What a Year

I'm sitting on an Amtrak train en route to Washington DC to celebrate the new decade in our nation's capitol with some wonderful Villanova friends, and it is suddenly occurring to me that today is the last day of 2009.. which, when I think about it, was a really eventful year of my life.

What happened in 09?
I made a movie
I graduated college
I played a big part in my final VSMT show
I lived in LA
I had some identity crises
I studied at Stella Adler, Mike Lemon, & Kathy Wickline
I made a daring career choice
I lived at the beach
I spent a whole lot of time in New York City
I committed to my girlfriend
I came out to my extended family
I lost 15 pounds
I rented a car
I started a blog
I went on a cruise
I discovered an interest in international cinema
I read books and listened to audiobooks
I started cooking meals
I cleaned out my room and all my boxes
I ate interesting foods at nice restaurants
I went to a lot of parties
I skiied, cycled, jogged, did pilates and yoga
I ran 2 miles without stopping for the first time in my life
I saw Nova make it to the Final Four (and even cared about it)
I saw gay rights get rejected from too many places, but accepted into a few
I saw a black president come into office - something I really never thought would happen so early on in my life
I made a ton of new friends from many different groups
I realized which friends will probably stick with me for life
I rode cars, buses, trains, planes, and ships
I interned for a famous person, a big company, and a small company
I lived in 3 different apartments and 2 different houses in 4 different states

2009 was a huge, life-changing year for me, if I really think about it. I don't think I could really sum it up as the "Year of ____", as many try to... well, maybe a year of -- as most years are -- growing up.



- Posted from my iPhone

Ho Ho Ho, and a bottle of Grey Goose

Do you remember when you stopped believing?

I remember that I tried to hold on for as long as I possibly could, and that I still tried to believe long after I really didn’t quite anymore.  Even after I started picking up on hints from TV sitcom and cartoon parents who said things about not wanting the kids to find out Santa isn’t real (come on TV writers, why must you spoil it for your younger audiences?), even after my cousins and I started catching on that the guy in the Santa suit at our Christmas Eve parties bore a striking resemblance to our Uncle Scott, who always happened to be conveniently in the other room washing dishes when Santa visited (though one year they had our grandmom wear the suit instead just to throw us off!), even after Jacqueline & her sister from our swim team told my brother & me one summer about how they had spied on their parents wrapping presents and putting them under the tree the previous Christmas Eve (this was pretty hard evidence to refute) - I refused to stop believing.  I had such a faith in this magic that just had to exist in the world that I did not want to let go.

But some time around the age of 9 I guess I let the building evidence get to me.  The last straw was, funny enough, my presents on Christmas morning -- brand name presents.  I remember thinking, “Why would Santa bring me colored pencils that say The Gap on them instead of making them himself in his workshop?”  And then a few packages later I received a cassette tape with a price tag LEFT RIGHT ON IT from The Wall -- why would Santa outsource to The Wall?  Apparently “Santa” was a little overtired and got a little sloppy that year.  It never occurred to me that I had picked out many of my gifts every year in catalogues and commercials before I received them, and that they were obviously brands too - Mattel, Barbie, Fisher Price.... But this year, somehow even more than the price tag, those Gap colored pencils (of all things) did it to me, and my last stitches of faith didn’t immediately drop and smash like a rock but sort of feather-glided away from me in the air.  

Still, even after my true belief was gone, I kept it up anyway.  I didn’t admit my not believing to my parents until a couple years later.  And I continued to play my favorite December game, where I pretended to be a toy-making elf named Sterra (I am sharing some pretty private details here) with my friends, my brother, or by myself.  And even after I was a little too old to keep that up, I held onto my Christmas spirit.  Whenever that time of year rolled around, a big part of me turned into an excited little kid again.. even when the religious aspects of Christmas didn’t mean as much to me anymore... and I couldn’t wait to experience all of our adorably lame family traditions like singing Christmas carols while Aunt Jeanne plays piano (and almost no one can carry a tune).

So where did it go?  I mean my real, true Christmas spirit somehow just hasn’t been there the past few years like it was for so many years before.  And it has something to do with my comfortability with my family.. My spirit took a low blow that first year the Crane cousins decided that instead of being all excited about singing carols, it would be more fun to play drinking games - even though every other day of the year drinking games would have sounded great to me, something about adding this to our Christmas Eve party felt wrong somehow.. And then as I started having to hide my personal life from my extended family (on both sides), I started sort of dreading the family events I’d once been impatient waiting for.. instead I was anxious awaiting the inevitable “So, what boys are you dating?” and the “Good for you, you’re single!” talk that followed, as I sadly watched my cousins with their boyfriends & girlfriends and missed my own.  So I dropped a little more cheer and picked up a little more martini.  And grew up a little more, finally, after fighting it all these years.

And this year, everything will be different.

The Urge to Write, Coming Out, Food Obsession... What's On My Mind Right Now

I have been itching to blog lately. as weird as that is....  I used to really dislike the idea of blogging.  I think it was the days of angsty Xanga entries that threw me off.. I never liked the idea of airing one’s dirty laundry for all the public to read.  A friend of mine in high school used to rant about all her relationship drama and everyone would talk about it the next day - that’s a little too attention-seeking, even for my taste.  And I once tried to jump on the bandwagon and start a Xanga the summer after I graduated high school - it only lasted about a month, mind you - that had unfortunately happy-go-lucky entries along the lines of “Today we went to the movies. The movie was so cool. Then we went to the diner. It was so much fun.” -- not sure whether to yawn or barf.

But I’ve kept a private journal for quite some time now - sometimes it’s been my savior - and I think part of what’s begun to hook me into blogging is, funny enough, Twitter.  I’ve enjoyed sharing little statements of how I feel about life at various points throughout my week.  And lately I’ve felt this strange urge originating in the bottoms of my fingers and pushing to get its way out through my fingertips - to WRITE.  It’s a strong urge I get fairly often, at which point I’d usually turn to my highly password-protected journal, but sometimes my busy daily life makes me ignore it -- and now suddenly I no longer can.  And for some reason I’m not seeking the same protection I normally do.  

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Hm.  It only just now occurs to me as I’m writing this, but I wonder if this sudden relinquishing of my protective tendencies is due in part to my recent if not long-overdue coming out to my extended family and my parents’ friends.  I no longer need to hide who I am or who I’m in a relationship with from my family, church friends, country club people, mutual friends of my cousins... and I’ve got to say, it really is liberating after two years of walking on eggshells around people who aren’t from Villanova (who’d have thought that would be my gay haven, of all places!)  

Tonight at my film acting class, I shared (we have to share something at the beginning of each class) the fact that I am now about to introduce my girlfriend to my extended family, that I just finally told them about her after more than two years.. and in doing so I came out to my class as well.  Well, it’s a funny phenomenon: as soon as I uttered the words “my girlfriend,” all attention in the room was on me in a way it hadn’t been the moment before, and suddenly I was much more interesting to everyone than I had been.  It’s sometimes as if everyone was seeing me as this generic girl and all of a sudden I became multidimensional to them.  One of my best friends used to (somewhat jokingly) tell me that I would be a boring fruity-drink-loving college girl if it weren’t for the fact that I was into girls.  And you wonder why I revel in this identity.  I certainly don’t think I’m boring without my bisexuality, but it does feel like something special - like I’ve discovered this incredible secret in the world that most people aren’t in on.

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So after being on a diet for the past four or so months (trying to become an actress = trying to lose the college weight) and being on Weight Watchers for the past two or three, lately I’ve been having a rough time with it.  I guess I’ve become aware of the consequences of the extreme attention to calories and points all the time: an unhealthy obsession with every bite of food you’re putting into your mouth.  As the Weight Watchers leaders say, “If you bite it, write it.”  That puts a whole lot of calculating into everything you eat all day, every day.  After a while of this, I think it’s finally been getting to me.  Tonight I caved and bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.  I worked it into my extra points for the week (there are 35 extra every week - not bad - though I usually spend them all on weekend alcohol, sigh), and I thankfully didn’t eat the whole pint though I did end up having more than I’d like to have.... but I think I needed this so I could stop feeling deprived.  And I think it might have done the trick.  It was “bad” enough, delicious & decadent enough, that I don’t feel the need to keep cheating on my diet the rest of the week. 

I will go back to my personal battle tomorrow, though: Working at a bakery shoots three or four bullets right into my diet-shield every single day I’m there.. I try to combat it with ammunition of celery with peanut butter and 100 calorie packs of goodies, but it’s a skirmish where I can never be sure which side will come out on top... I really should leave for that reason alone.  I struggle back and forth with whether this is actually enough reason to find a new job or if I should stick it out longer.  So I stick it out, for now.

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All my postings probably won’t be quite this long, I promise... but, like I said, I was having the urge to get my thoughts out through my fingertips.

How sweet it is to have a kitty curled on the bottom of my bed right now.  I highly recommend it.