Mistress of none

I got this meme from MeanG:

(1) Go to http://www.careercruising.com/.
(2) Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
(3) Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
(4) Post the top fifteen results

1. Communications Specialist

2. Critic

3. Writer

4. Translator

5. Print Journalist

6. Market Research Analyst

*(and now it gets REALLY random...)*

7. Plumber

8. Comedian

9. Magician

10. Professional Athlete

11. Composer

12. Telephone Operator

13. Plasterer

14. Special Effects Technician

15. Stock Clerk

Basta

It's hard enough when you can't fall asleep because you have a good song stuck in your head. But last night I had "Gimme More" on endless replay and it almost drove me insane.

Good? No. Say what you want, though, that song is catchy.

Semi-starstruck

Every day on my way to and from work, I pass the production trucks for Bachelor #2, which is filming pretty much all over Back Bay. It’s kind of neat to see a movie being filmed in Boston because while this town tries its best to be sophisticated, it is the polar opposite of glitzy. That’s why I like it here—what you see is what you get. Still, it’s neat to see all the activity and today I got a taste of it up close and personal. One of my coworkers is a bigwig at the Old South Church and he spirited me into the sanctuary to watch a wedding scene being filmed. I’d never been in the Old South Church before and it's gorgeous! The chapel was full of director’s chairs, which stood out strangely from the polished wood and stained glass. The sanctuary is a heart-breakingly beautiful space made more lovely by extravagant lighting and $80,000 worth of flowers from Winston’s. No joke. Kate Hudson was nowhere to be seen, but there was someone dressed up as a bride under the chuppah (there was a rabbi and a priest up there, too) and about 10 rows of extras dressed in black tie wedding attire. Being an extra definitely doesn’t look glitzy—the cameras rolled every few minutes, but the extras all seemed like they’d been sitting in those pews for a long time. The bride came out into the hallway and complained about having to pee really badly. Someone I couldn’t see clearly jumped over a bunch of pews and shrieked some things we couldn’t hear. Then the production crew kicked us out because we were visible through the stained glass windows. Outside the church, a growing crowd of bystanders was watching for celebrities. I thought about yelling, “Look! There’s Dane Cook!” but decided against it because 1. that’s not nice and 2. Dane Cook stopped being funny a long time ago and he doesn’t need the attention.

Recap

Things that happened in the 6 weeks since I last did anything on this blog:

1. We went to Stowe for a week. It was lovely. It was not the city. We hiked and kayaked and ate a lot of mediocre ski town restaurant food. We also enjoyed the company of Scully, who we brought with us at the last minute and who might have had more fun on vacation than anyone else.

2. Our fantasy football league’s draft. In the middle of round 3, my laptop froze and there were a lot of colorful words in the air while Lunchboy rushed to get the downstairs desktop logged on (I would have done it but was extremely busy freaking out). Kickoff was last night and I’m excited for the season. Last year I got a leetle too into it and then burnt out before the Superbowl, so I am learning my lesson and pacing myself.

3. Tom Brady’s ex had their baby so I have been able to stop checking Inside Track roughly every 6 seconds.

4. Justin Timberlake had a concert special on HBO. SexyBack and Rock Your Body are really good songs but the rest of his music isn’t great, so we were both a little surprised by how mesmerized we were. Perhaps it was his fey boy-bandiness? His hiring of Janet Jackson’s choreographer? The way he flogged every tired arena concert trick in the book? Just in case anyone forgot where he was playing (Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York), JT helpfully blurted out, “New York!” every few minutes. So last night we watched part of the rerun and made a drinking game out of it. JT is much better watched when drunk.

5. I started doing biweekly group sessions with a personal trainer. He’s funny, flamboyant, looks like Chiz and Higgypiggy combined, has lots of good stories from his days as a designer for Tommy Hilfiger, and he kicks my ass so hard that I’m asleep by 7pm on workout days. Suddenly I have guns! After all my self-flagellation over Mysore, I realized I was burnt out on yoga—on getting in the practices, making it home in time for class, pushing through yet another class where the instructor can’t keep their sides straight. It feels good to mix things up. I’m still at yoga 1-2 times a week but I am amazingly less stressed now that I don’t have “Four times a week or die!” emblazoned in my brain.

6. Anxiety—it’s what’s for dinner. But the weights help. So does the clonozepam that my doctor was lovely enough to prescribe. C’est la vie.

When given a horse to flog, flog it I must

When Heather first wrote that she and her husband were going back to visit LA, I smiled and thought, “I bet she hits the stairs.” That’s because, way back in the day, Heather used to be a stairs junkie like me. I never saw her there because she left LA before I moved there, but her posts about the stairs made me feel warm and fuzzy inside because hey, I was no longer the only semi-obsessive stairs addict in the world. Those stairs, they stick with you. They are a discipline, they get in your blood. When Lunchboy and I went back last year, I took him to the stairs roughly 3 hours after we got off the plane at LAX. And then we went back the next morning. Obsessive? Just a bit.

Lo and behold, this popped up on Blurbomat. I once emailed Heather about the stairs obsession, but she didn’t write back. If I had a kid and a dog and an insanely successful blog, I probably wouldn’t have time for email, either. That and the fact that I'm a complete and total stranger. But the stairs thing is one reason I kept reading Dooce after MeanG first got me into it. And I bet Lunchboy would empathize with Jon because we somehow ran 10 sets of the stairs last year and both of us had a hard time walking for the rest of our CA trip. The Harvard stadium is nice and I appreciate having it close by, but it is not the same.