Some people sing in the shower. Not Paul. He recites lines from Arnold movies. Sometimes he just talks to himself in an Austrian accent. Comments about the water. What body part he is currently washing. It's fun.

Everyone have a safe and happy New Year's Eve!

The only think I like about being sick is the crazy dreams. You know, when you can't really sleap 'cause you can't breathe, but you're really tired. So you have Twilight Zone dreams. Last night's dream wasn't so great. Paul went out with the boys and got high on coke, so I had to move out. But the one before that was fun. I was the understudy for Christine in Phantom of the Opera, but no one told me. The dream starts with me singing one of her solos as the opening number. I'm on this boat that's on some sort of track around the stage. The audience is loving it, and they don't realize I'm the understudy. Because this is one of my favorite musicals, I happen to know this song. Then, the boat goes under the stage down this roller-coaster track under the audience and around the theatre into the backstage area. It's such a rush. So I get back there to change to my next costume, and everyone realizes I'm not the real Christine. In fact, I had never rehearsed with the cast before. Which, is not a problem for me. I don't care. But everyone else is really upset. The director was a friend of mine from college, Aaron Swisher. Except in my dream he's older, thinner, and less gay. He tells me to go out there for the next scene. It's at that point that I realize, I don't know any of her dialogue. I only know the songs from the CD. Everyone freaks out. I keep saying, "See, we should have rehearsed. It's not my fault this is so unprepared." Then they shove me onstage while I'm still putting my wig on. One of the characters named Emily has died. There is no Emily in Phantom. She's from Dracula. My dream is mixing stories. Anyway, it's my line, and I don't know it. Everyone looks at me. The audience becomes restless. I'm trying to signal to the cast to help me, but they're all pissed I'm there. One of the girls hisses, "It's your line!" "I don't know any lines, I only know songs. And I'm not even that great of a singer." I try to get her to feed me the lines, but she's stubborn and refuses. For some reason, I found that hysterical. Like, even though I look like an idiot, it's not my show and I wasn't supposed to be the understudy, so I didn't really care.

I went to work today. No more fever. And I have disk 2 & 3 of Alias Season One, which I will be watching tonight!

Yesterday was a little crazy. I woke up with the beginnings of a cold. Some people get gifts for Christmas, I apparently get sick. So I took it easy most of the day. Paul volunteered to take me out for dinner, which I declined. That goes to show how sick I was. I watched Alias Season One, Disk One on DVD. My latest Netflix rental. Did laundry all day, talked to the folks. Nothing big until right before I had to leave to pick up a friend from the airport. Now, I had been feeling progressively worse throughout the day, and the Sudafed I took made no difference. Or, maybe it did and I could have felt even worse. Right before I left to pick up Cassy, Brad, and Ethan, I was ironing. I stopped ironing and put the iron on the counter. Near my keys. Then I went to the computer to make a payment on my visa card. I noticed my checking account was $200 short. That may not seem like a lot to most people, but to a struggling actress, $200 is pretty much all that was in there. I looked at my account history and found the problem. See, at the beginning of October I deposited the money from the wedding I shot. Unfortunately, it was cash. But because I had other problems with deposits, I saved my slip. Well, a few weeks went by and the deposit never showed. So I went to the bank and they had to do a whole thing. Basically they credited my account the money. I have a claim number and everything. But then on Christmas, they took the $200 out. I'm not sure why. I get to spend the next hour on the phone trying to figure that out. Needless to say, I almost puked when I saw my account balance. Plus, I was sure I had thrown away that receipt since it was taken care of almost two months ago. Well, now I'm late to pick up Cassy, but I'm determined to find this deposit slip. I tear the place up and finally find it. Whew. I grab my keys and burn my hand on the hot iron. I can't find our huge vat of aloe, so I just run it under water. It was sort of like watching a comedy of errors. From going through every paper I could get my hands on to an inch long raised mark on my hand. We had spent most of the day cleaning, and I was able to trash it in about 10 minutes.

Then I woke up feeling even worse than I did yesterday. So I called off work--something I never do. On top of all of this, I am drinking a ridiculous amount of water. They say keep yourself hydrated when you're sick. Well, I'm running out of toilet paper. I've had a little more than 60 ounces, and I've only been out of bed for 4 hours. But the medicine is making me thirsty.

On the plus side, I did finally get to watch The Life of David Gale. I think Kate Winslet is one of the greatest actresses of all time, and forthcoming will be a post about that. Until then, I will continue to rub Vaseline all over my nose. And pee.

Well, the email is fixed. In my rage yesterday, I forgot to mention some good news.

For the past two months I have been taking an improv comedy class. It started out with an audition before I left for a wedding in Ohio back in October. (BTW, Ohio is now covered in FEET of snow. I absolutely do NOT miss that.) I felt the audition went well, but I was only there because I wanted to take the beginning and advanced class. I knew eventually I'd be auditioning for the troupe, so this was sort of to see how their auditions were set up. The long way to go about getting into the Jesterz is to take the beginning class, the advanced, then they can offer the advance again for half price. This would take about 8 months. They said they'd call us by the end of the week no matter what to discuss our audition. They also said they would be offering the advanced class to those they felt could handle it. Super! The classes are $250 for 8 wks, so that would save me some money. Well, the week passed and we went to Ohio. I never got a call. Now, you are NEVER supposed to call back after an audition. It's a law. But, they said they would and they didn't, so I did. Mainly because when I first moved out here I auditioned for a show. My audition was great, so I was surprised and disappointed when I didn't hear back. I got a call from the AD during their first rehearsal asking where I was. So because of that, I thought maybe they forgot to call me. I finally got a hold of the director, and he asked if my roommates had given me the message. I have A roommate. Not several.

"Oh. Then some random house of four people got my message."

I was invited to join the advanced class. For half price. This is great! However, there were other people in the advanced class who had gone through the other classes. So, politically they had a leg up on me. The class was great, and I had so much fun. Paul, my aunt & uncle, and some friends came to see our showcase. (My sister did not because she is a punk) They loved it. Now, the showcase is also an audition for the performance level.

Yesterday at work I got a call from Jef to discuss the class and what the Jesterz would like me to do next. It turns out I made it to Level 3 Performance. Which means Thursday @ 8 and Friday @ 10 I get to do a show! I am so effing excited! Merry Christmas to me! Rehearsals begin in January and performances follow shortly after. He only asked 2 to move on, and I was one of them. So if you're ever in the area, stop by and watch a show.

I am so mad I could vomit flames. For some reason my email is all messed up. It seems to be frozen. I can't receive any new messages. I also can't send an issue to hotmail, as it redirects me to a page that is not working. I'm past the crying point. I am now numb with hatred. If anyone has any ideas on how to fix hotmail, please let me know. They do not have tech support via the phone. The only way to get a hold of anyone is to email the help center. Which, for some reason, is not working. If hotmail were a person, I would kick them in the knees until they were dislocated. Then I would give them papercuts underneath their fingernails with manilla envelopes. The thicker the paper, the deeper the cut. Then I would pour rubbing alcohol on the open wounds. Then I would go Kathy Bates Misery on their ass. Oh, I am angry.

We're not very good at waiting.

Last night Paul brought home a package from his parents. It was our stockings. I have a gift from Tosha and my grandma. We tore into the stockings and I opened Tosha's stuff. I was able to hold off on my grandma's for now. I have no self control whatsoever.

Oh, and I need to leave for work in 7 minutes and I'm still in my pjs with stinky breath.

I don't know who wrote this; it was forwarded to me. Instead of sending it through email, I thought I'd post it here. For those of us who grew up in the 80s & 90s, this is great! I personally have fond memories of "Centipede".


When I was a kid adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a Straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death! And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it! But...Now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it! I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet - we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves! There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! There were no MP3s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and f@#* it all up! You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options! We didn't have fancy shit like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was it could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your drug dealer, you didn't know!!! You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister! We didn't have any fancy Sony Play station videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was a little square! You had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win, the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died! Just like LIFE! When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy sat in front of you and you couldn't see you were just screwed! Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing you had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning... d'ya hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards! We didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove imagine that! If we wanted popcorn we had to use that stupid jiffy pop and shake it over the stove like an idiot forever. That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled, you guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

The new Harry Potter book goes on sale in July. My half-birthday is July 23, in case any of you were wondering what to get me.

You know you live in Arizona if...

You hear "Gradma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" in Spanish.

Adrenaline is a funny thing. Not funny ha ha, funny interesting. The other day I was on the highway going to work. All of the sudden, traffic came to a halt, as it always does. There were six lanes of solid non-moving traffic. I looked in my rear view mirror and saw a truck speeding towards my back seat. There was nothing for me to do. No where to go to avoid this. As I braced myself for my oncoming death, I felt the adrenaline pour into my heard and pump through my body. Quite odd. The truck came to a screeching halt about one inch from my bumper. I loosened my grip on the steering wheel, and went on sitting in traffic, not going anywhere for the next hour. But it took a long time for the adrenaline to wear off. I could still feel my heart beating harder than normal. My head ached. My fingers tingled. I was aware of this for the rest of the morning. The functions of the body fascinate me.

Oh, and even though I am incredibly proud of my wonderful stock pick, I am sure everyone is sick of my posts. I was going to post each time it hit a new dollar bracket instead of every day, but that happens about every other day (it's over $8, and Thurs was the first time it was over $7). So I think I'm just going to post at the beginning of each month. In case you are wondering what to get people for gifts this year, might I suggest a wonderful radio and a Sirius subscription?

$7.28

If you would like to have sex with an actual person, I highly suggest that you change your vanity plate to anything other than JEDI464.