signs one is being outpaced by one’s siblings:

when my baby brother calls to tell me he’s named me as a beneficiary on his life insurance policy. what? he has life insurance? i still remember when matt would throw a fit at the dinner table if his vegetables touched his macaroni.

initial impression from watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade:

the Barenaked Ladies are really bad at lip-synching.

a thanksgiving-eve snow storm coated everything in a glaze of white, and on thanksgiving morning the sky cleared and everything sparkled all blue and white.

thanksgiving day was pleasantly spent in the cozy apartment of chelsea and lee, gourmet cooks who, like the rest of their guests, don’t believe in getting up early just to cook a turkey, so consequently our thanksgiving dinner started on the late side and continued into the wee hours of the morning. the scrabble game was competitive bordering on viscous, but when the game ended there were three pies, and so we’re all friends again. and, for the record, tam is too a word.

i did mourn the loss of the pumpkin pie (an unfortunate mix-up of sweetened condensed milk and non-sweetened condensed milk), but lee makes an apple pie that i would sell my first born son to have another piece of, and i satisfied the pumpkins craving by making pumpkin pie at our apartment later this week. now andy and i have a fridge with nothing but some leftover udon and lots of pie.

Omnium Gatherum is a smash hit, so yay for that, we’ve extend the show through the 18th and the box office phone is ringing off the hook. of course, i am a slave to the show and have no free time, but so it goes. the latin confuses our patrons; earlier today a i booked a ticket for the play ‘Ominous Gathering.’ tee hee.

i’ll admit it. i’m an incorrigible laundry optimist. and i’m a cheapskate, and since i have to pay for laundry by the load, that only makes the whole situation worse. i make poor judgments all the time:

surely that red tank top won’t bleed onto the whites again this time.

dry clean only? they don’t really mean that.

reshape and dry flat? well, draping it over the radiator is a shape, right?

anyway, tonight’s laundry mishap was worse, because it’s not my laundry. see, i got roped into taking on wardrobe duties for the show i’m stage managing right now. no big deal, really, i just have to do a bit of ironing pre-show, and wash a load of socks, t-shirts, table linens twice a week. well, that’s where i went wrong tonight — this play is a five-course dinner party, and the cast has to eat quite a bit on stage, and they wipe their mouths on cloth napkins. which i tossed into the washer along with all the clothes. which unfortunately stank of salmon, even tho i shook them to remove any lingering crumbs. which spread the small but potent quantity of salmon oil evenly throughout the load, so when i took the clothes out of the dryer, everything smelled like a stinky fish.

and all this because i was too cheap to put the napkins in a separate load.

on mom’s advice i am now re-washing in hot water with a long soak cycle and a half cup of baking soda added to the mix. the fish smell may go, but will i have shrank everything in the process? putting me in charge of wardrobe just has disaster written all over it. if not tonight, then next week, when a pen sneaks past me into the washer, or i forget to separate reds from whites, or i leave someone’s sock in the dryer…the possibilities are endless.

i woke up the morning after the election and it was like un-christmas. you know – that drowsy feeling of anticipation, aware that there’s something special about the day even before you’re awake enough to remember what that is. only this time i had this ugly, black pessimistic feeling as well, like a grey storm cloud hanging over the bedroom.

the long and short of it is:

the half of america that voted for george bush: who are you?

this isn’t the america that i know. and while the subsection of the united states in which i live clearly isn’t representative of the whole (i can count all the people i know who voted republican on one hand), i feel disillusioned to be so far out of touch with the part of american that is and will be making policy decisions that affect not only me, but people all over the world.

ugg. i’m utterly disgusted. i should have done more.

…was celebrated in understated style this year. my costume consisted of a t-shirt which said “scaredycat” and a pair of leopard-print cat ears: i went dressed as my inner child – a little bit frightened of everything, and distinctly feline in my predilection for napping in sunny places and my high strung nature. zeke found the cat ears most intriguing.

i did, however, torture Andy by engaging in my beloved halloween-morning ritual: downloading “monster mash” from itunes and listening to it at full volume right after hopping out of bed in the morning. i can’t explain it; three years of co-habitation with lauren imbued me with a weakness for certain pop pleasures.

it’s not that i’m trying to make a slow exit from the blogging world. it’s just that lately, i feel as tho i have nothing left to give. no creative energy left over after all the “have-tos” have been done. my writing has dried up, i’ve been remiss in my friendships, both near and far, and when i do get an evening off, all i seem capable of doing is vegetating in front of the television or behind a book. believe me, this is not a state of affairs I would like to maintain indefinitely. i’m just trying to get by right now, to breathe into one day at a time, keep believing that my ship will come in, that this will somehow get easier.

so, the brief update:

we’re considering moving to a new apartment a little further north of where we live now. it’s hard to consider leaving our neighborhood, with its abundant take-out thai food, 2 minute-walk to the yoga studio, conveniently located public transit and strangely colorful residents (is that a halloween costume, or are you just always like that?). on the other hand, the place we live now feels, well, like living in a dorm. temporary quarters in an exciting district whose noise pollution frequently intrudes on one’s sleep. and there’s a lot of barf on the sidewalk after the weekend, which i find most unpleasant. the other apartment (belonging to a friend who is moving in with his boyfriend) is on a quiet, tree-line street. it has a garage (so that someday we might own a car), a backyard, an extra bedroom – in short, it feels like the sort of place one could make a life. so, are we going to do what we said we’d do, and settle down and make a life here in chicago? good question.

in rehearsal for a new show. the play is good, and i’m working with a set of designers and actors i enjoy very much, which is making a difficult play/process easier. and i do love the strange things i learn for each production – this time around i’ve learned everything there is to know about interior moulding, confetti cannons, and how to get a gigantic, scary gothic chandelier custom built for under $300.

trying to decide what to be for halloween. it’s another sign that i’m not living my life right when i realize that the past 3 years i’ve been too busy to dress up for or celebrate my favorite holiday. when i was a kid i had my halloween costume planned out in detail by august, at least. i am open to suggestions, one and all…

i have a car! (of sorts). chicago finally has a car-share service (www.i-go-cars.com). after paying a one-time membership fee, i can now walk two blocks from my house to where a shiny new honda is parked, drive wherever i want for $6/hour, and everything – gas, insurance, maintenance, parking – is taken care of. yay, car-shares.

still working for the dentist. since i’ve gotten to a place where i can process insurance claims and schedule patients with my eyes closed and brain half-turned off, i begged my boss to let me take on new tasks for fear i might die of boredom. so now i’m learning how to take x-rays on patients, sterilize equipment, pour models from impressions, and other thing that are at least interesting while i’m still learning them. i have no intention of becoming a dentist (working all day long under those fluorescent lights, looking at people’s yucky moldy mouths, no thank you), but these marketable day-job skills are always useful to tuck into my back pocket for future times of unemployment. actually, i’m just trying to get to a point where i do enough messy lab work that i can wear scrubs instead of uncomfortable/expensive “office” clothes to work in.

thinking of taking the winter off from stage managing (so i’ll just have two part-time jobs, instead of three), and taking a stage combat class and a class in copy-editing (thinking of more flexible day-job possibilites for the future).

see? so now you know i’m not dead, just really really boring.

my favorite moment of the day is twilight – that moment after sunset and before darkness, when the air around you is dark, but the sky is still light and the trees and buildings are sharp, black silhouettes. it is the quietest time of day, the moment when the earth holds its breath. the other night, i was on the train coming home from work, and i looked up from my book and out the window at the twilight, and thought, when i am old, all i want is to spend every evening sitting on a porch somewhere watching this moment, holding my breath as the color drains from the sky and the darkness gathers. it is the closest thing i know to peace on earth.

i like noting the little mile posts of time passing in my life. the phases of the moon. the subtle turning of the season. when our first year’s lease is up. like the previous month’s mile post, this is another one: its the first time i’ve lived in the same dwelling for an entire year since i left my parents house eight years ago. we did it. managed to dig our heels in and stay in one place for a whole year. and while a friend is in fact tempting me with his soon-to-be-vacant, much-posher-and-cheaper-than-ours apartment, we are leaning toward just staying put for a while. having some continuity, or as much as one can have and still be living paycheck to paycheck.

usually the autumn brings a sort of melancholy to me, but this year there is something comforting about the gathering fall. the leaves have just barely begun to turn, but already it is dark when we rise for work, and dark as i take the train home at the end of the day. today was the first really cool day, scarf-weather, and right now the radiators are creaking back into action with a comforting series of clanks and hisses that always precede the warmth, filling the air with the pleasant scent of warm dust.

there are few places i dislike more than a city-hospital ER. andy called me from the train on his way home from work tonight; he’d cut his finger on some glass at the end of his shift and it was still bleeding pretty bad, and did we have any gauze and tape in the first aid kit at home? a trip to walgreens fortified our first aid supplies with gauze and tape (as well as spiderman bandaids and hershey kisses – oen wants to be prepared for any sort of emergency) by the time andy arrived. like head wounds, finger woulds BLEED A LOT, so the bathroom counter looked really dramatic and ER-like by the time we got it re-bandaged and andy installed on the sofa with his arm propped over his head. a quick consultation with the family nurse (andy’s mother) concluded that he probably needed stitches. so we packed up our books, chocolate, and other camping-out essentials and walked a couple of blocks to the nearest hospital.

why i hate hospitals. well, 1) i’m a total germaphobe. upon arriving home several hours later i mandated that we both scrub our hands with hot water and dial soap until i felt sufficently de-germed (last spring andy brought the stomach flu home with him from a doctor’s office and i have no desire to repeat that experience). 2) the place smells like shit. literally. once you’ve been inside for an hour or so you start to forget about it, but if you make the mistake of going out for a cigarette or some fresh air or a phone call, the desensitation process starts all over again. 3) the metal detector and interview with the security guard prior to be admitted into the waiting room. i plied the security guard with the aforementioned chocolate and afterwards had no trouble coming in or out. 4) all the sick people. sick people freak me out, there’s no nice way of putting it. there’s the young hispanic woman in a wheelchair, no visible injuries about her, but she can’t hold her head upright, so she leans it against the built-in IV pole on the back of the chair, hand pressed to forehead. her worried husband crouches on the floor next to the chair, holding a plastic cup of ice water up to her lips and speaking to her in a low voice. there’s the four-hundred pound guy who can’t fit into the over-sized wheelchair. his bare feet are scabby, bright red, and swollen to to such a degree that shoes are not an option. there are several sets of parents with children draped across their laps sporting ear aches, fevers, asthma attacks. there’s the young couple who share their newspaper with us; the wife has cut the palm of her hand badly and is worried about her job as a massage therapist. when andy and the woman both go for their stitches, the husband peeks into the back and gives me regular status reports on both cases. in the treatment room, andy tries to distract the young woman with jokes as she struggles with queasiness brought on by the sight of her own blood soaking through the bandage.

i hate hospitals. i think the people who work in them are heros. i just don’t want to repeat that experience, even for a minor injury, again any time soon.

well, he wouldn’t vote for barak obama, apparently. according to alan keyes, that is, who released a public statement today stating that if christ were here today, he wouldn’t vote for barak obama (he doesn’t specify whether jesus would vote for keyes or if he’d opt for a write-in candidate). well, how can you argue with a political opponent who has a direct line to god?