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Category: Life

When Free Time Isn’t Free

Published August 27, 2011

Until recently, I had been looking forward to auditioning for the Microsoft Theatre Troupe’s fall production of “Sweeney Todd”. MSTT is all-volunteer – Microsoft covers all production costs, and all revenues go to charity (one is chosen for each production.) I was certain it’d be a huge time commitment, but with rehearsals practically across the street from my office, the blow would have been softened. But then I discovered that “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, the improvised Star Trek TOS parody I appeared in this summer, had targeted the first two weeks of November as our return – a…

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Up in the Air

Published August 24, 2011

It’s easy to take the miracle of flight for granted when living in the United States. We’re such a big country that more modest means of transportation like trains and cars can’t get us from one end to the other in a timely fashion, so air travel ends up becoming rather embedded in our culture. Yet even here, countless folks never get on a plane – either from lack of resources or desire – and to those folks, airports must be insanely daunting temples of transportation. I went through a large part of my adolescent life without flying – we…

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Full Circle

Published August 9, 2011

As a performer and public speaker, it has been a long time since a performance situation or venue truly intimidated me. Several thousand people watching me dance in a theme park parade? No. (Even while wearing dreadful bowling costumes.) Six hundred women at a Microsoft technical conference? No. (Besides, we had microphones.) A 1500 person ballroom at a comic convention with a major celebrity? Not really. (I might have been a wee bit distracted by the knee surgery or the painkillers, but still not intimidated. Long story.) That’s one of the gifts improv gives you – all the world’s a…

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Soliloquy of a Graduate Student

Published August 5, 2011

I opened Pandora’s box today. While idling in traffic, curiosity struck me out of the blue. I’ve been keeping online journals since 1997, give or take, stretched across 4 or so sites. Would any still be active? The answer: my undergrad journal is no longer with us, but my grad school journal DOES exist, on the public internet (if you know where to find it, and no I’m not telling). You wouldn’t want to read it anyway – I had forgotten how painfully emo I was when dealing with the stress of grad school and my clinical depression. However, THIS…

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Table for One

Published August 4, 2011

Growing up “smart”, kids can be pretty cruel – and no matter how much academic success I found, there was also a lingering loneliness. I lost several “best” friends to what I can only understand in retrospect as jealousy or something along those lines; the streak of cruel girls was significant. Maybe I was just pathologically terrible at picking best friends until I got to middle school (where I was lucky to finally find friendships that stood the test of time.) It certainly didn’t help matters that my “romantic” life in high school was almost entirely a nonstarter except for…

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