Thanksgiving with the Baltimore clan! This year there will be 18 people for dinner, and yet somehow there will probably still be one dessert per person.
I'm thankful for so many things and people this year, and I hope you are too.
Happy Thanksgiving!!!

If you wish, you may address me by my new title, lovingly bestowed by the handy dandy website Make Me Mighty.

How do you get over your first love? Inquiring minds want to know.
Going into detail on such a public forum would be dumb. Suffice it to say this was sparked by a sudden burst of totally platonic--'twas ever thus--contact with the guy in question, as well as by watching Closer for the first time. All in all, Closer is a really excellent and thoroughly miserable movie. Clive Owen and Natalie Portman were so, so good. Jude Law made me want to punch/hug the living daylights out of him. Julia Roberts was Julia Roberts. Before Closer I watched Milk for class. Even though it was my second viewing, I cried.
It's late, but I'm tempted to top that off by watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Otherwise I'll never get to sleep.

Almost every time I have a moment, it happens while reading the New York Times. For example, when I first found the article that inspired The Play I was sitting reading the Times in a very important upstairs room in my Midwestern house.
Today's moment occurred while reading this article about inmates taking Wesleyan courses, and I can't blame it entirely on The Wire, since David Simon hates academia almost as much as he hates The Man. I don't quite know yet what I want to do with this moment I had, but I'm bookmarking the article pronto and sleeping on it. Maybe in the morning, I'll have an epiphany. In the meantime: dinner! And the great self-defense class Roommate J and I are in. One of the instructors has a great Liverpool accent. Pure awesome.

I had a revelation while watching Hamlet last night. I am to Shakespeare what my Great Aunt M was to minorities: every experience is a positive exception to a negative rule, and, like Great Aunt M, that rule is totally in my own head. Do I like Shakespeare? No. Did I love Hamlet last night? Yes. Was I hanging on every word? Yes. Did I wake up this morning still thinking about it? Yes. How much of that was due to Jude Law's attractiveness? Only about 12%.
The same things happened when I saw Merchant of Venice (yes, the movie version with Jeremy Irons) and read Julius Caesar for my Theater and Sacrifice class.
I think I've figured it out. As of now, I'm swearing off amateur productions of Shakespeare. Maybe that way I'll figure out that I actually do like the guy. A little bit.

Also I get to see Jude Law in Hamlet tonight, for $25 including transportation to NYC. Thank you Princeton.

In honor of Sesame Street's 40th Anniversary: "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon."

I may not have had swine flu two weeks ago, but I sure do have an ear infection now. I never had these things as a kid, so to have one just under a month away from my 21st birthday seems a little ridiculous. But there you are.

In order to distract myself from the itchy-cottony side of my head, here are some wonderful things that have happened over the last few weeks:
1) The principal of my elementary/middle school e-mailed me and asked whether I would be willing to inaugurate a series of letters from alums, telling their stories and updating everyone on their lives.
2) At the Women in Theater Conference in September, I ran into one of the administrators of Residential College (FreshSoph Edition) who asked whether I'd be willing to help her organize some smaller women in theater events for the residential college. I gave her my e-mail and said I'd be happy to. Just before Fall Break, she e-mailed me and asked whether there I could meet with her for lunch to discuss plans for a SWAN (Supporting Women Artists Now) week in March. At lunch, she explained that she did theater in middle school and still loved it and wanted to take advantage of her organizational skills (which are indeed legion) to pull the SWAN Week (usually just a day, but why stop there) together. She said she would pull together lots of different ideas from students on events to include, and then asked me how I would like to be involved. After about twenty minutes of vague talk about wanting to get students who knew and loved theater but who hadn't done any at Princeton involved, I ran out of ideas. She asked me what my favorite part of theater was, and I mentioned playwrighting and The Play. Immediately she crossed off all the other ideas she'd written down for how I might participate and said, "You'll do THAT play." So I get to cast it and direct it for performance as part of this week at the end of March celebrating female artists, which is more than I could ever have hoped for.
3) Fall Break: one week of intense relaxation, productivity, great time with the Aged Ps, and the beginnings of an ear infection. Three out of four isn't bad.

I got back from Fall Break yesterday. Now the real work of the semester begins. But I'm slightly more optimistic than I was this afternoon when I went to pick up my antibacterial ear drops from the pharmacy. There's nothing like being informed that neither of your two health insurances covered ear drops. After calling my dad and getting the OK to spend $100 on the only thing that was going to keep me sane this week, I retreated to the magazine section to await the filling of my prescription. Standing there, reading Cosmo and close to tears (I'm pretending it was the magazine's fault), I realized that things could only get better. And they did. The ear drops were soothing, dinner was yummy and we ran into old neighbors/friends (Athena and her posse--remember them?), a brief run at the gym got me sweaty enough for the best shower of my life, and now I'm sitting here FINALLY updating my blog.