a class there, I think technique-wise I'm a bit ahead of most people who go. This is a good thing, but also a bad thing, as it might mean I'll have more habits to fight against.

Canadians = Phone 'Tards?

Since moving back, I have received, on average, 1 wrong number call per week. I do not seem to recall such a rate of calls in New York.

This morning, at 10 am, my phone buzzes with a text. I pick it up and read:

"Did u sleep well princess?"

It's from a number I don't have saved in my contacts, a 647 number (the newest GTA area code, which I think was added due to the explosion of cell phone numbers, Toronto getting its one after New York, which has 646 and which kind of confused me when I first saw the text because I thought it might have been someone in New York texting me. Anyways). I consider my options; hell, maybe it IS someone I know, someone who has a predilection for calling me Princess (which, I suppose, is not completely out of the realm of possibility). So I text back:

"Who is this?"

As of yet, I have received no response. I hope the anonymous sender is sufficiently chastised, and will, in the future, double check the number to which he is sending his sexy texts. Either that or LOSE SOME WEIGHT SO YOUR FAT FAT FINGERS DON'T HIT THE WRONG BUTTONS.

I'm not really angry about it, I just thought the caps looked kinda funny. Oh, yes, and happy day-after-Canada-Day. Hooray Canada!

Forgot One

1. The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
2. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
3. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
4. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
5. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
6. Middlemarch, George Eliot
7. The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse
8. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
9. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
10. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford
11. Let Us Compare Mythologies, Leonard Cohen
12. The Sandman: The Wake, Neil Gaiman
13. The Sandman: Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
14. The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
15. The Sandman: The Doll's House, Neil Gaiman
16. The Sandman: The Kindly Ones, Neil Gaiman
17. Underworld, Don Delillo
18. The Sandman: Fables and Reflections, Neil Gaiman
19. The Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman
20. Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr
21. The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman
22. The Sandman: Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
23. The Sandman: A Game of You, Neil Gaiman
24. The Sandman: World's End, Neil Gaiman
25. The Sandman: Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman
26. The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Frank Miller
27. Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen
28. Different Seasons, Stephen King
29. Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
30. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson
31. Moneyball, Michael Lewis
32. American Pastoral, Philip Roth
33. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
34. The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem
35. Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
36. Orlando, Virgina Woolf
37. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
38. Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
39. Lizard, Banana Yoshimoto
40. Hardboiled Hard Luck, Banana Yoshimoto
41. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
42. The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
43. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963, Robert Dallek
44. Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
45. Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut

I Hate These People

This is why you don't buy shit that has Mao's face or slogans, or Che's, or Stalin's. If you are not a card-carrying Communist who's willing to back up the rhetoric with real, violent dissent (in which case I probably don't want to know you, because you're scary), realize that people who come to power (and believe the only way to effective change is) through violent change have violent histories, histories which are not really all that far back in the past and which people feel very strongly about. Even putting the Peruvian Maoists aside, Mao is not the kinda dude you wanna put on a shirt. It's literally like putting Hitler or Stalin (though Mao might have killed more than both of those men through his policies) on your shirt and being all, "Hey, it's ok, it's ironic!"

No, it's not. And you're a terrible person. Every time you put that shirt on, a puppy gets its ears crushed by an automatic rice picking machine.

I say this as an individual who owns a shirt which has a sickle and hammer on it (which gets some interesting reactions from Asians and Eastern Europeans), but at least my shirt doesn't have a quote from Stalin saying, "Who needs Bolsheviks?" or something along those lines.