kerouac says

i have to tell you, i have never enjoyed the monkey as much as i do right now. not since we were first falling crazyinlove.

this therapy stuff is the shit. i have never felt so loved as i do right now, when someone is flipping his guts around and trying insanely hard to be better at some difficult stuff in order to safeguard us. he is the world champeen.

we'll keep talking, and i'm sure there will be rough days, but this was a great idea. and i'm so relieved to know that we react so well to hard work.

i'm also drowning in my own throat crap right now. i have used up the entire box of office tissues. no one will look me in the eye. i think that's because i'm wearing pig tails, bleary eyes and a ted kennedy nose. Not Pretty.

(but so happy. so, so happy.)

i just had new headshots taken. on the cheap: i booked the least expensive photographer i could find who seemed actually able to take acceptable photos of faces, i did my own hair and make up, i booked the cheapest and shortest session.

and you know what? i think they're great.

i only saw them briefly, during the shoot, but i have DVD of them in my bag. i may or may not post some of them here for you to vote on. i feel like i would if i could cover my face with some MS-painted-on funny glasses, but that would sort of render the process useless. ye olde dumb blog may be the only place in which i can truly take refuge from my face, so . . . maybe not.

i know some of you are asking, louella? why are you having headshots taken when you sound so much like you are breaking up with acting? and where are my potato chips? what price bananas? are you my angel?

the short answer is, because i wanna. i've felt guilty about my crappy pictures for a while, and for the ___ months left to me until i do or don't get into graduate school, i'm going to keep auditioning. in fact, i'm flying to seattle to do that big, possibly-useless group audition next month. maybe that's it: i couldn't stand to go home with a bad headshot. and maybe a fresh try with new photos and monologues will at least help me to get out gracefully. you know how some people go to relationship counseling to help them break up? maybe that's what i'm doing.

so, it's done. i've felt sort of shivery, shake-your-head-no about all things theatre for a few months, so maybe this my way back in. for now.

i spent monday at a bridal expo.

these people have "hired" me to be a wedding photographer with their company--quotation marks because there won't be any photographing or getting paid unless they actually book some weddings here. in the meantime, however, they're outfitting me with a digital SLR i could never afford and allowing me to do anything with it i want. they're a successful studio from col0rado, and want to expand their business--why into new york, of all places, i don't know. i guess if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. they were here over the holiday weekend for the bridal show (hereafter, "BS").

oh, man.

apart from the unabashed inanity of the BS, there was me sheparding around a group of midwesterners, tipping the cabbies they left underpaid, explaining why we should not rent a car, doing the hailing, drawing on the maps, picking the restaurants (because you cannot go to new york and eat mother-loving TGIFrid@ys). i got a thank you email from them with FAR TOO MANY emoticons, and i know that any is too many, but this was worse because two of the emoticons were animatedly GETTING MARRIED at the bottom of the page.

of the party, there were two younger women who were associates with the company and a little less frumpy and deep-fried than the others. one of them shot me a consoling look when we were all asked to join hands for a blessing before tucking into our turkey sandwiches at a lunch meeting. i sidled up to her while waiting for the elevator later and said, do you think they'd freak out if we booked a gay wedding? "oh, none of that!" she said. "they will have none of that!"

sigh. they were mostly nice people--awfully provincial, but in a sort of sweet way, until i heard about the homophobia. i should probably ask the owners themselves before condemning them as haters, but i'm afraid to hear them say it out loud. i'll start shaking and stammering and blushing and try to say something worthwhile but instead come off like a discredit to the cause. and then i'll have to either quit or live with not quitting, and imagine the pity face they'd make if they knew i wasn't the straightest arrow in the box.

queer america, i may have sold you out for a camera.

one reason: dayjob, inc has installed some sort of net nanny which won't let me blog. those things make me extremely paranoid. i know it doesn't happen like this, but some part of me believes the entire company got together to look at a giant register-tape print out of all the internet traffic on the network and it turns out i've spent 324 billable hours blogging and will now have to pay them back.

really, though, like blogger is the worst thing on that tape. there are some incredibly misdirected people at work who i'm sure are into some bizarre porn.

there have been quiet days, lately. quiet ones where both people in the room are happy. the monkey took our christmas tree down; i think he picked up on the fact that i couldn't bear to do it myself. the last steps in sealing the new, replaced butcherblock countertop have been taken, signaling the end to major efforts in the kitchen (little touch-up paint, a backsplash: it's easy from here on in).

i've been trying to write more, and so have taken my laptop with me a few times during the day in order to harness some odd hours between engagements. yesterday it slid off my lap in the subway station. it didn't even hit the ground hard, but now there's a mid-sized aluminum dent in the southwest corner. sadness. these powerbooks are built like diet coke cans. i wanted to take it to tek5erve, but the monkey says they can't fix a dent in the skin. i'm trying to pretend that it's like a cool scar that makes me look dangerous.

i went to a pilates class at the yoga studio in my neighborhood last night. i'm not sure i did it right. like, three quarters of the stuff we did felt like absolutely nothing, like isolated muscle movements so small they barely registered--and then the last fourth were exercises so insanely painful that i thought i was going to lose bladder control if required to stress my abdominal muscles any further. i woke up feeling like i'd done a bunch of crunches and spent the rest of the night lifting a toddler off the floor.

also i feel like i'm coming down with a cold, so i'm home. ergo the blogging. there's nothing to eat, but the monkey's a sucker for a sickie, so i'm fending off hunger with wheat thins until he comes home from the lunch shift and i can ask him, so pitifully, to make me some soup. i have the voice all picked out.

so, i was casually doing a little work on my online application to Br0wn today, and, um . . . i don't know where i got the idea that it was due on the fifteenth, because in a tiny pop-up window it gives the deadline as TODAY. how did i miss this? and how fortunate is it that i happened to check, seeing as how i was certain it was sunday (how did i get sunday? i've looked, and 01/15 isn't quoted anywhere. i must have totally made it up).

holy simone de beauvoir's birthday, batman. if i had missed the deadline for this particular application, i'd have driven down to providence and prostrated myself in front of the admissions people. god. gives me the shivers.

happy birthday, s. you're still my favorite.

also, i know my birthday's a long way away, but there's this.

i'm a bridesmaid! i'm a bridesmaid!

and, may she set a trend that never dies, the one who's least afraid is not afraid to dispense with the look-alike attendant custom. i am in favor of this; grown women should not dress alike unless they are doing a number. the engaged one hasn't addressed specifics, but i am out of my mind at the prospect of being encouraged to buy a long satin dress that (and this was the bride's only caveat) makes me "feel like a million dollars."

i suppose it depends on who's doing the feeling. rimshot!

also, my mom gets so excited about weddings that the last time i was a bridesmaid, she paid for my dress. "don't worry about it," she says. godbless'er.

tonight is looking promising; i haven't been out on a friday night for a long time. don't wait up. i plan on missing the last express train.

my parents must have raised me with an appropriate amount of liberal guilt, because over the last couple of months i've been feeling really bad about telling homeless people on the train that i can't help them get food. i know all the arguments; it's illegal to beg on the train, you can't tell who's legit, money gets used for nasty stuff. frankly, though, there's just something awful about telling someone you don't have a dollar for them when you know it wouldn't make a bit of difference, that it would hardly make a dent even if you gave two dollars to every single person who asked. and even if it's for thunderbird. how does the accident of fate that got me born into a middle-class family make me the arbiter of who deserves a dollar for anything?

one time i ran into a seattle acquaintance totally randomly in a st*rbucks on seventh avenue, and i sat down to sip my coffee for a minute, and he introduced me to a friend. i mentioned cash flow worries, and the friend said: feel like you don't have enough money? give away a hundred dollars and notice how completely it doesn't affect you in any meaningful way.

so i chose these people. and the more i think about it, the better i think they are, so if anyone else is looking for a place . . .

the monkey got a new job. actually, possibly two. gooooo, the monkey.

i have started liking our therapist better. i think this is because during the rainy weather he made a funny about how his last client had come in damp and left a very questionable wet spot on the seat of his sofa; the monkey thinks it is because the therapist is agreeing with me more often these days. probably both are true.

NYU, b3rkeley, n0rthewestern and c0lumbia down; br0wn still to go. slow and steady wins the race, they tell me.

one of my friends sort of dispairingly asked me if the monkey and i were going to spend new years at home, like losers. which is funny, because if it's the losers who can't imagine spending multiple hours in the crushing sty that is times square, in the freezing cold with no weed, booze or bathrooms--then i am such a loser. Such A Loser.

we got way dressed up (and the theatre was close enough to the subway hole that i could wear dressup shoes, which only happens about twice a year) and went to lincoln center, where they thoughtfully had flutes of champagne for us (and not-sucky champagne, too, although there's always something about the taste of spaarkling wine that makes me think i'll be vomiting this later, thanks to too many too-fueled opening night celebrations in college). it was remarkably festive. and then our cheapo seats turned out to be fabulous.

it hasn't been no easy year.

but still a good one.

and when we got home from the theatre and turned on the local news (fewer kisses and proposals this year; more drunken people with unfamiliar accents) and ate some popcorn, i wouldn't have been anywhere else if you paid me a zillion dollars.