Gil-less Girls
Seriously, if Lorelai and Rory don't get their act together I'm going to...well, I'm going to keep watching the show but I will whine the entire time. And that's no fun for my mother. The beauty of that show is the mommy daughter banter and there can be no banter if mommy and daughter arean't talking. Sure Luke and Logan can be on the receiving end of the super-fast Gilrmore vocal antics but it's no fun watching them not keep up. I mean really, I need more food binges and sarcasm, less lovey dovey key hunts and move-in phobias. Pretty please!

(/rant)

I guess I should finally tell the internet my good news...

I have a job!

But I am going to work on not talking about it too much here in great detail becasue the last thing I need is to get dooced. I'm pretty sure that the college loan sharks won't buy that as a valid excuse for not giving them back their money.

I start next week and am in thesis hell until then for an end of the month deadline--the fun just keeps on coming. Thanks for all of the words of encouragement during the dark days of unemployment, they helped more than any of you will ever know.

Much love to you all...

A Lifetime Ago...
This weekend brought with it a long overdue visit with my friend Ginger who I hadn't seen since last Christmas. I couldn't believe how long it had been when I finally realized that ringing in the New Year was the last time we had shared a face-to-face conversation. It was so good to visit with her, she is the most kind-hearted person I know and it's so comforting to have her around.

During a car ride into Austin we were reminiscing about the year we spent living together right after college, before we both decided to make big changes in our lives, both of which involved major moves and major life adjustments. As we talked we both agreed that it feels like it was another lifetime. We were young and all of our friends lived just blocks away. We were all trying to be grown ups so we drank a lot more wine and martinis than beer at our regular happy hours. We were all single and looking--but not too hard. We worked during the day and played a lot at night. We shopped and watched movies and made dinner and jumped on trampolines in the backyard. We wondered how all of our lives would play out but realized it was futile to put too much pressure on the future when the present was challenging enough.

And now, as we all push decidedly past our mid-twenties, I am amazed at just how different our lives are. There are new relationships to contend with, men we laughingly remember and those who have made a permanent place in our lives. Friendships which have changed or broken off completely. And then relationships like ours, that feel comfortable no matter how much time has passed between hugs. I can still remember the smell of her coffee brewing in the mornings while she got ready for work and it is because of her I learned that substituting ground turkey for ground beef in a recipe didn't really hurt the dish.

I think I finally realized this weekend, for the first time maybe, that things will never be like they were. We'll never be sharing lat night stories in our pajamas before climbing into our beds in rooms across the hall. We'll never have the late night girl sessions about the potential guys we'll meet because the potential guys have been replaced by the real ones who love us remind us that comfort is better than variety. It makes me a little weepy inside, as the realization of adulthood often does. But then I feel lucky to even have those memories stored away in the photo boxes of my mind to pull out when things get a little cloudy.

A lot can happen in a lifetime...and there's so much more to go.

B-I-N-G-O

My mom took a couple of days off of work earlier this week. I like to think it's because she just loves spending time with me but really, when you have worked for a company for over thirty years, the one good perk is a massive amount of collected vacation days. So she randomly chose to play approved hookie and hang out on Monday and Tuesday. My sister-in law, my niece and my mom and I all decied that since Monday is "moms-eat-free" day at our local mega pizza play land, that we would all go and stuff ourselves on thin crust pizza, salad swimming in ranch dressing, free refills on Coca Cola and chocolate pudding. On the way up there my niece, who holds the car DJ title, picked a CD from her Barbie logo car case and ordered her mama to pop it in. And in no time flat the entire car was clapping along and singing out loud to to the B-I-N-G-O song because it is impossible, no matter what your age, to not do so. That song was imeediately followed by the Hickory Dickory Doc song, some song about numbers (all the way to twenty!) and Old MacDonald and his farm animals. Singing all of those old songs with my niece was such a fun thing, only enhanced but the plastic toilet full of goo that she won at the pizza place with which I taught her how to make farting sound with. I am nothing if not a good aunt!

But all of this singing about BINGO reminded me of one the things that my mom and I used to do all of the time when I was young. We played bingo..a lot! Fridays were at the Catholic church, Saturdays were the VFW hall, Monday nights were at the Elk's lodge and during the week, when my oldest brother was home to take care of us, my mom and my aunt would go to midnight bingo in Austin. For me, I loved the bottles of colored ink we got to use to mark all of the numbers and the fact that nachos and thick slices of coconuct cream pie satisfied the criteria for supper. For my mom, as I would later learn, bingo was a way to help sustain the household. When the numbers were right, she could win a few hundred dollars to make sure that we were all fed for the week until the next payday. So my mom and I decided that we should play a game or two, for nostalgia's sake and in the hopes of padding my ever-dwindling bank account. We drove into Austin and played a couple of rounds at a skating rink that transforms itself into a bingo hall during the day. We shared a plate of nachos and traded colored bottles of ink for each game. We didn't win anything, I didn't think that we would, but it felt just like it used to. And sometimes, that's more than enough.

It's never going to end...
I had a realization today, and not one of those good ones that makes you smile about the beauty of life either. One of the ones that makes it a little hard to breathe, the kind where the panic sets in at such a drastic speed lying down seems like the only real option.

As of now, I am still not done with my thesis. I plan/need to be by the end of the semester but NYU red tape still makes that plan seem like a slight impossibility. I am still unemployed and living with my mother with no car. But I had come to peace with all of these things. The pressure is still on for my paper but I was doing okay otherwise.

Until today.

Today I received that little piece of paper in the mail that reminded me that, for the next twenty years of my life, I am still indebted to my college years, the good and the oh so very bad. My loan payments need to be repaid to the tune of almost $500 a month for the next two decades of my life. And right now, I don't even have that much money in my bank account which makes payment number one, due on November first seem like a salty knife going directly into my eye. I'm at a loss and more than a little overwhelmed. I'm feeling all light headed and wobbly, like I'm standing on a boat that just keeps rocking back and forth and back and forth and...

I'm working on eventually coming to terms with the choice I made to be a psuedo academic, but more importantly, I have to figure out how to call off the loan sharks until I can afford to begin my lfe sentence, I mean payments.

I think a martini might help, but the kind I shake up in my own kitchen because I absolutely can not afford the kind from and actual bar.

In honor of Stephanie's birthday, we took a road trip to San Antonio on Saturday for Fiesta Texas' Fright Fest. It was equal parts cheese and fun. We rode all of the best rides and gorged ourselves on pizza and french fries and ice cream and funnel cake. The sugar high put me to sleep while Stephanie sang songs all the way home (a byproduct of the four liters of Mr. Pibb she consumed I am sure.)

It was a blast, just as birthdays should be!

My favorite part of living in New York was the theater. Any extra money I had inevitably went to buying a ticket to a musical or play or the opera. For the price of two cocktails in Manhattan I could buy a ticket at the student rate and enjoy two and a half hours of pure entertainment.

Needless to say, I have been in withdrawl since being home.

Not having any money and no car has put me at a loss for scoping out cool entertainment in Austin which, by the way, has a pretty great theater scene. What I do have though is time, time spent listening to the radio and calling in to hotlines trying to win prizes to help with the boredom. A couple of weeks ago I won tickets to see a play in Austin that my brother had wanted to see, so we went.

Just the idea of soaking up some live acting and singing had me all excited. I picked out a great outfit and even did my make-up. Because of construction on the highway connecting our town to Austin, we took the scenic route into downtown Austin which doubled the actual time it should take to get there. And after driving an hour, plus and extra fifteen minutes looking for a parking spot, we sat through two and a half hours of a really bad production. The sound system was awful and did more squeaking than amplifying of voices, the lighting cues were crap and kept illuminating furniture instead of people and the time in between scene changes seemed like days. The only saving grace was the actors, who powered through the horribly produced show and worked with the less than steller no-real-conclusion material to give pretty good performances of really bad material. Towards the end of the show I found myself looking and my watch in the dark trying to decide if the little hand had literally stopped in time. And then, just like that, it was over. No one in the audience even realized that the abrupt finish to the song was actually the end and we all just sat there waiting until the lights came up and the actors walked on stage to stalled applause.

Now I know how hard it is to put on a musical production. But you can't just stroll in to town advertsing Shaft in a brilliant role ina brilliant show only to give us Shaft in his same old leather bomber jacket spouting off fatherly advice in a few scenes and expect it to make up for a horrible production. It's just not that simple and your audience, well we're just not that dumb.

My future's so bright...

I gotta wear shades!

Thanks to Sarah and her cell phone that, unlike mine, actually allows you to send the picture once you've taken it, I have a shot of Rachel and I scanning the crowd looking for Gwyneth and Apple at the Coldplay concert. Because really, I only went to the concert to play a little game of six degrees of separation since Chris Martin is married to Gwyneth, whose mother is Blythe Danner, who starred in The Prince of Tides and Meet the Fockers with the one and only Barbra Streisand--it could have been my chance! But alas, I had to settle for some amazing music, five dollar nachos and really great company. I think it was a pretty fair trade.