No. The other one...

I have what maybe the cushiest gig ever. I have been taking classes at, pants down, the best improv school in all of Chicago (if not the US\World). These classes are not cheap... but some very nice person tipped me off to the opportunity to do a work study program. Basically I work for 5 hours a week and in return I get free classes.

People, this is a sick deal. I know that they are doing it because it means that they get free labor but at the same time I am doing it because I get free classes (all in all, after interning for 4 sessions I will have saved over a thousand dollars --- which is a LOT of shoes).

Most interns work as ushers during the shows. They show people to their seats, play bar back, clean up after the shows, and try to deal with drunk idiots for five hours one night a week. I, however, sit in a lovely purple office with lots of fast internet and easy access to a vending machine, where I answer phones, take reservations and try to come up with cute and funny answers to the same seven asinine questions I get asked every time the phone rings. I work 3-8 which means I can go out the night before and have enough time to lose my hangover as well as go out after work and not have to meet up with everyone after they're all already totally wasted.

I can wear whatever I want and eat during my shift. My friends who have classes on Saturdays stop by and hang out with me. I get to play on the internets and send text messages and make a dent in all the books and magazines I have stacked up next to my bed. Occasionally important people from around the theatre stop by and chat with me.

Like I said-- sweet gig.

Here's the rub-- one of the gals who runs the theatre is ALSO named Rachel. She is absolutely crazytown but one of the funniest/awesome people ever (check out her blog here). And not only do we look kind of similar (in that way that all girls who are short-ish with brown hair look the same) we apparently have idential phone voices. This would be a compliment except for the fact that it means one out of every five phone conversations goes like this:

Rachel: "Thank you for calling iO, This is Rachel. How may I help you."
VIP on the other end of the phone: "Hey Rachel, its [insert famous/important person name here] can you do me a favor? [insert something I've never heard of said in a beyond-rapid pace]"
Rachel: "...[pause].... This isn't Rachel Mason."
VIP OTOEOFP: "Oh. Uh..."
Rachel: "Sorry."

...Yes that's right. At least once a week I apologize for my very existance.

boo, Paris Nails, boo.

Just a heads up: This post is g-ross. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Right now I am soaking my left foot in warmish-hot water in which epsom salts have been dissolved. Its about 95 degrees outside and not much cooler in my bedroom. My body isn't quite sure why I'm so mad at it. Today has been quite the terrible day as far as my body is concerned. Long pants for the first time in a month (jeans no less!), sneakers for the first time in two months and now, a hot bath made specifically for my left foot as the rest of me sits around sweating and wondering what exactly it did to make me so goddamned angry at it.

Oh body. Its not your fault.

Remember a mere week ago when I extolled the virtues of my first mani-pedi in a long while. How I celebrated my girlyness and vanity (if you don't remember, it was only two entries ago...scroll down. I'll wait...).

That was before I got the oddest sensation in the big toe of my left foot. It was this sharp tingling. I ignored it for awhile because I have foot problems all the time and all those years of breaking toes and twisting and whatnot I figured it would go away in time. Well, a few days went by and I started waking up in the middle of the night due to the pain. Things had gotten out of control. I was in Maryland at the time and my sucky-balls insurance only works in IL and besides, it was a Sunday so I went to the next best thing to a doctor. I went to Lizzie. It was handy that I was sitting next to her in bed at the time.

She confirmed my fears... it was an ingrown toenail. After being totally disgusted I took more advil than my liver probably cared for me to and waited until I got back to Chi-town to make an appointment with a podiatrist.

I explained the situation to my boss so he'd pity me and give me the afternoon off for my appointment. He did what he does best and told me horror stories about the pain and the bleeding and the general life-alteringness of this procedure.

It took 15 minutes.

No joke. I was in and out of the office in about the time it takes to watch a tivo-ed sitcom. I walked back into the office (not that I wanted too, I just thought it would be better to go back in that afternoon than have to get up early the next morning) with my big old bandaged toe (and flip flops no less. That paired with my general hobo-ish exterior yesterday pretty much confirmed all the reasons I'm sure I'm going to die alone). Everyone in the office was dutifully impressed by my pain tolerence as was I (forgetting convienently the face contortions I had performed while the doctor was anethsetizing my foot, prompting him to say, "Holy cow. Are you about to have an anyurism?") until of course, the lidocane wore off and my body suddenly realized I had paid someone to chop off a significant portion of my toe nail.

Okay, lets back track.

Back in the day. My toenails were very important to me. Kind of like callouses. When dancing on pointe, it is crucial that your toenails be cut in such a way that when you're balancing on them they don't start cutting in to the skin. As it makes the whole balancing in a tiny box of wood a whole bunch more uncomfortable.

Anywho...the pain started about an hour and a half after the surgury. People, I was about to go back to the office and be like, "Put it back on!" because the pain of the ingrown situation was way less dire than the post surgury "Hey that's why we have toenails in the first place!" pain.

I took about 12 more advil and felt bad for myself. The pain was gone once I took the bandage off but the totally disgustingness of what it looked like and the realization that I had to wear actual shoes in 90 degree heat I took some more advil and continued to feel bad for myself.

Then with the feet soaking I considered burning Paris Nails down. The nail place that started this whole charade is on my shit list for realz. I mean, is it kosher for me to walk in there and be like, "YOU BROKE ME. I want my money back!"?

Also, I promise this is the last post about my feet.

green underwears.

So, everyone has a favorite pair of jeans. They're the pair you buy, perhaps on a whim that you end up wearing three or four times a week until they literally decompose on your body. You stress out every time you wash them because it screws them up for like three days. Yeah, those pants. The day those pants die is a dark, dark day for everyone.

My jeans are from American Eagle. I bought them on a whim (isn't that always the way?) the day before I left for Nantucket the summer after my junior year of college. I then wore them every day for pretty much the next two years. They're the most perfect pair of jeans. Super comfortable and yet almost trendy enough to pull of wearing to a bar when you're just not feeling up to the tight, sexy jeans (uh, I guess I should have mentioned I wear jeans every day. No joke. I own -- seriously-- at least 20 pairs that I wear on a regular basis). Anyway, I got complimented on them pretty much every time I wore them and they looked good. I was a happy girl with a good looking ass.

Time passed and at one point a little hole began to form on the back right hand pocket. Right in the top inside corner. I still wore them a lot because I always have cute underwear on and I don't really have any shame Then something tragic, that I've managed to block from my memory, happened and the entire pocket started to rip off, right at the seam. I began to panic and rushed to my neighborhood American Eagle, naturally they had completely redone their denim section (STOP doing that! You're ruining lives, AE). The jeans did not exist anymore. I asked for a similar pair in their new denim line. The brain trust girl in the mini skirt was of no use to me so I went home and was sad. Then I had one of those minutes where I remember that there are people starving all over the world and some people have no pants at all.

So I decided to mend them. People, I am not a seamstress. In fact in the womanly arts I pretty much fail across the board. I can't cook or sew or clean or be submissive and docile...so me trying to mend denim was pretty laughable, but I did it. Then they got shoved to the back of my drawer for awhile because I thought they needed a rest (which they did), I got a new favorite pair (my first sevens) then another new favorite (probably my Polo Ralph Laurens-- although at this point I really like most of my jeans-- and I have three pairs waiting to be hemmed that will become favorites, I have no doubt).

So last week things at work went balls crazy and I found myself working late and (worse) worrying about work while I was doing the fun 20-something things that should be dominating my mental space. By the middle of this week, I had completely stopped caring about what I looked like at work, basically coming in and running around like a kid off her ritalin and then going home and passing out. I also hadn't done laundry in about three weeks. On Thursday morning, what did my comatose fingers find in the back of the drawer? The favorite jeans. I needed something to be happy about so I threw em on with a fairly long tee-shirt (as the corner hole was still fairly obvious-- though I was impressed with my pocket-seam hemming abilities.

Doodley-doo, off to work I went. The day was nothing short of ridiculous with the running around and the long stretches of time spent staring at a computer screen, trying not to cry. About mid-day I had my third potty break (I'm doing this new thing where I try to drink 2 quarts of water a day and that with the gallons of diet coke really run right through me) and I notice that the seams were starting to kind of stretch and the hole down the seam was getting a little bigger. I yanked down my shirt and went about my day.

At the end of my day (that was supposed to end at 5, but actually ended at 7) I go to the bathroom and once again look at my jeans/handy work. Either my butt grew three sizes that day or the running and the stress were apparently a match for my sewing because the hole was ENORMOUS. Like we're talking six inches, right across my rockin' ass. None of the guys in my office (now its me v. 5 guys all day every day-- its kind of the opposite of fun) mentioned anything about it, which was nice of them. Because seriously it was like every nightmare I had in high school, a giant hole and my green underroos (that ironically enough said Drama Club on them) sticking out for everyone to see.

I thanked my lucky stars that I had had the foresight to carry a messanger bag. I grabbed a men's tee-shirt that covered a little more of my heinie (although had my company's logo on it, which was pretty embarrassing the entire way home) and then I spent my walk to the train/home making sure that the messanger bag was artfully placed directly over the giant hole in my most favorite pants.

...Which I'm still not going to throw away. Nope. You can't make me. They're getting washed now, I'll figure out what to do with them when they're clean. A pair of denim, assless chaps perhaps?!

a moment of silence, please

There comes a day in every young-ish girls' life when she realizes that she is never going to dance on pointe again and she can finally do something about those nasty callouses. Ladies and gentlemen, for one young(-ish) girl-- that day was today.

Today I let some poor defenseless Asian girl shave 22 years of callouses off my feet.

Let me explain (now that you've had a chance to vom all over your keyboard)-- I was/still am one of those kids who refused to wear shoes in the summer. I spent my summers running around barefoot-- not just in the grass, sand and concrete but also cobblestones and broken shells of Nantucket (seriously, the road outside my Grandmother's house on Nantucket is literally made of broken oyster shells. And I would run and skip up and down that thing like I was walking on pillows). To this day-- the most you can expect out of me during the summer months is flip flops. And I have been known to walk around many a large US metropolis totally barefoot, which is not only hard on the tootsies, but a good way to get the foot herpes.

Not only am I a filthy hippie when it comes to footwear, I've also spent a majority of my life trying to keep my feet from throbbing due to the turning and balancing and jumping I did on them (not so much anymore). I remember vividly one of the "older girls" limping into Dee's with her pointe shoes on, cursing the Gods that told her that shaving off her callouses during a pedicure was a good idea. She was in pain for the next four months. After that I swore I would never let anyone near my callouses, particularly when I started doing a lot of barefoot work.

Anyway, my feet were getting to be pretty bad news. I kept putting off getting a pedicure because I don't really like the idea of people touching my feet and it seemed kind of silly since I didn't have any reason to get a pedi. Also there was a secret little part of me that hoped that maybe I would some day shed fifteen pounds, gain some strength and a massive amount of flexibility and become a dancer again. Although, if the past three years are any indication that's probably not going to happen. Although I did bust out some serious foutes at the bar this weekend (barefoot, obvi)...I think it was time to put the dream in the scrapbook and try not to have such crackwhore feet. The salon across the street has $30 mani-pedi specials during the week and I have a bar mitzvah to look hot at this weekend (not to mention a fiesta del tragedy) and work is making me want to kill myself, so I went for it.

I'm not gonna front, it was pretty g-ross looking at like 22 years of foot skin peeling off (Oh, I'm sorry-- were you eating?!) but my feet feel really nice and they look kind of attractive, like attractive enough for me to allow someone else to look at the bottom of them.

While I was getting all pampered I kept thinking about Courtney's post about nail salons-- I have no doubt that the poor girl was bitching about absolutely filthy my feet were.

Anyway, I'm a whole new girl.

Oh, and Reason number 349023420345721 why I should NEVER, EVER get a manicure EVER-- Because it takes me LESS than a HOUR to totally fuck up at least one of my nails. Seriously, I had been home for twenty minutes before I screwed up my thumb nail. Does anyone know if I can just go into a random salon and ask if they'll fix it?

true.

I don't normally repost other works of genius directly into my blog, but I was reading at my internship yesterday and came across this passage in a fantastic book that everyone should read.

"Unrequited love was, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I see it had advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meagre, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions. In the world of stark physical reality it might call for the removal of my ill-fitting garments (in the dark or the bathroom, if possible: no woman wants a man to see her safety pins), but it left undisturbed their metaphysical counterparts. At that time I believed in metaphysics. My Platonic version of myself resembled an Egyptian mummmy, a mysteriously wrapped object that might or might not fall into dust if uncovered. But unrequited love demanded no stripteases."

Yes.

Okay, back to my screenplay that is way harder to write than a novel.