Archive for the ‘how i am awesome’ Category

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Personification: too far.

2011/06/01

Much has been made of my harem pants jumpsuit. I mean, that’s not MY harem pants jumpsuit, it’s just a for example. MY harem pants jumpsuit is black. I’ve gotten quite the response on Facebook to any and all posts mentioning said jumpsuit (really, the ONLY jumpsuit), so I can’t help but feel like people want to know more.

I bought the harem pants jumpsuit with the highest aspirations. I thought I’d be avant garde and wear it with pin-thin stilettos. Maybe add a scarf. I’d look stylish and edgy, it would be awesome.

But oh, Reality.

The harem pants jumpsuit was maybe two sizes too big, to start. Being on the slighter side, I’d anticipated this, but I was entirely unprepared for how quickly the whole thing lost its SHAPE. One day it was a harem pants jumpsuit, the next day it was a swaddle of cloth at my feet. I didn’t let this stop me, though! I abandoned my notion of ever wearing the HJP out of doors, but started sporting it around the house like a second skin. A second, loose, baggy skin.

Last night, as usual, I was wearing the harem pants jumpsuit. It rides mostly as just “pants” these days – the elastic is too far gone to imagine pulling it up to its advertised height – but anyway, while wearing the harem whatever-it-is, I accidentally sliced open my finger with an exacto knife.

“Awww, shit,” I sighed, realizing the colossal annoyance that was about to ensue. “Ah! Shit!” I cried again, as the pain hit.

Wound up spending 3.5 hours in the East Boston ER, during which I read up on Lightroom, mapped out a data structure for my home backup array, and got a very uncomfortable four stitches. Have you ever been injected right in that little nerve that runs between your fingers? No? Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend it.

BUT! The splendor of the whole thing! I wore my harem pants jumpsuit OUT OF THE HOUSE! Granted, it was only to the ER, and the only other people I saw were B!, the doctor, and a very confused nurse, but still! I feel like HJP and I are on a new path together. Maybe I’ll take her to work tomorrow.

Posted in aberrant behavior, best week ever, city livin', how i am awesome | 1 Comment »

It’s all Greek to me. Mmm. Olives.

2011/04/06

B! and I met in 2003, when I signed up to be a PA for his self-produced indie feature. I seemed like I had cred, since I was working for a real live production company, and we treated each other with the respect of fellow cinephiles. His encyclopedic knowledge of film history made him disposed to reference the Great Directors as part of everyday vernacular – every conversation led to Scorsese – and I would smile, nod, and politely change the subject.

I couldn’t let on, you see, that I have no interest in movies.

I mean, I WATCH movies. I ENJOY movies. I’m just not INTERESTED in movies. Like, I have no HEAD for them. I could sooner tell you the first ten digits of Pi than tell you who directed the last film I watched, and I’m horrible about remembering plots. I once sat through an entire hour and a half of  ”Audition” before realizing it wasn’t the movie I thought it was. (An aside: does anyone know of *another* Asian gore flick that involves pretty girls and piano wire?) But I couldn’t let B! know this. Especially while we worked on the next four films together.

I’m telling you, this went on for years.

So OK, it’s last night, 2011. We’re flipping through the Netflix queue the other night, and he’s like, “Let’s watch ‘The 400 Blows‘”, and I’m like “God, is it one of those movies that has no PLOT?”

He looked at me, quizzically, thinking I was making a (somewhat incorrect) generalization about French New Wave. His mind tried to wrap itself around who I could be talking about, and, after a brief cataloguing of the collected works of Francois Truffaut, settled on Godard as a resting place. “I mean, ‘Breathless‘ was kind of weird”, he thought. “Sort of.”

I took a sip of wine, musing. Those black and white movies with no plot. I got into those for awhile, so I’d be able to talk about things like I knew things. I suffered through so many of those damn boring films, all subtitles and jester suits… Which one was the worst one, which one did I have to turn off?

“Like ‘8 1/2‘” I blurted out.

B!’s face drained of color as I realized my mistake.

“FELLINI??!”

His voice was a whisper, not a shriek.

I fumbled for an explanation, knowing that insulting The Great Fellini was like kicking his sister in the neck. I felt exposed (shamed!), for not only had I not LIKED 8 1/2, I hadn’t even REMEMBERED who directed it. I’d completely shown my hand, totally blown it,  effectively ended nearly ten years of a well-played charade.

“I mean, that’s not even FRENCH NEW WAVE!!” His eyes were like saucers, they poured me a whole new shade of cream. “That’s ITALIAN!”

Completely trapped, I dissolved into hysterical laughter. I couldn’t bear to tell him that Fellini and Truffaut always seemed like kind of the same thing to me.

Posted in art?, how i am awesome | 4 Comments »

How Not To Spend Your Time: Pt 2

2011/04/04

Last Thursday, I just sucked it up and went to the doctor. I didn’t have high hopes – after the failed mono test of the previous Saturday it seemed anything was possible. Except, like, the opposite of that.

So I hauled over to Eastie, parked a half-mile from the health center, and enjoyed the smell of early-morning secondhand smoke during my stroll down Porter St. It was $170 to get in, with a Nurse Practitioner, no less, so I intended to make the most of things. I read a pleasant book in the waiting room after checking in with a woman who looked like a young Salma Hayek (if Salma Hayek had an 18-inch waist and a 36-inch bust), and, as usual, I was weighed facing toward the irons on the scale. I kind of wish they would ask you first.

My nurse was a hip young man with shoes I adored and glasses I couldn’t help but covet.

“I hate rashes,” he confessed, with a sigh, after I showed him my arms.

“So do I,” I said, scratching absently at my lower back.

Together we spent considerable time looking through a large medical book containing every skin disease known to mankind. There were suppurated lesions, cracked and bleeding flesh, swollen fingers and languishing toes. Eventually we settled on Pityriasis rosea, a mild but mysterious affliction that lasts about a month, has no known cause, and, thus, no known treatment.

“I could prescribe you some steroid cream,” he offered, “but you couldn’t, you know -”

“- put it ALL OVER YOUR BODY.” we finished in unison, as I turned my attention to a particular itchy patch on my upper thigh. “OK, well, I also wanted to ask about getting Chantix – that ‘stop smoking’ pill, or whatever.”

He turned back to his monitor and tabbed over to my medication profile. “You know,” he said, rather sadly, “I really wouldn’t feel comfortable prescribing that for you until you talk to your other treaters. Chantix has some pretty serious side effects.” A valid point, since the newly-introduced Seroquel is giving me such vivid dreams that I occasionally wake up and smell my subconscious burning.

I liked this nurse. He treated me very nicely. I liked his rash book, I liked his sweater, I liked his wedding ring. I wanted to have him over for kebabs. He suggested that I come back in a week to check in, and then asked me, as an afterthought, what kind of insurance I had.

“It’s the shitty kind.” I laughed, and I told him all about the crazy deductible and the problems getting my scripts, and and the huge bill I now owe my therapist. His brown eyes turned sad behind those incredible black-rimmed glasses, although he laughed along with me. I mean, I felt bad for the guy. He clearly wanted to help me, but was absolutely unable to. Like, in any way at all.

At least I’m pretty sure now that I don’t have Scabies. That’s a good thing.

Posted in charming neurosis, city livin', how i am awesome, meds | 4 Comments »

How Not To Spend Your Time: Pt 1

2011/04/01

B! and I went down to see my parents the other Saturday. Seeing the wretched state of my forearms, covered, as they were, in tiny red bumps, my mom gently steered me to the Minute Clinic at CVS. Together we waited there for about 40 minutes, observing the vast and varied pharmacy clientele, and were finally seen by a very nice Nurse Practitioner. After tallying off my boutique of psychoactive medications, she silently added “anxiety disorder” to my profile and then asked, in a very matter-of-fact way, if I was depressed.

“I think I might have mono,” I told the nurse.

The nurse produced a large binder from somewhere behind her computer, and flipped over to a page tabbed with “INFECTIOUS MONONUCLEOSIS”. It had more pictures than text. This did not instill confidence.

“We’ll do a test,” she said.

To me it seemed like spending a hundred dollars on nothing at all – there’s no cure for mono except just chilling out, and, realistically, I can’t afford to just chill out right now. But my mother persisted, and I gave in.

Carefully, with the air of a new hire navigating the supply closet, the nurse brought down a box labeled “MONO TEST” and began to read the printed directions. There was a needle, a vial, and three glass jars involved. She seemed a little confused.

“Um,” she said, squeezing dryly at the eyedropper bottle, and kind of trailed off. Turns out, they had run out of the solution that tests for mono, and so she couldn’t tell me anything at all.

Free advice: if you have a mysterious rash covering your entire body, are fairly sure you don’t have measles, and would like medical validation for why you’ve been sleeping 10 hours a day, don’t bother going to the Minute Clinic in my parents’ town. It’s totally not worth it.

Posted in anecdotal, free advice, how i am awesome, meds, personal hell | Leave a Comment »

Somewhere inside, I’m just a long-haired dude with a bag of chips in one hand and a 2-liter Mountain Dew in the other.

2011/02/21

I mean, I could update you guys about a lot of things. I could give you the over/under on all the tablets coming to market, and might, meanwhile, expound upon the relative merits of converting to ProRes 422 when using Final Cut Pro. I’m eagerly awaiting the maturity of HTML5. I own four 1-TB hard drives.

Ask Katsumi – I wasn’t born this geeky. When he first met me, at 22, I’d literally just learned how to type. I remember pecking out whole papers in the computer lab at college because I didn’t realize you could save your file to a floppy disc. FLOPPY DISC. I didn’t learn about technology until I absolutely had to – I had no head for it, I thought, it had no soul.

My first gig with Pusser provided impetus for the honing of my secretarial skills, and then, suddenly finding myself the PA at a high-end post-production facility, I had to learn everything else fairly quickly. It’s still a matter of some pride that I know how to daisy-chain three HDCam decks so they’ll all dub at once. By the time I went back to Pusser in 2008, I was configuring the fiber-channel storage for our Avid system and honing our workflow for a straight line from production to online.

I’d be lying if I said that Katsu had nothing to do with this transformation – I turned to him whenever I needed IT support, which was often, and relied on him to guide me through the bits and bytes of day-to-day business. But now there is no Katsu. I mean, that’s not totally true, I definitely texted him and was like “WTF is HTML5″ before I got all about HTML5, but still. You can’t lean on your estranged spouse the way you leaned on your husband. And, you know, that’s cool. I like to stand on my own two feet.

But what I’d REALLY like is one of these. Techporn. What a feeling.

Posted in how i am awesome, i hate technology, progress?, work | Leave a Comment »

In college, I just ran the waffle machine in the dining hall. That was OK.

2011/02/10

Tuesday was the kind of day that made me glad to have weekly therapy sessions. I’ve gone off the Abilify again, bolstered now by an extra 75mg of Effexor, so I don’t know if it was that or just the whim of the wind that swayed me from “great” to “feh”. Either way, I arrived home from work feeling very out of sorts. The dinner I’d planned involved a lot of chopping, and I used the time like a meditation on life. Asparagus cut into perfect 1-inch segments on the bias. All cannot be lost. We ate dinner around 8:30pm, and, just as I was finishing up, my phone started buzzing.

“Hello, this is Erin,” I answered, as always.

“Hi Erin, this is Natalie, I’m a freshman at Syracuse University,” replied a cheerful, carefully scripted voice.

OK. It’s like, I know where she’s going. I know they want money. And we all know I don’t have money. But I don’t want to be rude to the poor girl. So I let her go on. She told me all about some new website the University has for alumni networking, and a way for me to “stay in touch with what’s going on at SU”, as though that’s some kind of top priority for me. And as she’s yambling on, I’m thinking about what *I* was up to at 8:30pm on any given Tuesday as a college freshman, and how it sure as hell wasn’t working some targeted telemarketing gig on work study. I felt bad for her, actually, and wanted to tell her so.

Until her script got awkward. “Another reason why we’re calling is just to catch up on what you’ve been up to since graduation…!” she read, with awkward inflection. “So, what have you been up to since graduation?”

I graduated college in 2001. And what’s happened since then defies description. Like, I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes trying to come up with something, but I just can’t. Part of me really wanted to give it to her: the cold, hard truth about how life just turns around and slaps you in the face. How you really can work yourself to death, even if you love your job. How you can go from being a happily married woman with a nice, comfortable life to an unemployed would-be divorcee in what seems like the blink of an eye. How you can rise up again, in spite of it all.

All these thoughts vectored like time-lapse in my brain, until, after a slightly uncomfortable pause, I laughed. “A lot has happened since graduation,” I said. “A lot. Right now I work as project manager for a nonprofit company. Before that I worked in documentary film.” I left out the mental institution, I left out the complicated divorce, I left out how, at 26 years old, my name appeared on screens nationwide as co producer of a major PBS documentary. I left out how I can teach myself anything, how I HAVE taught myself everything, how, when *I* was a freshman in college, I had no idea what I was in for.

In the end, she asked me for $150, and I said no, sorry, I can’t afford that, but the five minutes I spent on the phone with her really made me think. I’ve done a lot since 2001. And that’s pretty cool.

 

Posted in anecdotal, free advice, how i am awesome, life story, matrimony, money, therapy, work | 2 Comments »

Money doesn’t talk, it whispers.

2011/02/06

The button on my favorite jeans broke today. My only comfortable jeans. The only ones that don’t make me feel fat. And my first instinct was to go out and buy another pair. I mean, they’re just Lucky Brand, not like, Paige Denim or something, so we’re talking about a relatively small investment. Just $99 plus tax for all the glory that comes with a new, well-fitting pair of jeans.

My instinct, as I said, was to just drive down to Newbury Street and grab a pair. We got some new bookings at ECA Productions, and I mean, what am I going to do otherwise? Jeans are a necessity. Right?

I was living pretty high on the hog with Katsumi. We both made good money, so we both pretty much did what we wanted. No groceries but the groceries from Whole Foods, no cat food but the very best. I bought new clothes without a second thought, and, though I love to cook, we dined out more than we dined in. Once, during restaurant week, we went out to Pigalle and spent the equivalent of a month’s car payment on dinner and drinks for two. It was no big deal. Coming from this angle, yes, I mean, of course, just go get the jeans. You need them. Obviously.

So this morning I slung my purse over my shoulder, grabbed my wallet and my shiny new Discover card and headed out the door. But instead of going into the city and hitting the Lucky store, I went to a Goodwill in Somerville and unloaded five boxes of crap from the old apartment. Those days of decadence are long gone, the days of five-course dinners and designer shoes, and even though once upon a time replacement denim may have taken precedent, these days I’m more worried about paying our rent. Like, actually worried.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining. I still sustain some very expensive habits, and it’s hard to rally a pity party around a camp that’s basically burning cash. I live a nice life, I drive a nice car, and, really, I wouldn’t want to change a thing. It’s interesting to see how “needs” turn into “wants”, and how “wants” turn into “luxuries”, and how easily we can slip from one way of being to the next, when we’re given no choice but to do so. I like that I seem to be resilient, in light of things.

Posted in car-ma, city livin', cookin', eatin', how i am awesome, jake, money, progress? | 2 Comments »

I’m always this accurate in my diagnoses. Seriously.

2011/01/27

So we’ve had Jake for a little bit now, and, so far, no mishaps. No biting, no scratching, no clawing holes in the screens and, most importantly, no peeing. None. When the doctor went in to take out the errant testicle (Small Jake had a ball in hiding, for the uninitiated, a man-sac that never descended), he discovered that the thing was actually pressing on his ureter. Or urethra. Whatever.

Anyway, point is, that whole time he was peeing like crazy all over the apartment? He probably couldn’t help it! Poor little guy. I really did hate him, that time he hit my boots, and I almost broke his neck when he peed on the red velvet loveseat. Our landlord said, after Jake, that he’d never let another cat live in one of his buildings again. That’s probably because of that time when Jake let loose all down the back stairway. I mean, I can’t say I blame him – he had to rip out the carpet in the hallway, and even after THAT, it STILL stunk of urine.

I was very wary when I took him back in. I had prepared myself for the worst. But, and I’m knocking on wood, he’s been just great! Friendly, even! He likes to sit on my lap and get all over my computer now, and he cuddles when we watch TV. He was never so relaxed before! And it’s probably because, you know, I was right. He just needed to get snipped. Free advice: neuter your animal.

Posted in free advice, how i am awesome, jake, manifesto | 3 Comments »

Call ‘em as you see ‘em

2011/01/27

My post about this guy is featured on Callin’ Out on Etsy! I love being on other people’s websites. Especially when I’m calling out douchebaggery.

Posted in best week ever, how i am awesome | Leave a Comment »

SHAMELESS self-promotion

2011/01/20

HEY HEY GUYS! GUYS! I’M ON THE INTERNET! FOR REAL THIS TIME! If I haven’t already compelled you to watch these videos through Facebook, LinkedIn, or Gmail bombardment, I beseech you one last time to indulge me. I am so proud of these little pieces – I edited “Activities“, “Classes“, “Friends“, “Home“, and “The Key Twirl” – and it was such a blast to work with the footage. It’ll take literally less than a minute. Then come back here and tell me I’m awesome.

 

Posted in art?, best week ever, how i am awesome, VIDEOVIDEOVIDEO | 8 Comments »

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