YAY!!!! HE PICKED JESS!!!

This just makes me happy. She was a really nice person and seemed very real, and it's nice when those people win. You see it so rarely.

So yay!

Opening night....

Was freakin' awesome.

We got a standing ovation.

And someone came dressed at Torgo. Yes. There was a Torgo in the audience.

Just an awesome time all around!!!!

WOW!!!!!

http://www.fangoria.com/news_article.php?id=5017


My name. In "Fangoria" magazine.


Awesome!!!

This time last year

This time last year I wasn't sleeping either, but for a completely different reason. It was this time last year that I knew the next day, I would wake up, close "Shakesploitation", have lunch with the cast, come home and, in the presence of my friends and parents, kick my husband out of the apartment. I can't believe it's been a year.

I was talking to a few people at rehearsal tonight, and I told them I have some mixed emotions about it all. It feels like years since I was with Steve, yet I feel like I've only had a few months since we were together. It's so weird to feel like I've lost and gained time regarding the same situation, but it's happening.

I know New Years is typically the time to look back and reflect on what's happened for the last year, but I really think my New Year, and New Me, started on September 24 of 2006. I'm not going to rehash all the many ways in which I've changed, or the many more things I've learned about myself that I am working on changing. All those baby steps carried me through a year of life altering moments, and I'm still taking them. Every day is another step, another way to make myself better or regress into the person I once was. I am very glad I've chosen to (mostly) keep going and not falling backwards. But the difference now is when I do regress to the old ways of living, I am able to understand where it's coming from and forgive myself for it instead of making it just one more step in the wrong direction. For that I am so thankful.

I am thankful for Steve. I am so thankful that he was the epitome of all the badness I had surrounded myself with in my relationships since I left my parents' home and started playing "adult". Of course, there were a few good ones here and there, but for the most part, Steve was a combination of all the bad ones. He was it. He won the Biggest Asshole Tory's Been With. Ever. Prize. And for that I am thankful.

I had hoped I would be his moment of change. I had really hoped that I would be the thing that he would realize he wanted to hold on to and, in order to do that, work on those things that poisioned him. But it was the other way around.

After it all happened, I had quite a few moments (days, weeks, months) where I asked myself what I had to learn from it, what I had to gain (and yes folks, those moments where I was still the victim and wanted to know what I had done to deserve it...a lot of those, actually). The more I sat with the pain of it, the more I realized what it was I had to learn, to gain, and most importantly, how I put myself in the place to be the victim in the first place. That was the biggest lesson of them all. And it was very painful. It was horribly painful, more so than sleeping in the wet spot he and his woman left on our bed. More painful than the harsh words he wrote to her about me, the lies about me and our marriage, the times he told her he hated me because I kept him from being with her. The knowledge that she was just one of many that had shared his body while he was with me.

The most painful of all was what I had done to myself. What I had looked for in another human and how I could use that to hurt myself. Taking myself out of that victim role was so difficult because I had spent a good number of years of my life living it every day and always wondering why it was happening to me.

I don't have all the answers. I don't even know all the questions yet. I am on a journey that will last as long as it lasts and there is nothing I can do about it. Nothing but hold on, enjoy the random bits of scenery, absorb information around me and never forget. As long as I don't forget what happened in my past I will not relive it in my future.

And for the first time in a long time (maybe ever), I am really looking forward to my future. Because I have one for the first time.

I see who I used to be through the eyes of my first love from 15 years ago.

Wow. Never thought I would say this, but here goes....

I just got back from Ehren's. I'm still sweaty and already sore, and I know tomorrow I will be hurting all over.





I MUST get a Wii. I simply must.

For anyone who thinks racism is extinct in America

I know this story is a few days old, but I wanted to post it anyway.

From Chicago Sun Times

W. Virginia--Captors allegedly sexually abused, beat victim

Charleston, W.Va.
Authorities said Tuesday they may file hate crime charges in the case of a woman who was tortured and held captive for at least a week.
The victim, a 20-year-old black woman, was called a racial slur while captors sexually abused, beat and stabbed her, her mother said.
Six people, all white, including a mother and son and a mother and daughter, were arrested.
"I don't understand a human being doing another human being the way they did my daughter," Carmen Williams said Tuesday from her daughter's hospital room. "I didn't know there were people like that out there."
Megan Williams, a cast on her arm, spoke barely above a whisper. "I'm better," she said.
The woman's abductors called her the N-word "every time they stabbed her," Carmen Williams told the Charleston Gazette. She was forced to eat rat and dog feces and drink from a toilet, the criminal compaint alleges.
The case is "something that would have come out of a horror movie," Logan County Sherrif W.E. Hunter said.
Deputies found Williams on Saturday when they went to a house in Big Creek, 35 miles southwest of Charleston, after an anonymous tip from a witness to the abuse, sheriff's Sgt. Sonya Porter said.
Suspect Frankie Brewster was on the front porch and told deputies she was alone, but then the woman limped toward the door, arms outstretched, saying "Help me," the sheriff's department said.
The suspects were arrested Saturday and Sunday. Deputies were still trying to determine if the woman knew her captors, Porter said.

Assupmtions

Every day, I live my life nothing but one assumption to another. When I get home at night, I assume the apartment is empty of human life. I assume an oncoming car won't swerve its way into my lane. I assumed my husband was going to be faithful. I assume my heart will continue to beat and my lungs will continue to filter air in and out. I assume my flesh will react to touch and heat and cold. I assume I will continue to be. I assume fabric softner will make my clothes smell good.

So why do we become assholes when we assume something and we are wrong? Would someone call me an asshole if someone was driving and decided they liked my lane better and blasted the side of Fyona? No. I would be in an "accident". If I came home and someone was there? I would be a "victim", not an asshole. Even if I left the front door unlocked. My assumptions about what was going to happen would be wrong, but I wouldn't be held responsible for it. Yet when dealing with others, we can so easily become an asshole if we assume something different than what they are thinking. Why this double standard? Do we live in such a constant state of assumptions that, when we notice one being wrong, we feel the need to attach severe punishment on to it?

Case in point.....I assume this 3:30 am rant was the direct product of reading Stephen King for the last three hours straight. Maybe not. Maybe this is a touch of brilliance and I needed to write it down to later form my thesis from it. Or maybe I am living in the dream world of thinking I could write something brilliant in that way. Maybe I am really, I mean really, tired and am relying on spell check to make me not look like a complete idiot. Yet the whole time, I am assuming my eyes will focus, my fingers will find the appropriate keys, my mind will be able to communicate the motion needed to make my fingers find the keys. And let's not forget the ever so constant breathing and heart beating and all the other minute muscles spasms that are making my existance possible. If I was wrong about one of those last assumptions, I wouldn't be an asshole...I would be dead.

Maybe this shit is only deep because it's now 3:34 in the am on Wednesday night/Thursday morning and I have a belly full of damn good writing. Maybe I am one Cosmopolitan away from feeling like Carrie Bradshaw.

Or maybe, just maybe, these things that pop into my head as I lie in bed- one arm tucked comfortably under the pillow, right leg bent at the knee, assuming a stance of a sprinter about to leave the start line, Kitten to my right, soft glow of the alarm clock to my left making a light blue halo against the wall-maybe these thoughts have a purpose, a reason.

About a week ago, I was seeing the world floating through my closed eyes as I was about to enter the land o' the sleep, when this thought popped into my head. I had to get up and write it down in the living room on an envelope reserved for paying Com Ed their monthly ransom. It may or may not have any usefulness, but since dreaming a poem years ago, I have made it a practice to write down things I feel may at some point in time be of use.

This particular thing may be good, may not be. I don't know that I can judge that accurately for at least a few more years. Those things need to be tucked away in desk drawers and exhumed at a later date, when any and all emotion can be removed from it and it can be seen as something apart from me and my human-ness. But sometimes.....sometimes this need to write takes over and I can't do anything but listen to it, give in to the drilling in my head....feel the keys giving way to the pressure coming from my fingers or the pen digging into my middle fingernail on my right hand. Those moments are the ones in which I describe things, I mean, really describe things. Those are the moments when I feel I actually get what it is to be an observer of life. Or something like it, anyway.

Maybe it's just that the mundane looks very glossy and glittery at 3:42 in the am. When my leg falls asleep and feels achy and full of needles underneath my laptop. And it hurts to curl the toes. Maybe it's the need to write because there are moments when I feel the accute reality of living by myself in a large city with friends a phone call away. I wonder if we as a race chose to sleep in the night because we wanted to avoid that 'real' feeling. When everyday, normal sounds take on a different meaning and severity. When normal trees cast wary shadows on walls. When we feel the most naked, despite the layers of clothing and sheets and blankets piled on us to protect us from the somehow dangerous night.

The biggest kicker of all? I may read this in the morning and laugh my ass off, like I laugh off some really creepy dreams or scary night visions. Or maybe I won't. Maybe this will be the dream that, no matter how many times it is told and retold at parties and in circles of captive audiences, still makes my stomach ache in some distant way, as if it was all reality and I am just waiting for the ship to come in and shuttle me to that alternate reality where the shit really did happen and that other me really did exist.

I just can't believe it's almost 4 in the morning.

Today, scooters were coming out of the woodwork! They were everywhere. At one point, I was behind two who were driving side by side and I felt like we were in a gang. A gang that gets up to 45 mph, bitches! And then we passed about five going the other way.

I'm part of a fad! ;)

This is some crazy shit!

Today, Kitten crawled up.....and SAT ON MY LAP! This is the first time she has ever done that. She sat on my lap, then would move to the couch right beside me, then lay her head on my leg. Then back on my lap! This happened three different times. I think we're moving on to a different phase in our relationship!

I get to do a dream ballet in Manos! I am so excited!!!! It's during the song Torgo (Roz) sings about me...I become unfrozen and Matt Russell comes out at Torgo and we do a ballet. It's hysterical! I'm so excited.

I had my writing test today. I felt really good about it. Now I just have to start cracking down on GRE studying.

The weather is making me so happy. The perfect jeans and sweater weather. This is usually the time when I really miss being with someone, but not this time. I am really enjoying being by myself during this weather.

But I would be lying if I said it didn't feel good when I get flirted with. Like today on the hog. This guy on a bicycle was matching me for speed for a few blocks (a crazy 40 mph) then he would get behind. We kept catching each other at lights, and finally he started talking to me. We had a quick, cute conversation and it just made me feel kinda fun inside. Nothing big. I don't want anything big. Random flirting at intersections. Random flirting in stores. Low key, non commital. Hell, an intense relationship with someone living 30 states away...that's my ideal. But for now, random flirting at intersections feels good. And being by myself during this weather is perfect.

I am a happy little clam right now.

Weekend update

This weekend has been filled with quite a bit of excitement. Mom and dad were here for their birthdays. Christi was here for work. I have an interview tomorrow and have to be off book tomorrow night (which I think will be just fine). We open the show in 11 days and Dames starts next weekend.

I'm just feeling really good right now. Things are starting to happen and I just feel good about it all. After a month of being sick and down, I am starting to be myself again. And that feels good.

And yes, LoCo, I have to mention that Lacey got kicked off Rock of Love, and that makes me happy. ;)

Manipulators all over the world are getting theirs.

I don't think about it, or them, every day, all day long like I used to. They are fleeting thoughts that pass here and there.

Because of that, when those moments hit me, they hit me when I am unarmed, defenses down, no adrenaline, with nothing prepared to fight them with. I am naked and vulnerable when they hit now, and they hurt with a stronger intensity, a blast of pain and rage and sorrow that I don't see coming.

I know these are the last bits of me healing. And these are the worst. Those blindsiding blasts that knock me back a few feet and months. But they go away. After a quick burst of crying or raging, they go away.

I am very excited for the day when I know they are gone forever. That time will come. I have lived it completely so I could heal from it completely. And I'm almost there.

You are KIDDING me?!

Dr. John MacArthur.

This man says that Christians shouldn't do yoga because there is too much chance of something "bad" coming in to you and it's worshipping a false religion.

This is on CNN.

That is all.

Summer of the Spiders

I am really tired as I write this, but I wanted to write it tonight, so bear with me.

There is SOMETHING going on with our ecosystem right now.

I thought at first that the massive amounts of spiders only affected my apartment building. Webs of what look to be Halloween spider webbing on the ivy covering the front of my building. A back porch area that is infested with webs and arachnids hanging in the middle. Spiders living in my plants. Driving on my hog and having to pull over because there is a spider hanging out on my rearview mirror. More than once. The web that takes up a quarter of my living room window (on the outside, thankfully)

But it's not just here. They're everywhere.

Jason and I went to Hollywood video tonight and, draped from ceiling to hanging tv to walls were webs with spiders in the middle. In Hollywood video.

Someone at rehearsal told me about a park in Texas where there were sheets of webs, and the amount of mosquitoes caught made an audible hum/whine as you walked by. Mosquitoes are also blooming in numbers. Jason and I were bombarded at the coffee shop we were at until the video store trip. All. Over. The. Place.

So obviously, there is a surge in the mosquito population which would explain the explosion in spiders. But why? I know we've had quite a bit of rain the last month or so. But save a few large storms, we have had a relatively dry summer from what I remember. And the spiders were all over the place before the hurricane that started our wet season. As we speak, Kitten is batting at some flying creature. I think it's a mosquito. Which wouldn't surprise me. I've had to kill three in my bedroom so far.

This is just very interesting. I wonder if there is an increase in birds, since there is more bird food dangling from webs just waiting for me to walk through. And have the heebie jeebies for the rest of my day. The thing is, I haven't noticed more birds at all.

I just wonder what this means. What it means as a statement to our environment, to the number of different species and how they interact with each other.

There has only been one other time in my life that I had to seriously thank my stars and garters that I wasn't arachnophobic. And that was the shithole apartment I lived in in Muncie that was so infested that at one point it looked like my carpet was moving. And the wolf spider ran across my ankle, waking me up in the middle of the night.

Maybe I just wanted to document this, in case no one hears from me for a bit and finally someone breaks down the door to discover me completely coccooned on my couch with 'Scrubs' playing on repeat and Kitten nibbling my toes off.

Not that that would happen, of course. Kitten would never stoop to eating my toes. She would start with my eyes.....

Ok. So.

I got my first whiff of Fall today, on the way home from rehearsal. It was fabulous for a few reasons.

First, because it's Fall. And Fall is the best.

And B, because it means I could smell.

I feel 100% times better. Okay, maybe more like 98.4% better. Not quite myself completely, but getting there. And thanks to Bone, I am able to hear much more.

Also, I am very glad that I'm not arachnophobic. If I were, I would be unable to enter any door to my apartment at any time during the day or night. Or open my windows. Or sometimes look in my rubber tree.

I've been on a bit of a vacation from myself lately, and I have to say I'm pretty happy to be coming back. I mean, I've been to paradise.....but I've never been to me. Or at least I haven't been myself for about a month. And it wasn't paradise by any stretch of the imagination. So I guess what I'm saying is I have become a liar on my blog when I talk about being to paradise but not being to me.

AAAANNNNNDDDDDD........NOW is the time for me to go to bed.

Let's try this again....

I'm on another batch of antibiotics and some nasal spray now. This time the doctor says I should be back to myself in five to six days. If not, I need to be examined again. Or, decoding DoctorSpeak, if I'm not better in five to six days, euthanasia.

At this point, either is fine with me if it will make my ears stop popping and my nose unclog.

I don't think I'm resistant to antibiotics, because it's been years since I've been on any. I don't abuse them and rarely take them. But I guess I could have caught a bacteria that was resistant. Or just stubborn as shit.

I hope these meds do work so I will hopefully feel like peeling myself off the couch again. Unless that is something else entirely, which is a good possibility. But at least all the snot in my head won't rest on one side of my face if I can't get myself off the couch for other reasons.