Thanking Thankful Thanks

I am thankful for this wonderful home I've made with my best friend. Our apartment is warm and cozy. Our kitchen is full of good smells, our couch is full of blankets and snuggly cats, our lives are full of laughter and sometimes screams of terror (because Ann and I are fucking crazy, if you haven't noticed). My years living here have been some of the happiest of my life, and I know I will miss them long after they are gone.

Not only am I able to support my artistic career with day jobs, but I am able to do so with day jobs that I love. Leasing apartments lets me interact with people (which fills my extroverted little heart with glee), many of whom come from all over the world; helps me give back to the apartment community I love, and provides me with ample down time in between appointments where I can just hang out on my couch and read. Walking dogs seems like a magical wonder-job dreamed up just for me. I've learned so much about dog training and handling. I love when an abused, frightened dog chooses to trust and bond to me; I love the challenge of working with dominant, potentially dangerous dogs and learning to do so without fear. I love the amount of exercise I get every day. I love being outside. I mean, come on. I literally get paid to play with puppies all day.

And - I get to act. I get to be a professional story teller. Nothing on earth makes me feel more alive than getting inside someone else's head and helping others see things from their shoes. I've made people laugh and cry, I've made people love me and hate me, I've been ugly and I've been beautiful, I've been strong and I've been broken. When I was a very little kid, the first thing I remember telling people I wanted to be was an actor. And I grew up, and that's what I did.

I live in an area with a vast array of food choices. I can buy food without GMOs, organic food, vegetarian and vegan food, local food, food straight from the farmer, exotic food from all over the world, high quality ingredients, gluten-free food, dairy alternatives, food made by people who really love food. I love how health-conscious DC is, and I love that there are so many people here who are as passionate about food as I am.

My friends are brilliant and perfect and gorgeous. I've found people who get my weird ass sense of humor and make me laugh until I can't breathe. I have friends who I know will love me at my worst, support me at my weakest, and whom I want to love and support. I have friends I rarely hear from who will send me a sweet message when they know I'm sad, or are just thinking of me, and it brightens my day so much. My friends are intelligent and passionate. They are the kind of people who have been filling up my newsfeed with daily Thanksgiving posts of their own. I have friends of different ages, races, political opinions, spiritual beliefs, socio-economic statuses, cultures, and lifestyles. They make my life richer and they make me better.

I have a father who raised me to believe there was nothing I couldn't do, who taught his daughter about tools and carpentry and campfires and bugs and playing in the dirt just like he would have a son,  who taught me to be brave and strong and to have a sense of honor. I have a mother who is endlessly patient, a careful listener, and an amazingly resilient woman who taught me to love endlessly, to never judge, to value everyone's opinion, to give with everything I have. I have a sister who never tires of sharing deep philosophical Harry Potter conversations with me, who I can call at any time to share one of our hundreds of inside jokes and know she will find it just as hilarious as she did the first time, who stands up for me when I'm too unsure to stand up for myself, who somewhere along the way went from being my annoying little sister to my best friend. I have a grandmother who believes in growth and change even at eighty-seven years of age; who, despite growing up on a North Carolina farm in a time and place of racism and misogyny, voted for Obama because of his stances on women's and gay rights; who is my ultimate inspiration for aging without losing curiosity and joy. I have aunts and uncles and cousins, some who are very similar to me, and some who are very different - but who all find ways to bond and connect with me, and who love and support me.

I have this blog, this little corner of the internet, where I can share my thoughts. Good friends read it, acquaintances I didn't realize still thought of me read it, strangers read it. This blog is quite small in the scheme of the blogisphere, but I am so grateful to all of you who stop by here and check up on my life and thoughts. I can't tell you just how much it means to me.

I live in a country where I can make change happen, by voting with my ballot and my wallet, by protesting, by signing petitions, by sharing my opinions through public social media without fear of arrest or prosecution. There are many place in the world where that is not the case, and I am deeply grateful for this privilege.

I have a skinny orange knock-kneed cat I adopted because I was afraid no one else would, who was unfriendly and aloof for an entire year, who eventually warmed up to me and became a more devoted and loving little pet than I ever could have imagined. I have a very sweet, very stupid, very tiny cat with the softest, most beautiful fur, who runs around and breaks my things and meows nonstop and constantly tries to jump into the dishwasher/fridge/oven and sometimes wakes me up by knocking a lamp on my head, but snuggles right up next to my face every night, and who loves nothing more than being rocked like a baby, carried around my apartment with her head on my shoulder until she purs herself to sleep. I have the most loving little elderly rat who snuggles into my pockets and does his little rat purr as I scratch behind his ears, peeing on me all the while.

I have a healthy, strong, bendy body that can do all sorts of things. It can dance around and run and climb up high and perch (and then be terrified to come down) and stretch and hug and have sex (heh) and see and hear and taste and smell and touch. It is a wonderful vehicle to experience the world through.

I spend most of my life very, very happy. There are so many things that bring me joy. I feel overwhelmed by how much love and beauty exists. There is a lot of bad in this world, but there is so much good. I'm thankful I can see it.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Here's Some Crap I've Been Up To Lately

Since last we spake, I have been involved in 2 theater projects. First, I assistant directed my friend Jason for a short piece of three ten-minute plays. Having no directorial experience whatsoever, I pretty much fell into this position, a la the following:

Jason: Want to be a reader for auditions tonight?
Me: Sure. Why not.

Jason: Want to stick around for callbacks and help me cast?
Me: Sure. Why not.

Jason: That was fun. Want to AD?
Me: I absolutely do not have time to. But sure. Why not.

I had to miss the last week of rehearsals and the one performance due to theater project number two, which was a bummer (missing the rehearsals/show, not working on the 2nd project). Half of the cast was people I'm already friends with, the other half was delightful, and they were all great actors, so all in all the experience was quite marvelous for me.

The second project is a play with Venus Theatre called Claudie Hukill.

It's the first time in a few years since I've worked with a cast of such ranging ages, and I really like it. We've got a cast of good listeners, and I'm loving doing scene work with everyone. I think our chemistry is already strong, and I'm looking forward to digging deeper into our characters' relationships.  Also, working with a smart director is always wonderful, and that is definitely Deb :)

So yeah. If the idea of me desperately trying to speak in a Boston accent while the rest of the cast uses a West Virginian accent sounds amusing to you, you should come see it. 

~*~

I am getting a little crazily excited for Thanksgiving.

Here's the thing. Everyone always shits all over Thanksgiving. Halloween gets so much hype (rightfully so), and Christmas gets even more hype (naturally), but THEN everyone decides they are just SO DAMN EXCITED about Christmas, they steamroll Thanksgiving and bust out the Christmas crap Nov. 1. And I'm aware it's mostly retailers that are responsible for this, but you know a few of you out there allow yourselves a Christmassy thing or two before Black Friday.

There are several major qualms I have with this. First of all, I have OCD (actually though, as in I've been medicated for it) and have many rules about how I think the world should behave. For example, you can begin celebrating Christmas the day after Thanksgiving. And no one celebrates Christmas like me. I go ape-shit on Christmas. I listen to nothing by Christmas music for the entire month, I watch a minimum of three Christmas movies every week, I bake cookies and roast chestnuts, I obsess over Christmas presents, I decorate, I change the lyrics to carols to make them about my pets and sing to them all day around the apartment. It's a little intense. But I wait until the day after Thanksgiving like a FUCKING SANE PERSON. 

Because Thanksgiving is wonderful. I get to spend time with my family (whom I adore), I get to happily think of all the fantastic things in my life that I'm grateful for, I get to enjoy the last bit of autumn, and, best of all, I get to cook for people. (Food is my favorite thing. Cooking is my favorite thing. Cooking for other people is my favorite thing. Nothing makes me happier than showing people I love them by making them tasty food. That, and knitting them scarves.) I have been scouring the internet, my cookbooks, and the absurd number of foodie magazines I hoard collect for the past couple weeks, trying to decide what recipes I want to try out on my family. 

So please. Don't let Christmas be a greedy bitch. Thanksgiving is just the nicest.

~*~

If you don't follow Ann and (her brother) Shawn's blog, Sibling and Charybdis, it is possible that you are an idiot (because they are brilliant and hilarious and you should follow it, duh). It is also possible that you missed this.

And on that note, I am going to go eat some brussels sprouts. Peace out, bitchlets.

Ingrid Michaelson Is My Soul-Twin

The audio and video get a little out of sync at the end, but my new computer is apparently incapable of filming a video correctly... so I'm sorry, internet, but you'll just have to deal. And please pardon the crash at one point. It was Stella doing something terrible. Other than that, enjoy!

How to Hit on Ladies

Winking always gets you sex.

Ask any woman, and she will tell you that walking down the street - especially in a city - attracts a certain number of cat calls. Doesn't seem to matter that much what you're wearing or how you look - if you're a girl, you're going to get some attention. As a professional dog walker who spends about six hours every day walking around the city, I get this a lot. Usually it's just a simple whistle or "Hey sexy", but sometimes you get some particularly creative incidents.

Last week, for example, I was walking a cute little dog named Cinnamon through the suburbs of DC. As I strolled down the street, two men standing about twenty feet apart from each other began to engage in an extremely loud, excruciatingly specific conversation about my various body parts. They spoke to each other and did not acknowledge my presence at all. This went on until I was about halfway down the block from them.

Naturally, this experience left me feeling flattered, respected, and a bit aroused. It got me thinking, though, about all the poor unlucky-in-love schmucks out there going about things entirely the wrong way. Thing is, there are actually gents who think the clear shot to a lady's heart is by "getting to know her" through "conversation" before asking her out on a "date", not shouting at her like she's a stripper on a pole. You know where your crazy antics are getting you, dude? Straight on the fast track to friend zone and celibacy. And so, based on my own experiences, I have decided to lay out a fool-proof, step-by-step guide to bang-city. Observe:

1. Get her attention by whistling or making kissing noises. Women love being beckoned like animals. It shows off your care-giving side.

2. Offer up a "Hey, sexy/baby/gorgeous". I am confident I speak for all females when I say that nothing endears me more to a man than being addressed with a degree of intimacy usually reserved only for people I've already slept with.

3. Compliment her on her appearance. We all know she wants you to. You think she's wearing those yoga pants because they're comfortable? Heck no, techno. Homegirl's practically begging for someone to tell her her butt looks like two cantaloupes squished together.

4. Ask for her number. Because asking someone for their number ten seconds into an interaction always works.

If, for some reason, she's a frigid bitch and didn't give you her number, you now have two options.

5a. "I want to (verb) your (adjective) (noun)." To be fair, the lady just met you. She has yet to be acquainted with the glory that is your mighty sexual man prowess. Inform her. Immediately. Once she knows just what a romantic interlude with you will look like, she won't be able to resist. And don't be afraid to get creative when it comes to verbs. "Go balls deep in" might sound like a mouthful (pun intended), but when used in the right context, the results can be magnificent.

5b. Yell "HEY! I'M TALKING TO YOU!" with as much aggression as you can muster. There's nothing chicks love more than an alpha male. If you've got one who's especially shrewish (and if she's ignoring your advances so far, we are most certainly dealing with a Grade A Femi-Nazi Man-Hating Bitch), nothing is going to make her weak in the knees faster than a man who is willing and ready to put her in her place. Use this step with caution, however. There's always the chance this will backfire and really, genuinely scare the shit out of her - because you're significantly stronger than her, about 50-100 pounds heavier, and you know, rape is a thing.

So there you have it. Stop playing the nice guy card like a little bitch, and get out there and lasso yourself a lady. Happy hunting, gentlemen.

Guest Post from Carolyn @ Full-On Fit!

I recently got an email from the lovely Carolyn asking if I would be interested in having a guest blogger. I said yes, because a) networky stuff is one of my favorite aspects of blogging, and b) her post is about yoga, and we all know I'm hella about yoga. Check out Carolyn's blog Full-On Fit to follow her "journey to find physical, mental and emotional health."

Without further ado, here's Carolyn's post!

A Quest for the Perfect Exercise: How Yoga Enlightened Me

I love to exercise, but nothing had ever made me feel the way I felt when I discovered yoga. The initial experience was so new and exciting that I'll never forget about it for as long as I live. Yeah, it was that memorable. If you've been on the search for an all-encompassing exercise that stimulates mind, body, and soul, listen to how I got involved in this life-changing art.

First, here's a little background on me. I've always been a fairly active and athletic person. My favorite ways to exercise included kickboxing classes and spinning. Classes are great because you are in an environment conducive to working out. You work alongside people just like you who are also trying to find an exciting way to get in shape. Kickboxing is fairly self-explanatory--you practice punch and kick combinations with the guidance of an instructor either in the air or on a heavy bag. Spinning refers to an instructor-led stationary cycling class where music and verbal encouragement are the key forms of motivation to work hard and get fit. While both workout styles offered different aspects that I really enjoyed, I was always interested in trying yoga one day.

So why did I decide to try yoga? I'd been doing plenty of research on it out of pure curiosity and believed that it would offer me more health benefits than both the kickboxing and the spinning. I learned that yoga aided with improvements in three major areas: the immune system, muscle tone, and posture.

Immune System

The breathing aspects of yoga work to strengthen the immune system in a number of ways. The focus on breathing provides the body with proper oxygen for exercise and daily function, while exhalation detoxifies your lungs. Yoga also helps to create a balance in hormone release, decreases the major illness causes of stress and anxiety, and aids in ridding harmful microbes from the body when acupressure points are stimulated.

Muscle Tone

Yoga involves many holds, twists, and bends that all require the muscles to flex and release. Some of these positions force the arms and legs to support the bodyweight for seconds or minutes at a time. All of these movements stimulate muscle growth and aid in burning fat and increasing definition.  Dr. Glen Axelrod of the Center for Orthopedic & Spine Care even claims, “Many professional athletic teams use yoga as an integral part of their training.”

Posture

Improved posture comes with an increase in muscle mass and greater flexibility that results from practicing all the different holds. Poor posture inhibits bloodflow and the proper functioning of organs leading to disease.

After plenty of Web-surfing and article reading, I jumped at the chance to take a yoga class with a friend named Alyssa. Alyssa was already a practitioner of yoga--even though it had only been six months since she began. Regardless, she was far more experienced than I and taught me more than I could've ever have imagined in such a short amount of time. My friend helped me pick out the proper clothing and yoga mat, and she offered many tips that came in very handy during the class. I even learned that shoes weren't required!

After my first session, I was hooked. It was an experience like no other. I was nervous at first since I was a newbie, but everybody was in their own little universe when I entered the room. You could hear the drop of a needle--that's how silent it was. We started with simple breathing, then moved on to basic poses, called asanas, including the mountain and warrior. Even though the poses were difficult and felt awkward at first, I quickly got used to them and had a blast during my first session. I felt sore and out of breath at the end of class, but it was in a very good way. Alyssa was there to support me with smiles and eye contact the whole time.

Since that initial yoga class, I've taken several more and practice at home as well. I already feel stronger, more flexible, more energized, and healthier in general. Yoga is the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I'll definitely continue to learn and improve my technique from now on.

http://blog.gaiam.com/blog/3-yoga-moves-to-boost-immunity/

Sing Along Friday

Check out these tunes, cuz I think they're rockin'.

And then this one, because it's my favorite scary music video ever and it's Halloween-time, muhfuckas. If you don't like vulgarity and glorified violence, maybe don't watch it. 

I'm off to pack my weekend full of awesomeness. Do the same, cupcakes.

A Letter to Myself On My Birthday, One Year Ago

I remember how you're feeling. You feel as though you're on the cusp of something big. For the first time in six years, you are going to examine your life outside of the context of someone else. You've gotten over the initial heartache. You're done feeling sad. You've pushed your bruised, slightly battered little heart to the back of the shelf to deal with later. This year is going to be big and exciting, and it's going to change you. You can tell.

You'll use your newfound free time to cultivate friendships, figure out what it is that makes you tick, and just spend some time with you. You'll start to appreciate yourself in a way you never did before. You'll understand what people love about you, and you'll realize that as long as you love yourself, it's okay if not everyone else does. You'll grow stronger in your own opinions. When someone disagrees with you, you won't surrender or fight for your say. Instead you'll listen, share, learn, grow. You'll learn to stand up for yourself. You'll learn to fill your life with people who make you feel fantastic and love you enough to tell you things you don't want to hear. You'll stop wasting time on people who make you feel small. You'll begin to differentiate between someone else making you feel small, and you attributing your feelings of smallness to another person.

Someone will look at you carefully and say, "I think your heart is very guarded right now." You'll nod. It needs to be. You'll deal with that later.

You will feel so much joy, so much fullness, so much love. You will find beauty in everything around you. You will be shocked that you could have been missing this and not even known. You will begin to think that nothing could ever bring you down.

It can. Hold on. This one's going to hurt.

You will see sides of yourself you have never seen before. You will experience your emotions in a way you never have before. But even through the worst of it, you will feel that you are stronger. When you are lying on your back, staring up at your ceiling and feeling like your chest will cave in, you will remember a walk in the dark at three in the morning when you told yourself, "This will end. This will pass. I will be okay." And you will know it's true now, because it was true then.

You will see others around you reaching different milestones. You will think back to how you thought your life would look now, and you will feel discouraged. You will try a number of things, thinking they will bring you what you want. Some will, some won't. You will ultimately reach a sort of peace, knowing that you can achieve more than you thought you could, and knowing that your path doesn't need to look like everyone else's.

You will see your body grow stronger than you ever imagined. You will wonder if your heart can do the same. You will consider re-examining it.

Now that you have some perspective, you will immerse yourself back into some of those deep scars you have. You'll see how much further they go back than you realized. You'll begin to recognize that no one else can fix you. You have to heal yourself.

You'll try to open your heart again to other people. You'll be scared, so scared that you can only love people who can't quite love you as much. Each time you'll get a little closer to what you're looking for. Each time you'll have a clearer idea of who he'll be.

You will find beauty in all these struggles. You will have enough perspective to see how much you are growing. For every time you feel bogged down by the world, you will have ten times where you feel lifted up with gratitude that your life is so damn good.

You will learn forgiveness in a more painful way than you have ever imagined. You will be overwhelmed by the wonderful, beautiful people in your life who have chosen to love you. You will learn how to protect yourself but never, ever stop loving. You will find your backbone.

I wish I could tell you that your life on this side of the year looks the way you are expecting it to. I'm not where you thought I'd be on several fronts. However, I can promise you this: I am joyful. I am peaceful. I am stronger. I am thoroughly and utterly content.

I love you, and I am so, so proud of you.

I'll see you soon.

-Katie