Birthday Week

I highly recommend celebrating one's birthday all week long. Ever since I've been away from home, I've enjoyed cards and packages trickling in all week long. It though that it must be sort of what Hanukkah is like. Or not. I wouldn't know. Well, Mars and I took the ball and ran with this idea. We celebrate one another's birthday's for a whole week. The only requirement is that the birthday kid gets a little something everyday. It can be anything, purchased, made, a gesture, anything. It's simply a fun little acknowledgement to give and to get. Sometimes we've themed gifts. I did a Medieval theme one year and he did and Underpants theme (Underpants is my favorite word.)

So, I just had birthday week. It culminated in a World Series Game 2 White Sox victory. If that weren't enough, there's the annual three way birthday bash for my good friends Vanessa, Eric and myself. Our bdays are right in a row and we thought it'd be easier for everyone if we made them go out only one night. So, for the last three years Librapalooza has been a fun, crazy, hazy and suprising party that spawns several juicy and entertaining stories.

Birthday week also featured gorgeous items from our registry. Simple, but necessary items like silverware caddies and untensil holders. My favorite, our awesome shower curtain. Mars also got me an awesome card with my own personal Mars drawing. The Arrested Development Season One DVD's, a bouquet of roses, and my favorite, a very clean house.

Knowing that someone is or has thought of you and what you may want so carefully, and knowing that they go through all the trouble they do to make the birthday week special, is something that I relish in life. It also makes me feel guilty that I screwed both my parents out of gifts last year as the wedding put a crimp in my fundage. I love that we have this tradition and I love that the giver always gets as excited as the getter.

Thanks Mars for an awesome birthday week.

Introducing K San 

Records

I was at a party on Saturday. They had a turntable and some vinyls. Some friends and I sat in the front room playing records for hours. I miss records. They're at home in Seattle. I miss my turn table. I miss the sound of a needle on the record and that I miss that grainy, echoey, sound before the song. It's an anticipatory sound. I remember that sound prefacing many dance routines, lip synchs, and my childhood foray into rhythmic gymnastics with a jump rope. If I had 2 weeks off, I'd drive to Seattle, get my records and drive back. That is all.

Snarkity, snark, snark, snark

I started two blogs so I can get myself writing more as part of the one woman show master plan. A by-product of my new writing and regular release of frustration habit has been an incessant need to write what’s on my mind; hence the letter to the CTA regarding the mistreatment of the indigent passenger.

Well, I’ve surprised myself once again by typing an email to the Chicago Tribune’s junior publication, The Red Eye. I get the Red Eye everyday for free at my el stop. I like to read it at the gym on the elliptical machine. It’s mini news blurbs, or sound bites, rather. It covers the nation and world and all events, but in a very abbreviated form. Enough exposition, the back page is a bunch of celebrity crap, which I hate that I read, but I do. There was a blurb on the insipid Jessica Alba. She is my token representative of the disdainful Hollywood machine that whores out pretty people for TV and movies and calls them actors. That game is a gross one, but one that I know won’t go away. As an educated actor, it is offensive and belittling as the general population cannot discern between someone like Jessica Alba and someone, well, who can act.. Granted, a majority of the fan base are probably made up of kids who vote in the People’s Teen Choice Awards. Which I’ve sometimes thought that dimwitted, immature adults vote in too. Age is not necessarily representative of good taste.

So, here’s my snarky email to the Red Eye, which made my boss laugh so hard he turned red.

Hello there,

This is a petty, petty complaint, but it's something that has haunted me for awhile now. On behalf of myself and the bazillion other talented and hard working actors in the world, please stop lumping Jessica Alba in with us.

I believe that a fair, alternate title would be, "Well Paid Eye Candy".

I found it utterly hilarious and absurd that in your October 3, 2005 edition, while discussing her talks to be the in the upcoming "I Dream of Jeannie" movie she said, "...the script is just not in the shape I would want it to be in if I was going to do it." Yet, she elected to do "Into the Blue" and "Honey".

She is not the only pretty thing in Hollywood that continues to work based solely on looks, far from it. I just have this standard that when I watch a movie, I like to feel that the actors in it actually have souls.