Since the next few months of my life have the potential to be life-changing and exciting, I figured I'd try to start updating again.

I'm actually getting to go home in a couple of days for Steph's wedding which is exciting. My dad bumped himself from a flight and got a free round-trip ticket so there that is. Of course, I will be in the KC a month later for Miss Mary's wedding. And, although I heart the Handy Zebra and all, I am a little disappointed that her name will no longer be the greatest palindrome ever. JK...kind of.

I've been on a hiatus from life for the last couple of weeks. Now that I'm returning to the world of usefulness, I'll be looking for a job, hopefully of the office variety that will pay me decently and give me benefits so I won't have to pay through the nose anytime I have a cold. Getting hired at school would be the best-case scenario, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm moving in with a new friend; this will be the third roommate in as many years. Rough, but I have normal hopes for this one. He's nice and has a steady job, the only real qualities that I was looking for. Plus, I've actually known him for 2 years, so there won't be any nasty surprises like this past year of joy.

After finding a job - which will most likely be waitressing if I'm being honest with myself - it will then be time for me to get crazy serious about lessons and singing since the fall audition season isn't that far away. I will basically be sending in applications for about 20-30 programs, hopefully getting auditions at half of them, and traveling to New York for most of those. Luckily, there's a sketch-tastic bus that's something like 7 bucks roundtrip, so at least I won't be blowing tons of money on getting down there. These auditions will be for young artist programs: companies that hire young singers to do community outreach, occasionally work in choruses or understudy lead roles, and do any other grunt work they need done. Unfortunately, there's only so many and each one only takes one singer of each voice type, so it's pretty crazy stiff competition. Not only that, but I'll be competing against people who could be as old as 30+ so that's awesome too. AAAAAANNND, I'm done with the pity party. Just nervous. The back up plan if no one hires me will be to move to New Jersey with Lesley, live crazy near the city, and do as much auditioning as possible.

Other than trying to embark on a singing career, I'm semi-regretting my haircut, I'm actually tan right now, I really want a puppy, my mom's moving to California in a month (and leaving my step-dad in KC...suspect!), and I can't wait to see Tropic Thunder.

I possibly just lost half of my itunes library. That's about 15 MB of music.

Fucking awesome.

EDIT: After spending an amount I'd rather never think of again on data recovery software, I got them back...I think. They're being "recovered" now.

MOTHERFUCKING BEST BUY AND THEIR MOTHERFUCKING GEEK SQUAD POLICIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A few things have happened in the last few days:

1) I'm sick. Awesomely sick. As are my closest two friends that were going to come over for Thanksgiving. Hurrah.

2) I didn't get into a summer program I really wanted. Ah well. I got a callback and it's a crazy competitive program. Still, it's in Santa Barbara and that would have been amazing.

3) I joined okcupid.com because I'm sick of not meeting men...well, any straight men anyway. I've been talking to people and it's just weird. I'm used to being around male friends and things going from there, this whole "stranger" thing is just odd to me. Ah well. It's nice to be able to filter out men that are shorter than 6 feet tall; a helpful tool if I ever saw one.

My ipod has been acting up for the last few days so after completely wiping it out and restoring it to the factory settings and STILL not getting it to work, I took it to Best Buy thinking that my 3-year service plan would allow me to trade it in.

Ah, how naive I am. It has to be sent out three times and deemed "broken/fixed" before I can get another one. Each of these escapades takes about two weeks.

Now, I don't know about most people, but I actually need my ipod. It's not just for walking around the city, but for learning roles and music and recording lessons and coachings. If this first attempt at getting it fixed doesn't take, it will be a whole month of people telling me it's still broken before I can get another one.

Am I just dumb for thinking that I could exchange it? I mean, it makes sense that they can't hand out free ipods to everyone that says their's is broken. I get that. It's the three times thing I think is a bit outlandish.

That's all.

I've just had a small day of revelation. I suppose what happened shouldn't have been such a big deal, but it was.

I'm in Characterization right now and it's pretty self explanatory; we learn how to research a role. I had never really been someone who couldn't "get into" a role and be emotionally in the moment but I always knew that I hadn't done the kind of research I needed to. This class has changed all of that. I now have half an inch of research on the character I chose to focus on for this class and can FINALLY approach a character on an intellectual as well as emotional level.

Sadly exciting.

Also, we had our first meeting today about Turn of the Screw, the opera we're doing in February. I cannot begin to explain how excited I am about it. I know I mentioned the corsets, etc. but she told us some amazingly awesome things. I shan't write them here since I know trillions of people will be traveling here to see it (wait...) but suffice to say it will be amazing. Special effects, Christmas decorations all over the auditorium, footlights, it's going to be SO GOOD!!!!!!!

And that's about it.

I want it to be Christmas so I can go home for a bit.

So, besides building my own Hell, I've not really been doing too much.

I went to New York this past weekend for an audition; it went well and I'm actually pleased, which never happens. One of the biggest highlights was the trip to Chinatown where, I'm almost positive, I managed to snag a real Chanel bag for 40 bucks. It was the most secret of secret backroom/stairways. I'm quite proud of the whole experience.

I've just watched the Daniel Radcliffe Extras episode. Perfection.

Too bad about this Writer's Guild strike. What will we do without more MTV reality shows since they're all, shock of shocks, scripted?! Dear oh dear.

There's been some serious drama at school with our new opera director, but none of it has directly affected me, so that's been kind of nice. Plus, I just found out that they're making hand-made corsets for each of the female leads in the opera I'm in, so that's sadly exciting. We were all tempted to buy them until we found out that they're running about $145. Still tempting but...

Yeah. That's pretty much my life now.

The chair has to go. I think I'm going to post in on facebook or craigslist and see if I can find a good home for it. In my head, there will be a dramatic goodbye during which I'll fling myself upon it as they're taking it out the front door screaming, "Please don't leave me!"

Too much?

I woke up today at 6:00 after going to bed at 3:00. I did the same the night prior to that. These two facts alone would have made for a not great moving day. But then, add onto that movers that came nearly 12 hours late, annoyed landlords, and a new apartment that's apparently much smaller than I had imagined and you get my awesome day.

I was told that the movers would come from anywhere between 7:00 and noon. I woke up a bit early knowing that I still had a few things to pack up and figured they wouldn't actually get there at 7:00 but possibly 9:00. Everything was ready by 8:00: tv/Direct TV disconnected, everything piled up, bed broken down, EVERYTHING. I end up reading in the living room until noon. Fine. I enjoy the written word. At 12:04 I called the moving company as I hadn't even heard from my dispatcher. I was/am well aware that for reason unknown to me that September 1st is the day EVERYONE moves in Boston. I figured I wouldn't get out until around 11:00 or noon anyway. They said that they were really backed up from the previous day (?) and that I'd most likely hear from them in around two hours. Okay. I wasn't happy about it, but okay. 3:00 rolls around and Brett and I (we'd both hired the same moving company about two weeks apart) are beginning to wonder what the hell is going on. I call again and again I'm told the same thing; trucks are coming back and I should hear from my dispatcher in an hour or two. At this point, we leave to go get food, something we haven't done all day. As we're walking back to our apartment, we run into our landlord who informs us that the people taking over our apartment were driving down our street at that very moment. Fuck. Fuuuuuck. I tell him that we'll let him know as soon as we do. 5:00 comes and goes and I'm at the end of my rope. I call, I'm not terribly nice and ask (I may be paraphrasing here) what the fuck is going on. I inform them that Brett and I live together and wouldn't it be a good idea to send one truck for both of us. This seems to spark a light bulb over their heads and I'm told that there's a truck on its way. The fuck?

They begin moving Brett in around 6:30. They begin me at 7:20. They left my apartment at 11:00 only to drive over to Cambridge (about 20 minutes away) to unpack Brett. This is after working until midnight last night and beginning this morning at 6:00 a.m. Clearly, this is not the mover's fault, but their supervisors and come Tuesday I'm going to be taking out my frustration, lack of sleep, and illness on anyone I'm allowed to speak to. And I will not be paying the full $828 they're trying to charge me. That price includes the 3 or so hours it took to move me (including travel from old apartment to new) and one way of the truck's travel time to/from their headquarters. I will be talking to the owner.

And now all of my shit is in here along with my roommates and let me tell you kiddies, it's fucking small. Smaller than I thought. I may have to throw out even more than I thought; as in, not only my couch, coffee table, and one entertainment center, but possibly my dresser and matching chair to the aforementioned couch. I don't know if I can describe how much I love this chair. I will be very upset if I have to get rid of it. My room seemed huge until I got my monster of a bed in here and there's no good place to put it, as the wall I had been planning to put it on has a radiator smack in the middle of it that I conveniently forgot about.

AND there are no blinds/shades/curtains on my windows right now. Which = me waking up at 7:00 a.m. and being insanely unhappy.

I can't think anymore.

Is this Larry Craig scandal big news because he may or may not have committed a lewd act or because he's a Republican senator is possibly gay? I'm leaning towards the latter which makes me ill.

Moving on, I've been sick off an on for awhile and, as I have an audition next week, decided to actually go to the doctor today. After talking to my dad, I decided to splurge and call to get an appointment with and ENT (not covered in my student insurance). Of course, no time available until Sept. 10th. So, I had to settle for the Fenway Health Clinic, which is kind of our school's "health center," but it's really the free, AIDS testing, family planning clinic for the city. A little sketch sketch. Ah well. I got a prescription for Flonase and then went to Whole Foods and spent far too much money on 1000 mg. vitamin C packets, apple cider vinegar, and a thing called a Netty Pot (which you use to flush salt water through your nasal passages...it's as gross as it sounds). Why do I want to do this singing thing again? Maybe I should just go to secretary school.

Found out that I can't move in a day early since it would up my hourly moving rate by $60. No thanks. However, we went and bought all of our paint and now I'm excited about that. Plus, I bought the nicest towels I've ever had from Target the other day and I'm obsessed. Thanks Thomas O'Brien. That's about my life for the moment. OH. We got this really cute loveseat for quite cheap. That's all.

Okay. After much urging/yelling from Mary, I'm actually updating my lj.

I went to Brevard, North Carolina this summer for a music program. Although the mountains were beautiful, the dampness and mold that's surely growing in my lungs weren't. We had to buy something that sucked the moisture out of the air so mold wouldn't grow in our clothes and shoes; not exactly a relaxing vacation. Let's see, a few highlights: we bought a 20-inch tall figurine of Jesus from Wal-Mart and took pictures of him all over the camp and city; a guy put his dick in a vat of paraffin wax at 4:00 a.m. and got caught by our nurse; my friend Joseph's car got caught in the mud, in the rain, in the mountains where we barely had cell phone service 30 minutes away from camp, at 2:30 a.m., and after trying to push it out in a dress and bare feet (a centipede crawled across my foot), we had to leave it, beg some friends to come get us, and get it out the next morning. Joshua Bell was there and creepily came to hang out with us and hit on boys and girls alike.

I kind of feel like the whole thing never happened. This seems to be a fairly normal phoenomenon with me. I can come back to Columbia and feel like I never left, but thinking back on freshman year and College Park, I feel like that couldn't have happened. When I got back to Boston, after about a week, I feel like being stuck in Deliverance country for two months was a day trip. So bizarre.

I just visited a couple of friends at another summer program and met someone who went to my elementary school. Ridiculous how small the world can be sometimes.

This is a horrible update, but they'll get better. I blame this on the fact that I'm watching High School Musical 2 right now. Don't judge. I saw the first one and felt obligated to see this one. There was a choreographed dance with basketballs. Amazing. And by amazing, I mean absolutely horrible.

HERE.

Today as I was telling friends certain past events of my life (i.e. certain boys that affected me for FAR longer than they ever should have), I began to look back on some earlier entries in my lj. A few of my favorites?

1) My first entry ends in an oh-so-emo quoting of song lyrics, as do an astounding number of the entries filling the five years I've had this account.
2) The friends only posting back and forth about that email I sent Nicole eons ago telling her how she was wasting her life, etc. Pretty great.
3) The trillions of times I mentioned Bubbaloons my freshman and sophomore years.
4) The completely amazing drunk entries. And by completely amazing, I mean horribly embarrassing and typo-filled.
5) How ridiculous and simpering I was. I think every other entry is about a boy or my body image. I was far more cliche than I let myself believe at the time.

And I'm sure, if I still have this thing in 5 more years, I'll look on this entry as childish and depressing. I do not recommend doing this unless you have a lot of time...because I now want to go back and read every entry from the beginning, just to see if I've really changed at all.

I return to LJ after an extended absence to say these things following the season finale of Lost:

1) I can't believe they finally killed Charlie.
2) I heart Hurley.
3) Kate's a stupid bitch.
4) Yay for Sayid/Jin/Bernard not being dead.
5) Yay for Locke not being dead.
6) Holy shit to Walt. And, on that note, since when is the dog still alive?
7) So the island stuff's now past tense? V.v. confused by all of that.

But, I must say, that this was one of the few episodes since last season that had me clutching a pillow and silencing screams of outrage...farfetched as it may have been, it was at least entertaining again.

I'm the worst live journal-er ever.

It's currently snowing outside and the accumulation may result in 3-10"; this on its own would be lovely. However, since the meteorologists have no idea how bad this Nor'easter will really get, they can't say what's really going to happen within Boston proper in the way of precipitation. Most likely, the lovely white snow is going to be washed away by rain tonight making for a delicious gray slush that will cover everything and be sprayed on unsuspecting pedestrians by passing cars.

Other than weather, life in Boston is going fairly well. The first opera I was in ended in early February, went beautifully. I'm now in the chorus of another production and it's killing me; basically, I haven't completely mastered how to sing multiple styles with my "new" voice and the style we're supposed to be employing in the chorus is the exact opposite of how I'm singing soloistically, so it's affecting everything I do outside of chorus rehearsals and I can't figure out how to stop it. We (me and the other girls having the same problems) asked the director for some advice and she told us not to worry about it since the sound balance will change once we get on the stage, etc. Frustration is the name of the game. But, it will be a really cute production: it's set in a small English village during WWII and there are American GIs there etc.; the opera's very light-hearted and "Italianate," so the setting's not as morbid as it may sound. The costumes will be great for part of it, but in the first act, since all of the female chorus members are townspeople and work on farms, we have to wear high-waisted pants tucked into boots. Line up now to do me, boys. Line up now.

My mom emailed me the other day to give me general information about Kansas City. As a kind of afterthought, she informed me that my cousin CJ (who's about 12, I think) was hit by a school bus...no other details were included. She called me this morning to fill me in: apparently, he was riding his bike without a helmet and listening to an IPOD, rode in front of a bus that was driving in a zone allowing the driver to go 40-50 mph, the bus was able to slow down to about 15-20 mph before it hit him; we was dragged for about 20 feet before the bus could come to a full stop. BUT, he's home now and making jokes, etc. with a skull fracture extending from his right eye socket around to the back of his head. The fracture resulted in some cranial damage to his right brain and a small hematoma that the surgeons decided not to remove because the procedure would actually create more blood flow, so they're just going to let the hematoma be absorbed back into the brain... I guess it's going to be about a year before he's fully recovered. INSANITY.

What else? One of my dad's students from a couple of semesters ago professed her undying love for him. Wait for it... She's a Mormon...with 11/12 kids...who thinks that the reason they have such a "deep connection" is due to the fact that they knew each other in another "spiritual life" and God wanted them to be together again. He's kind of sad because he liked her and said she was one of the best students he'd ever had (she wrote 10,000 words for a 2,000 word paper, etc.). He called me right after she called him, told him that she loved him, and then said that she needed to see him in person to fully explain her reasoning. She came into his office to tell him these things. I can't get over it; the poor guy can't catch a break.

I think that's all of the major developments going on in my life. Our spring break starts this weekend and I'm going to New York for a couple of days to see a couple of shows; I can't have a full week since we have rehearsals that resume on Wednesday, but it will be nice to get out of the city for awhile and just relax.

Kudos to Nick for buying five boxes of Girl Scout cookies at a Neo-Nazi rally, Mary, Katie, and Kelly for drunk dialing me about the infamous Olive Garden confrontation, and...that's all I got.

I finally own Extras Season One. It has taken forever.

I'm currently watching the Grease: You're the One that I Want competition. Don't judge.

Anyway, Billy Bush has decided that he's going to come up with oh-so-inventive nicknames for all of the contestants. What are the names, you ask? Boy-band Danny (who was already in a Broadway show, whatevs), Slacker Danny (also known as "Max-o-lantern." Not kidding.), Hot Danny (who totally used to be fat and ugly when he was in middle school), Wholesome Danny, BELLHOP Danny, and Ambitious Danny. For those lucky girls: Emotional Sandy (cause she cries all the time), Rock Chick Sandy (cause she's...brunette?), Small Town Sandy, Spritual Sandy (a worship leader who's obsessed with Britney Spears), Serious Sandy, Baby Sandy (youngest girl there...God he's inventive), and Ballerina Sandy (who, incidently, was Barbie in the Barbie in Fairy-topia (HA!) tour).

I HATE Billy Bush.

I know no one cares, but I find it ridiculous. Oh. Boy-band Danny just sang George Micheal's "Faith." Great plan, guys.

I may or may not be watching "Engaged and Underaged" right now. I'm nearly positive that the groom on the show is gay, 21, and a horribly indenial Christian...and a virgin. How awkward is that wedding night going to be?

Who wants to lay down some odds that within two years this marriage will end in a messy divorce?

I was far too emotionally invested in Grey's Anatomy this week.