okay, i’m taking a page out of lau’s blog and attempting the dirty dozen to make up for my distinct lack of blogging:

1. be mine. i have to say that i’ve never been on the kate spade bandwagon. i’m not on the purses-that-cost-more-than-their-raw-materials bandwagon, really. but, luxury handbag issues aside*, my attention was drawn to the kate spade website on valentine’s day which has a darn cute collection of e-cards one can send to their valentine. what the connection is between handbags and e-valentines? i couldn’t say. but they are cute.

2. things you shouldn’t buy on the internet: Hairsoreal. i swear that this was one of those sidebar ads on facebook the other day. i couldn’t have made this product up if i’d tried. it’s a hair-replacement product that, as near as i can tell, is a can of little tiny hair-shaped fibers, that you shake over your head like you were seasoning your bald patch with hair-shaped pepper. the fibers magically stick to one another and poof! there goes the bald spot. did anyone else go to the children’s science museum when you were a kid and get to play with the magnetic iron filings? i imagine it’s sort of like that. the thing i don’t get, tho, is why men worry so much about baldness. seriously. everyone’s bald! a receding hairline is like the last thing i’d notice on a guy, and it sure wouldn’t be the deciding factor as to whether i’d go out with him or think he’s attractive. balding heads areabout as common as having brown hair, or freckles. weird, the things we worry about.

3. things you maybe should buy on the internet: the under-the-sink urban-enviro-friendly compost system. this seems strange to me, because it doesn’t use enzymes and worms to heat up and chew thru the garbage, but somehow magically heats (via electricity) the garbage into dirt. that sort of sounds…too easy. but there’s a weird part of me that really really wants to try composting, but i also don’t want to make my roommate and neighbors hate me.

4. things you should do on the internet: play scrabulous with me before Big Bad Hasbro shuts them down.

5. winter. the ugliest winter in recent memory plods along in chicago. there has been some sort of snow on the ground continuously since christmas. the temp keeps dipping down into the single digits, which sends the windchill plummeting to 20 or 30 below. the locks on my car doors freeze. i think of myself as a very good, practical winter driver, and yet my car has gotten stuck on patches of ice three times in the past week. it’s also making marathon training (see item 8) particularly challenging. also, if the speed at which i am misplacing/losing mittens and hats continues to accelerate the way it has steadily since christmas, i’m going to die of frostbite long before spring arrives.

6. ultimate snow frisbee is the best sport ever. well, actually, i’d trade it for regular ultimate on a sunny summer day if i had a choice, but it has been a way to make winter bearable, at least for a couple of hours on saturday mornings. no one can run, cut, or handle the frisbee worth a damn, but dive rolls are awesome.

7. indoor ultimate frisbee. this is a historic moment, this new, ultimate-frisbee-playing self, because it’s really the first time i’ve enjoyed and excelled at playing any team sport. anyway, after six months of a pickup game, i got brave and signed up for an indoor winter league. i got totally skooled on my first day, but by the end of the season my playing has improved considerably.

8. stockholm marathon. continuing with the sports-themed news items, the stockholm marathon is breathing down my neck. picking a marathon is sort of like doing airport math. when i schedule a flight, i think to myself, “hmm, mid morning sound good.” and then i book a 10am flight, neglecting, as always, to do the airport math: to get awake, out the door, take public transit to the airport, and check in luggage requires that i am awake a minimum of 4 hours before the flight departs, which means that a reasonable-sounding 10am flight turns into a 6am wake up call. so, marathon math is sort of the same thing. may 31 sounds like a nice time of year to run a marathon, right? except that one neglects to count backwards by 4 or 5 months and realize that means runs in the double digits before the end of february. it’s really really hard to run more than an hour on a treadmill without going kookoo with boredom.

9. marathon pied piper: i’m actually feeling like something of a marathon pied piper. without really meaning to, i find myself suddenly in the position of leading a small group from my dojo in training for this fall’s chicago marathon. i’m the only one who has run a marathon before (and i’ve only done one, mind you), but somehow this makes me the expert. yikes. actually, tho, it’s weird but good. i mean, leading and organizing people and projects is what i do for a living, but i’ve really only ever applied those skills to making theatre happen before. but leading people on non-work-related pursuits (that they are equally if not more passionate about): this…sort of suits me. huh.

10. enough with the sports, let’s talk about food: C sent me the link to this food blog called 101 cookbooks, and it is now my new favorite place for recipes. mostly if not entirely veggie. gets a little out there with the hippy ingredients (where DOES one buy agave nectar?), but usually there are substitutions indicated for those of us still slumming it at the Jewel from time to time.

11. animal, miracle, vegetable: have been reading kingsolver’s book about her family’s year of farming and eating locally and…it has definitely gotten under my skin a bit when it comes to produce shopping. i look longingly at the four-dollar half pint of raspberries and think, those won’t taste like anything, they’ve been shipped halfway around the world. and that’s absurd to spend such money for something that won’t even taste good anyway. i reach for the winter fruits: apples, grapefruit, and think that summer raspberries will taste that much better for the waiting. still, its not like i’ve seen a grapefruit tree hanging around outside in chicago, either. how does one reconcile the luxury of a varied diet with the economic, political, environmental, social arguments for eating locally-produced food? i mean, what would canadians living far north in the tundra do to eat locally? live off reindeer meat for 6sixmonths at a time and risk scurvy? no, they thank their lucky stars that they can truck in grapefruit from florida, of course. it’s tricky, and thanks to this book and others, i’m more aware of the issue, but no more resolved. for about five months of the year, my CSA provides nearly all the fruits and vegetables i need, and they *are* local and organic. it’s just the other half of the year that i’m not sure what to do. what i do know is, the hyde park produce market had ripe avocados on sale for $.50 each today. and i bought one and i felt guilty about it and still it tasted SOOOOO good on my sandwich. thank you, honduras, for sending me your avocados.

12. 101 in 1001: go completely veggie for a month: check, done. i conducted this experiment for the month of january. the play-by-play is linked, but the upshot is: i can get along just fine without meat in terms of what i crave to eat. leaning how to be veggie in a non-veggie world will take a little more practice (particularly with regard to when other people cook for me), but it’s not an insurmountable challenge. the insurmountable challenge is that i think my body needs more protein than i’m capable of giving it from vegetable sources when i’m running/training heavily. while there are a lot of good reasons for being veggie that i can get behind, the primary reason that motivates me is that i think the disconnect between animals and food in our modern world is unnatural and it leads to unhealthful foods, unsound environmental practices, and unspeakable animal cruelty. (i mean, did you read the about last week’s beef recall? the nation’s school cafeterias are feeding our kids beef from cows that were too sick to even stand up. it’s horrific.) so all this brings me to the conclusion that the right path for me, i think, is to continue to be veggie when eating out, and on the occasion that i’m feeling really short on protein, i can cook a piece of chicken or turkey at home. then as a consumer i can at least make some decisions about the source of the meat, buying organic, buying locally. the same goes for eggs and dairy, too, when it comes to buying but…i don’t think i have the willpower to be vegan everywhere that i can’t be assured of the organic status of the ingredients.

13 [baker’s dozen]. the american dream: oh internets: what does the phrase “american dream” mean to you? i ask because, until this week, i’d never really thought much about it, aside from a vaguely negative connotation and association with the idea of manifest destiny. anyway, Next Theatre is producing a show called the American Dream Songbook, and as part of the lobby display, C asked the artistic associates and friends of the theatre to send in photos that represented our notion of the american dream. i couldn’t really figure out where to start for a while. i dug through old photos, and came across a series of self-portraits that A and i took the day we left for chicago. we posed in front of the Uhaul truck, one hand shading our faces, head tipped up, starting into the future like brave explorers. they were goofy photos, but i remember insisting that we take them, because we were setting off on this grand adventure, this next step in our lives, and i wanted to be able to look back and remember how we felt on that day. so i dug up that picture and sent it in with the following caption: “aug, 2003: looking into our bright shiny future the day we left idaho to move to chicago. a few years later, he broke my heart. but i still live in chicago.” some of my friends who saw it thought the caption was tragic, others thought it was hilariously funny. i realized later it was kind of both. it was weird to put up a photo of myself and A, especially in a public theatre lobby where friends of his might very well see it. but, i decided, that *was* my iconic american dream photo. the point (and this is the point of the show at Next as well) is that the american dream is elusive. it always falls short. life doesn’t turn out the way we think it will, but what we find instead sometime surprises us, and it is the hope that sustains us and gets us to surprising endings.

fast forward five years from that day in front of the Uhaul, and now we’re all grown up: A is a parent and a successful actor, he’s teaching classes at the school where, five years ago, we came to chicago so he could study. as far as theatre goes, i’m living the dream: i’m working full time in my field, no day job. i don’t have money to burn, but i can’t complain; i can pay my rent, i never worry about scraping by till the next paycheck or the next gig. i have a lovely apartment, great friends, a good life. but A and i, as a unit, didn’t survive. we found all those things we came to chicago to find, but in the pursuit, we lost the only thing that we brought with us to chicago: the us. and to be honest, i don’t know that we could have gotten to the places we are now together.

so, we end with an essay assignment, comment box: what does the phrase “american dream” evoke in you? go!

*did i blog about the time that my darling cat actually threw up into my purse? when i’m not home for too many hours he sleeps or does whatever it is that cats do all day but neglects to eat, so i get home and he’s starving and wolfs his food down and then sometimes yarfs it right back up. so one night he gulped some food, then sat down on his customary position of the footstool next to my desk. i had dropped my purse under the desk against the footstool. i left the room, and while i was gone, without even getting off the stool, the cat leaned over the side and PUKED INTO MY PURSE. what is it, a kitty barf bag? anyway, suffice to say that running the $25 canvas bag through a hot washing machine was no big deal. i laughed at the grossness of it all, and zeke looked mildly embarrassed. had i been carrying a $500 kate spade leather handbag, the cat-barf episode would have been a lot less funny.