Out of the Blue

Do you have a book-limit here?

amebug — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:01:31 +0000

Hey there, Internet.

Sorry I have been distant. The summer/September was hectic and unorthodox. I won’t bore you with excuses regarding my absence. I will, however, tantalize you with the fact that I have an exciting new idea involving puppets that I am preparing to unleash on the greater MD area. Get ready.

In the meantime, a high school acquaintance wrote this letter to her cat and, by the power invested in Facebook, I became privy to it. It’s amusing and I thought you might enjoy it! (Also, holy moly the synth breakdown in Ben Folds’ Ascent of Stan just blew my mind out!!) Anyway, here it is:

Dear Raven,

Thank you for shattering the stereotype that cats are clean, quiet, low-maintenance pets. Your incessant meowing and constant need for attention is an inspiration for felines everywhere. None of that lazing around all day or hiding behind couches for you. No one could ever call you an Uncle Tomcat. And you never forget where you came from. You were found at about 4 weeks old, eating from a dumpster and now, even when given the chance, you turn up your nose at Fancy Feast because you would rather eat crusts of bread, pieces of paper, and dust bunnies from the corner of the room. Covered litter box? Feh, who needs a litter box? The ground was fine before you got adopted and it’s still fine now. And people think that only dogs pick up random items with their teeth and trot off with them. Clearly, they were wrong. So, I salute you Raven Lenore.

Love always,
Mom

Love it.
Talk atcha soon…
xoxo

The grass is always greener…

amebug — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:35:55 +0000

I’m in this weird mood today where I’m randomly missing college. For some people, this may seem second-nature: “Of course you miss college! I get together with my fraternity/sorority/whatever friends every weekend, pretending I’m still in college!!” Yeah, no. That’s not usually how I roll (no judgement against anyone who does, that’s just not my bag). By the time I graduated, I was so incredibly done with school that I turned down my parents’ offer to pay for my grad school if I started right away in the fall. (YOU IDIOT!) I longed for a life where I could just go to a job, do it, and come home with no papers or homework or whatever at the end of my day. That’s pretty much how my life is now, and somehow it’s still stressful.

Don’t get me wrong: I really love my job. And for the most part it is much less stressful that many jobs (see any of my past posts about my crazy teaching experience). But I guess I’m just missing the illusion of the typical college student: that you’re “free” and “on your own” and that as long as you get good grades and stay out of trouble, your life is going to work out just great.

You’re not really free or on your own. Your parents pay the majority of your big bills, and there’s generally some kind of safety net in place for you if you mess something up. Picked the wrong major? Freaking out? No worries: there’s still time to change your mind! Here, have a month-long winter break! Here’s another week in the spring! And don’t worry, we won’t make you come in the summer unless you really want to.

Damn, dude. Life was good.

But I still found stuff to freak out over. And maybe in a year or two when I have a different job, I’ll look back at this time and wonder what the hell I was complaining about. Ultimately, I think I’m just feeling the effects of having the safety net removed, of realizing that my safety nets are wishing they had safety nets and that no one is really 100% certain of how it’s all going to work out in the end.

Or maybe it’s just this damn summer cold sending me into fever-induced ramblings. ‘Cause man, I know I get nostalgic from time to time, but I NEVER missed walking to class before.

Just a little something to let you know I’m not dead.

amebug — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:02:25 +0000

Been busy lately. Believe it or not, summer is one of the high-impact seasons at my job: we’re triple-booked at camps and libraries just about every single day. Fortunately, most days are one-show-only. Then there’s Alexandria, VA. Kill yourself, because you’re looking at a two-hour drive, a show at 2, a five-hour break, a show at 7 at a different library, and a two-hour drive home.

But honestly, it’s not that bad. Libraries are really fun! Librarians are organized and enthusiastic, and the kids are on summer vacation, so everything is Wonderful and they are usually pretty stoked to see you. You’re the awesome outing they (and Mom/Dad) have been looking forward to for a week! Fun fun fun.

Other than that, we got a Wii for Aaron’s birthday so we’ve been playing Twilight Princess every chance we get. It’s awesome. That game looks so freaking good, it hurts.

Sadly, this week does not leave much room for Wii-ing. I’m volunteering for Bubble Days at the Science Center on Saturday (you should come, it’s gonna be awesome!!) doing a demo about how to make bubbles glow. I think I’m going to learn how that works this afternoon, yay! But yeah, Sunday is essentially my only day off. I’m working next Saturday, too. I really hope our Saturday bookings end soon. Once in a while working a Saturday is actually kinda fun, but by the third one you’re pretty sick of it.

So yeah: things lately, pretty good. Busy, but having fun here and there and more in-love every day. (All of you making pukey sounds are just jealous!) I’ll try to keep up with the blog more diligently, but I’m not making any promises…because I like sleeping.

Why Music Matters…

amebug — Sat, 30 May 2009 13:54:12 +0000

I am reposting this from Amanda Palmer’s blog because I love it, and because I think anybody who reads this blog is likely to understand it, connect with it, and appreciate it as well. It’s beautiful and may lend a sense of hope and/or courage to those of us who are struggling with our craft one-way-or-another at this moment. You may want to have some Kleenex handy, and you should MOST DEFINITELY have some music (preferably some that speaks to you deep down) playing in the background as you read. And now, without further ado:

Why Music Matters
Karl Paulnack, Director, Music Division
The Boston Conservatory

Dr. Karl Paulnack’s Welcome Address to parents of incoming students, September 2004

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician… I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated… I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school. She said, “You’re wasting your SAT scores!” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite… Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture — why would anyone bother with music? And yet even from the concentration camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome.” Lots of people sang “America the Beautiful.” The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece “Adagio for Strings.” If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie “Platoon,” a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Mid-western town a few years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier. Even in his 70’s it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this: “If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2 AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

“You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

“Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music, I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

Suck on that.

amebug — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:57:22 +0000

Oops! I forgot to blog…

amebug — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 20:30:00 +0000

So life has been rad lately. It’s finally spring, work is pretty good (::knock on wood::) and things are moving right along. Unfortunately I’ve racked up some minor credit card debt due to the unforeseen dying of my car (a rat/mouse/squirrel had made a nest in the engine and eaten through the wiring harness!) but I’ve got a plan to hack through it. It’s the first time in my life that I’ll have to let the balance roll over from one month to the next…that makes me kind of sick-at-heart. I try to use my credit card like a cash-substitute, only spending money I know I have so that interest won’t build up. Technically I have enough in my savings right now that I could pay this off all at once, but that would pretty much wipe out my savings and that’s not an option in my mind. So, I have to suck it up and deal with my debts head-on. I shouldn’t beat myself up about it: it was money spent in an emergency situation, not some crazy infomercial shopping-spree or other craziness. I know it’s not entirely my fault, but it’s also not my fave.

In other news, the band is still stop-and-go. I’ve decided to record a few more demos this evening to try and hash out what I really want from the project, as far as sound goes. It’s just really frustrating. I’ve never really found anyone to collaborate with who inspires me to reach new musical heights (no offense to all the talented musicians I’ve worked with in the past! I love you all). Usually I wind up just resigning myself to arrange all the parts myself and teach other people how to play them. Honestly, it’s not very rewarding and it tends to fall flat because there’s no outsiders’ perspectives. I guess I’m just wishing for people who had the incentive/drive/lack-of-other-things-to-do to take time and make my original songs their own in some way. Pretty much everyone I’ve worked with before has said, “That song is great! What do you want me to do?” I miss Josh. He and I collaborated well together, we had some good chi or something. Damn it, Texas! Be closer to Maryland!

I’m not giving up hope on this. I refuse to. Just frustrated, as I have been for the past year or so. Now that I’m not in school anymore, it’s hard to find musicians, and I don’t want to settle on someone who doesn’t have the qualities I want just because they happen to play an instrument I’d like in the band and volunteered.

Whatever. Time to stop bitching and go make some music. Maybe I’ll figure out more of what I’m looking for.

Sometimes the Internet betrays you…

amebug — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:52:25 +0000

So, tonight I was tooling around on YouTube. I love to do this. I got on ye Olde YouTube with the intention of dorking out to my favorite Korg Polysix demo (shut up, you love my nerdiness!), but the “Recommended for You” section offered a brief interview with Jason Bateman and Michael Cera together! “Sweet,” I thought, “I like those guys!”

Friends, how I wish I hadn’t looked upon what I saw.

The Interviewer was an “Access Hollywood’ type, and whatever, that jackassery is to be expected. But the interactions between Michael and Jason seemed really forced and awkward and I kind of hated it. But I only kind of hated it at that point, it was sort of confusing and I was soon distracted by the Interviewer saying, “So there’s a clip of you getting fired from the movie Knocked Up floating around; that must have been really embarrassing for you when that leaked.” Huh? Say what? That’s not something I’d heard of before…how strange. ”Well…it’s not that embarrassing,” replies Michael, “because I still think I was in the right.”

And then, Friends, I did what I know now was an unspeakably stupid act. I sought the clip on YouTube.
Yes, it was an ugly and bitter battle between director and actor. Katherine Heigl looked stunned the entire time, and the clip ends with her exclaiming, “Shit!” No one (save the extras and crew members) went unscathed. Oh, but the true horrors had only just begun. This clip was followed up with some informal footage/interviews shot by a crewmember of Superbad. The person who posted these clips wrote, “This is a great prank where everybody pretends to hate Michael Cera. I think it’s a prank. It has to be, I love Michael Cera! lol hilarious!”

Okay, listen: this footage? OBVIOUSLY NOT A PRANK. THIS IS 5 STRAIGHT MINUTES OF AWKWARD TENSION AND PEOPLE OUTRIGHT HATING MICHAEL CERA TO HIS FACE. You know that annoying person you work with/go to school with who is utterly neurotic and tries waaaay too hard to be everyone’s friend? And when that fails they go to the other extreme and act like they’re way too cool for everyone?

Yep. That would be Michael Cera. Several people tell him to fuck off. Several more use the phrase, “Don’t f**king touch me” (because apparently MC does not understand the concept of personal space), and one girl really, royally flips out on him in the worst possible way. One of the producers loathes him so much that she refuses to talk about him save to mention the fact that she will never work with him again.

As someone who loves both “Arrested Development” and (especially) Juno, I was really upset by all of this. A little heartbroken I would even say. I felt a little bit nauseous and like I needed a hug real bad. I decided to watch some interviews with Ellen Page, just hoping and praying there would be some lightness. Happily, I did find one interview where Ellen and Diablo Cody (screenwriter of Juno) have some really nice things to say about Michael. Maybe he was just awkward and immature during the Superbad/Knocked Up business. Maybe his working relationship with Judd Apatow was just so toxic that it ruined Cera’s relationship with the rest of the cast. I don’t know. I guess I shouldn’t speculate or make excuses. I still love Juno and AD, and will certainly continue to watch them, but the kind words from the lovely Juno ladies were kind of too little, too late. The metaphoric acid wash of the previous video was all over my mouth, jeans, and heart.

I did the only thing a girl can do.

I watched clips from “Flight of the Conchords” and snuggled kitties until the queasy-ness subsided.
Still waitin’ on that hug, though.

Other than that, life’s been really great! (::knock on wood::) I’m going to be marching in the NYC St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Tuesday with my brother Dan’s Pipe & Drum band (IBEW Local 164). If you watch the parade on TV, look for me! I’ll be striding down 5th Avenue…

Laters!

I’ll post again later, but you should read this now…

amebug — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:25:15 +0000

re-posted from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/15/the-things-we-miss-a-viol_n_158188.html

“A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?”

Oh, dang!

amebug — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:30:14 +0000

Guess it’s been kind of a while. Um, been busy (compared to usual life). While the weather has been nice I’ve been trying to get out and take walks/bike rides to soak up some sun, fight off some of that Seasonal Affective business. Got my old job with the Science Center back, I start on Monday!! (YAY!) I figure after everything I went through this fall, I can deal with whatever silly complaints I had before.

Took a trip to NJ last weekend. It’s weird that my parents are getting ready to sell their house. I’m realizing now that I’ve had a lot of “lasts” there that I didn’t realize were lasts at the time: last Thanksgiving, last Christmas Eve picture with Jill, last summer night on my swing…maybe it’s better that I didn’t know at the time. That way those occasions weren’t bittersweet. But I am secretly hoping for just one more time on that swing. I will swing for 24 hours straight if I get it. (Okay maybe not. As long as my legs/butt can handle it.) It was also sort of surreal going through things in my childhood bedroom and deciding what to keep and what to throw away. Letters are the craziest. I left a bunch behind for my mom to dispose of; I didn’t have the heart to actually put them in the trash can myself.

I know it’s been a long time since I was Metuchen-Amy, and that I’m much more comfortable being Baltimore-Amy now, but it’s still a little hard letting go. It still feels like losing something.

On a lighter note, knitting is AWESOME. After Valentine’s Day I will post a knitting/sewing retrospective. I think that I’m going to be doing a lot of knitting on lunch breaks, etc. during the work week, so I’m going to try to get more practice sewing on the weekends. I think a lot of my frustration/rough edges is just from lack of practice. And from being too hard on myself.

Looking forward to the KG show at Talking Head tomorrow night. Mandy times, yay! (Mandy, I am sure, will be updating her blog very soon! hint, hint) I’m hoping the other bands will be enjoyable…I need a new favorite band. I still like my old faves, but they don’t give that same exhilarated feeling they used to. I miss that. I need a band to make me all starry-eyed at shows and blow up my car stereo. I thought that would be Jukebox the Ghost, but I’m kind of over it; only 3-4 songs on that album had real staying-power for me. One of those is a remix.

For now I believe it is time for taco salad. I am trying to be more conscious about where my food comes from, so I’m making more things at home. Last night’s taco salad was a definite hit. Let’s see if it lives up to the hype today!

(Good thing I start work Monday: I obviously need to get out more! P )

Things I did today that were awesome(!):

amebug — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:04:45 +0000

1. Yoga in the a.m.
2. Played games in French and moved up to the rank of “Kindergartner”
3. Had a piano lesson
4. Knitted with Katie
5. Finished my ribbed scarf!!
6. Started some stripey mittens (knitting in the roooouuund!)
7. Made delicious turkey soup all by myself
8. Drove to 4 different places all by myself
9. Parallel parked almost perfectly (first time since October)
10. Continued to have the most awesome fiancee and cats ever.

Things I did today that were not so awesome:
1. Realized I have spent a lot of money in the last two weeks.

I need to suck it up and get a job, yo.