Mopey Crankyface McMoperson

 

            I am generally a wildly good-natured and trusting person. I really do believe that everyone is, ultimately, a good person with the best intentions. This is almost certainly an attitude that’s going to get me murdered by a serial killer one day. But even before the inevitable end comes, this attitude causes me a lot of trouble. See, loving everyone sounds great, right? It sounds like the sort of thing that would make you happy and sunny all the time! Ahahahaha. No. So often, my general attitude toward the world is: “I LOVED you, I TRUSTED you, I saw your BEAUTY and your HUMANITY and your VALUE and your POTENTIAL, and you have SHIT ALL OVER my expectations. Well done, you.”

            There’s no cynic like a failed romantic, yeah?

            This is giving me a lot of trouble at university, actually. Many of the other people on my program are astonishingly disrespectful to instructors and other students, and there are a lot of students who are either insanely lazy or pretty unintelligent. I truly hate to be so harsh about it, but I am straight-up scandalized by the low quality of work that I see around me. We’re supposed to be at a university level, and I would’ve absolutely skewered any of my former students (all 14-17 years old) if they had tried to pass off this quality as acceptable. I’ve been skipping seminars a lot lately, because watching this nonsense makes my blood pressure skyrocket. I am, frankly, offended and demoralized by my fellow students. I trusted that we were all going into this program with good intentions, and now I feel personally let down.

            Of course, seminars are the only place where the instructors take attendance (they don’t for lectures) and this past week, one of my seminar leaders hauled me aside to point out that if I don’t cut this shit out, I might get put on probation by the university, which would in turn jeopardize my visa.

            I have been wrestling with this for several weeks now. I know university is, by design, supposed to suck. I didn’t walk into this expecting it to be enjoyable. My mother (always able to toe the line between “wise motivator” and “cranky misanthrope”) pointed out that the value of a university degree is less that it says anything about actual material you have learned, and more about your ability to put up with this sort of bullshit. She added that the less-motivated or –clever ones will probably wash out of the program after year one or in year two, so they might not be on top of me for all three years.

            I wish I could find a way to be funny or insightful about this, and maybe, after it’s all over, I will. In the meantime, it’s just making me cranky-squared, because class is an absolute misery and then I feel guilty about my fraying temper and my active dislike for so many people I barely know. It’s a tricky spot, chums. I’ll try to bring back the sunny attitude soon, I promise.

Why I'll Never Be An Adult

            OH MY GOD, y’all, is it possible to get pregnant from a musical? If it is, I’m in serious trouble because I’m almost definitely having Seussical’s baby. Yeah, the dorky little show is actually that good.

            Incidentally, our upcoming appearance on Jeremy Kyle is going to be fantastic. Seussical is going to be all, “You were cheating on me with Les Mis! How do I know that baby’s mine, eh?” and I’m going to be crying and screaming “It’s got FUR and STRIPES, of COURSE IT IS YOURS” and meanwhile Les Mis is picking up chairs that have been flung around the studio to build a furniture wall and mumbling in French to itself. Further digression: this is why I will never be a theatre critic. I am totally qualified, but at some point my editor would have to propose that I actually write something that makes sense to another human being while I lie on the floor screaming about pregnancy and Jeremy Kyle.

            Seriously, though: if you have the chance, go see this show. The venue is small and the staging is about as low-tech as it comes, but a ridiculously talented and energetic cast make for some of the most vibrant theatre I’ve seen in a while. Every one of them deserves kudos. Kirsty Marie Ayers is particularly outstanding and presh to death as Gertrude McFuzz, and David Hunter (whom you may remember from my last blog entry) is doing what he does best as Horton the Elephant – namely, he’s removing my heart from my breast and crushing it to a fine paste underneath his heel whilst being the most adorable thing in the West End. Also, on an even shallower note, special props to Natalie Green for having such a slammin’ bod that she even makes the Sour Kangaroo’s high-waisted wide-legged salmon-pink trousers look foxy.

            Unfortunately, I wound up sitting in the middle of a mostly-empty second row, and I felt like a total creeper. I dislike the feeling of being essentially in the actors’ laps; I’m a big fan of that fourth wall. Also, there were some minor issues with the microphones and the sound balance that were distracting in the moment, but should be fairly easy to solve. Neither snag hindered my enjoyment of the performance much, but I’d like to go back when they have some of the technical stuff smoothed out a little more.

I know the show is ostensibly kid stuff, but don’t be put off by that. Fun stuff doesn’t stop being fun just because you don’t need a booster seat at the theatre any more. Come on, I know you still sing Disney songs and have waffles for dinner when you think no one’s looking, right? (If the answer to that is “no,” you can just leave now. We don’t need your kind here.)

One final David Hunter-related note. (I promise this is not turning into a Fuck Yeah, David Hunter! blog. It’s relevant. Sort of.) Apparently my mother has found this blog! Hi, Mama, if you’re reading this.  Remember what happened the last time I saw one of Dave’s shows? If not, go refresh your memory with the second half of this entry. Anyway, TLC read that entry and phoned me, very concerned that I was developing a drinking problem.  I had to explain to her that I wasn’t drunk when the whole swearing-and-accidental-hitting thing went down. There is nothing like the shame of having to explain to your dear old mother that her only child doesn’t have a problem with drink – she has a problem with life. APPARENTLY.

Caution: Liz-aster Area

            There is nothing that makes quite as harsh a start to the morning as waking up and re-reading your post-midnight texts and tweets from the night before. I know I get punchy and yappy when I’m overtired, but somehow last night while tweeting with my friend Vera at 3AM local time, I went from a joke about how I’ve got to stop proposing marriage to buskers (perfectly reasonable and I stand by that assessment in the unforgiving light of day) to visualizing a man playing the ukulele while gripping my still-beating heart in his teeth while it pumps my blood all down his front. Um. What?

            I so wish I could introduce all of you to my friend Maz. She’s lovely. She’s gorgeous and clever and is possessed of a bone-dry sense of humor, and she also has some of the most eloquent gestures I’ve ever seen. She has one in particular that means “surely I must have misheard you, because no one could possibly be dumb enough to say what I think you just said.” (She’s German. They’re a succinct people.) If you know Maz, you know exactly the gesture I mean. It’s a little stiff-armed shrug combined with a side-eye, and I’ve seen it stop stampeding morons in their tracks. Somehow the critic who lives in my head has picked up the Maz gesture, and she uses it on me often. When I start talking about ukulele players and my ripped-out heart and fountains of my blood, my inner critic does the Maz at me pretty hard.

            Freya and I went to see a one-off performance of Tommy last week. We both went in completely blind – as far as I was concerned, David Hunter from the reality show Superstar was in it. He was the cute one who made me cry a lot, and I quite wanted to see him perform live.  I’m not even going to try to summarize Tommy here but if you’ve never seen it: paedophilia, pinball, Christ figure, early retirement. Yeah, it makes about that much sense onstage, too. After the end of the show, Freya and I went around back to say a genial “well done, sir” to Mr. Hunter.

            At this point, anyone who has met me ever is rehearsing the Maz gesture to perform it along with my inner critic, because you see where this is going.

            As per all expectations, I was the world’s most socially graceless little badger. I said “fuck” about fifteen times to poor Mr. Hunter, and “jizz” once, and then I accidentally punched him. It was maybe not my finest hour. Would we go so far as to call it a “Liz-aster”? I think we can. (I am totally making “Liz-aster” happen, you guys. It’s not like I don’t have enough events that need that descriptor.) Much to the gentleman’s credit, he was properly lovely to me. Of course he was! He’s a retired rock star. He’s probably dealt with weirder shit than blue-haired sweary American bitches. He really is gorgeous, though, and Freya and I spent the entire train ride home gently smacking each other in a blind fog of lust and crooning “Why couldn’t he be awful so we’d have an excuse to not fancy him?”

            If my inner critic doesn’t stop doing the Maz gesture at me, she’s totally going to get a repetitive strain injury in her shoulders.

Back On The Blog

Hello, all! It’s been some time since I checked in. I’ve been getting my bearings in a whole new country – I’m sure you understand. I’ve been indulging in a lot of good theatre and a number of good meals; the only harshes on my buzz are the fact that I remain as resentful of authority (makes university tricky) and disaster-prone as ever (gross virus; broken toe – I tripped over Chelsea and fell down some stairs; don’t even ask. Trust me, you don’t want to know).

So far in my London life: I’ve seen Twelfth Night with Stephen Fry, Jesus Christ Superstar, Matilda, Les Mis (twice, and stop acting like you’re surprised. You fool no one), Roger Rees’ one-man show What You Will, Our Boys with Doctor Who's Arthur Darvill and Harry Potter's Matt Lewis, and Jersey Boys. Oh, and I went to a book talk given by Miranda Hart, who’s one of my comedy idols. I’ve gotten lost about two dozen times and have consumed roughly my own body weight in beer and Cadbury’s chocolate. I’m slowly making friends with that adorable three-legged dog down the road. I’ve even occasionally managed to make it to lecture. The coming weeks show no sign of slowing down! I’m due to see Mark Gatiss (of Sherlock fame) in 55 Days, Hedda Gabler, and a one-off special performance of Tommy. There’s a talk at Highgate Cemetery I’m booked to see about insanity in Victorian England, and I’m going to see Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo do a gig somewhere in Islington.

Money is tight, naturally. Obviously I’m not hurting for anything, but my funds are budgeted very closely. I very nearly wound up taking a job at a call centre, despite my well-documented phobia of telephones. My bacon was saved in the nick of time by my old boss at the Princeton Review, who offered me a ludicrously lucrative gig scoring student essays. I may still look into some part-time work in the UK. I was on a bus down one of the shopping high streets this past weekend, and I thought about how fantastic it would be to be able to buy anything I wanted there – not everything I wanted, of course, but to have the funds for any one thing I wanted. Well, maybe someday. In the meantime, I’m going to hope that my current lifestyle is character-building. I’m glad to be housed, fed, and to have enough saved up for an exciting and varied theatre schedule.

Saying Good-Bye Is The Fucking Worst

I said good-bye to my dog Simon yesterday. I’ve been saying for the past year that particular day would be the hardest part of this process and I hope I wasn’t wrong because man, yesterday sucked. I’ve had Simon for more than five years, since he was just a puppy, and he is absolutely the love of my life and the best dog in the world. I spent all of yesterday morning in tears, while Simon leaned against my legs or crawled into my lap to lick my face and cuddle against my neck. He’ll be living with TLC while I’m in London; she’s promised to set up regular Skype dates for us. It’s not that I don’t think Simon isn’t smart enough to work a laptop, but the lack of flexible digits or a thumb is a hindrance to him.

I leave in 25 hours and the past day has been constant realizations of stuff I should’ve done ages ago, but didn’t. “FUCK,” I’ve screamed, jumping up from the dinner table, “I forgot to mend my winter coat! I’ve known it’s needed repair since two winters ago; why didn’t I do it then?” Man, past Liz is the worst. She probably decided to have a Doctor Who marathon and let September 2012 Liz worry about the coat and the checkbook balancing, and now September 2012 Liz thinks that past Liz is a fucking bitch.

I am finding this pressure uncomfortable. Maybe I’ll go have a Doctor Who marathon and let future Liz deal with a ripped coat. (I know future Liz well enough to suspect that she’ll be tweeting in December about what a fucking bitch past Liz is.)

Bibliophilia

            Please don’t misunderstand me – I love my family. I am devoted to my friends in the States. I am going to have an actual meltdown when I say goodbye to my beloved bulldog/border collie mix Simon.

            Furthermore, I don’t see myself as excessively materialistic. I like my comforts, but I’m pretty chill about the whole notion of possessions. People before things, you know?

            However, there is one arena in which the “people before things” philosophy falls away, and that is books. I love books. I hoard books. Every place I’ve ever lived has had shelves full of books, with more books crammed into, under and around every flat surface. I was the nerdy kid in elementary school who always got busted for reading under her desk, and now I’m the nerdy chick who chooses handbags based on how many books I estimate I can cram into it. I’m moving to the UK to study publishing because by god, it is high time this obsession made me some money.

            Of course, when you’re moving across the Atlantic, you really have to pare down your possessions. The questions I’ve been wrestling with these past few months haven’t been “how will I stay in touch with my mother?” or “will I be able to make it back to the States for my best friend’s wedding?” but “what books am I taking with me?” and “holy cats, how am I going to part with the rest of them?”

            After three purges, I’ve sold off eight boxes of books to my used bookstore, and I still have a whole bookcase that’s crammed to the gills. It’s amazing how many books you can acquire in a quarter of a century. I’m getting down to the books that it’s going to be hard for me to part with – I remain incredibly attached to a lot of the things that started my love affair with books, so I have a whole stash of young-adult feminist fantasy novels in the vein of Tamora Pierce and Patricia C. Wrede. At the risk of sounding like a capital-L Loser (too late!), those books were hugely important to me in my formative years, and surrendering them is going to be like losing friends.

            I still haven’t decided what I’m taking with me. How do you decide what’s important enough to carry on your back across an ocean?

Reporting Live From My Bed

            You know how whenever you’re about to lift something heavy, one of your parents will scream “Lift with your KNEES, not with your BACK!”? Even if you’re home alone, and both your parents live in completely different states, whenever you’re bracing yourself to lift something heavy, one of your parents will drop down from the ceiling Spiderman-style to scream “Lift with your KNEES, not with your BACK!” (I’d bet my pain pills you see where this is going.)

            Last Friday I had to lift up the lawnmower to get it out of the garage, and apparently both my parents were taking the day off from their superpowers, so I thought “Fuck it, variety is the spice of life.” So I bent, reached, and lifted, and then I heard something rip behind me. I thought I’d torn my jeans until I tried to straighten up and pain knifed through my back.

            So anyway, I’ve spent the past week immobile on my back, tripping absolute balls on a home-mixed concoction of muscle relaxants and anti-anxiety drugs. I don’t generally endorse playing pharmacist at home, but look, my alternative involves literally screaming in pain every time I move - and to head off your next question, of course I’m not going to the doctor; doctors are for pansies.

            On the upside, I had some dental work on Monday and I was all hopped up on my own personal go-go juice of Valium and Xanax while the nice man was drilling on me and baby, I felt fiiiiiine. Also, my dentist has one of those nice roll-y massage-y chairs, because my dentist might actually be a literal saint, and I’ve even said so when I wasn’t off my face on pills.

            Even so, I am so incredibly bored. Day one of lazing in bed was luxurious. Day seven is torture. I’m watching old episodes of Jonathan Creek and playing Sudoku on my phone and while these are generally my favorite things in the world to do, I’d trade it all to be able to take my dogs for a walk.