When you get offered a role in a movie and you accept in but then you turn it down because you realize you just feel so icky about anyone you know potentially seeing that movie.

That's what I did today. I would have been able to join SAG and get paid some seriously needed money, but I feel so much weight lifted after telling them I can't do it. Decisions like this suck but I'm glad they have to be made or life would just... suck.

So, I lose my SAG card, but I preserve my self-respect.

phew.
what did you do today?

Pot hole summer.

I apologize for the glaring discrepancy between this post and the last. 
But you see, in my youthful, hopeful, rosy-cheeked return I believed that (somehow) going to Europe for 3 months would make things...well...dissapear.
Or at least better.
(Better would be nice.)
That's all I was hoping for.


But I overlooked this minor, but rather pervasive issue. It is called men. And as Fleet Foxes so wisely croon at us, "memory is a fickle siren song." But in this case the siren's name is man and it isn't pretty. Or a mermaid, even.
This strangely absent but ever-present parasite, man, is the diagnosis for a little phenomenon Brookie has termed "pot hole summer."
It afflicts my bunnies and I in a most vicious strain and finds us invalids on delicious summer afternoons curled up on many  beds in the house in varying configurations (piles, that is) of fury, comfort, or dry-eyed (but drained) staring.


Because, as Fleet Foxes also remind us, "I don't know what to do."
Oh hell.


memory is a fickle siren song. 
blah blah blah blah.
It is interesting to me that everyone I know is either lovey dovey engaged to be married or breaking up. It is also interesting that some people fall in love and get married and others fall in love and get round-house kicked in the face.


Men.
Pot holes.
Summer fun.
Blah blah blah blah blah.

True confessions of an electromagnetic forcefield

One of the minor drawbacks of being a pivotal center of electromagnetic energy is that unsophisticated technology (or any technology, come to think of it) has trouble functioning in my presence. 

The weak ones just give up the ghost and short circuit (i.e. every microphone in every show i've ever participated in). The more proactive ones throw themselves into harm's way (phone ran over by car), take their own life (phone down the toilet on an already awkward first date), or simply run away (phone that left itself somewhere in Oregon, or, most tragically recent, netbook and ipod that sneakily stowed away in the taxi my first day in Paris).

This minor drawback evolves into something of a rather major drawback when I happen to be in Paris, already computer and music-less, and my previously stalwart digital point and shoot camera or its memory card (but probably both) decides it's had enough of my harmful rays and it's high time to conduct a bloody revolution of its own, effectively sending ALL of my pictures to the guillotine.

  This Reign of Terror has left me hollow and sobered and a rather poor blogger from now on, I'm afraid (I was planning on amazing and delighting with everything I've been seeing an learning in my photog class). I don't mean to complain or anything, but WHY ME!? Ce n'est pas juste! 

If you sais que je mean.

Love, loss, and no photographic evidence that I'm having the time of my life,

Banana

P.S. All this is made significantly better by the memory of seeing Fleet Foxes live last night (In fact, today when I went to this cute hipster photography store, Lomography [here], to soothe the blow with some food for my Holga, the guy who worked there asked me if I was at the concert and I said why yes I was. And he said it was incredible and I agreed and he said it was really really hot though and I said yeah it was really hot. And then I smiled at how amazing the conert was and he smiled at how bad my french is). Wow. I'm going nuts with parentheticals.

human hosepipe.

I will not say much beyond 

the fact that heartache

is inescapable, probably necessary to ultimate happiness,

and positively rampant in my little household. 

So let us turn to our ever-wise friend and posthumous mentor, Clive Staples,  for a bright and beautiful thought my dear dear friend, Jacob, blessed me with the beauty of:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

-C.S. Lewis

Ah, wisdom. It's delicious, is it not?

My roommate showed me this gorgeous video made by a BYU Professor that captures so perfectly the essence of relationships. And the wonderful Weepies' lyrics can never hurt:

So here's to vulnerability, still missing him every every minute, and this beautiful world that still spins madly on,

Banana

I can see clearly now

Well...almost.
Here's how it goes down:

1 I walk up to the eye test chart, cock-sure of my 20-20 bestowal...

2 My left eye takes 4 or so lines up before it can distinguish a p from an f...

3 I walk away with 20-50 vision.

4 which is quite a bit worse than my mother's...
5 who's in her mid-fifties.
and had a rogue bungee cord severely damage her cornea.

I admit I am sufficiently humbled, and will just have to get cutie specks.
yours in meekness,
Banana