DIARY

DIARY

Inked

I've clearly been having a bit of a body-modification thing these past few months. And so I thought it might be fun to do a roundup of all the tattoos, mostly because I love hearing the stories behind other people's (tell me yours, tell me yours!).

I don't know why I've never talked about most of my tattoos before - but I started thinking about this tonight, and I suspect the reason is that every time I start to write about them I get stuck. Not because I'm nervous to share my reasons for getting each one - I may not agree with those reasons anymore, but I'm a firm believer that the point of tattoos is not to be totally, all-in certain that THIS IS THE ONE, FOREVER, but rather to mark moments in time that meant something to you (and that's something you can never be sorry for doing). No, I think I've never talked much about them because some are easy to explain, but others? I'm not confident that I can convey why I chose to put those marks on my body. Not well enough, anyway. And I don't want to render them trite, because to me they're not.

That's why art exists, after all: sometimes words just aren't enough.

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Oh The Verlegenheit

(Full disclosure: this entire post may just be an excuse to use the word "verlegenheit" in a sentence. It means "embarrassment" in German and I have no idea how to pronounce it, but seriously think it may now be one of my favorite words of all time.)

So I spent this morning packing the attic, because my daughter ate the end of my computer charger*. Which brought my workday to a halt until I was able to find a RadioShack (yes, a RadioShack) willing to sell me a way-out-of-date MacBook charger for the bargain price of NINETY DOLLARS. Let's just let that one go, shall we?

Back to the packing. In our attic we have these built-in storage shelves that go wayyyy back into the house, and are thus the repository for things that we use so infrequently that we completely forget they exist until we unearth them during the course of a move (very useful stuff, as I'm sure you can imagine). And while going through one of these storage shelves I found them:

DIARY

Because Audition Tapes Are Always Fun

You know how occasionally some actor's original audition tape for some film or another will get released, and it's always fun to watch? Fun to see why they got the part in the first place (or maybe why they didn't)?

Watching these tapes gives me All Of The Residual Anxiety. Because GOD, I hated auditioning. No matter how prepared I was when I walked into the room, no matter how right I was for the part, I could never be sure that my nerves wouldn't get the better of me and leave me standing there in front of a huge room of people with my knees shaking, my neck bright-red, and my voice all high and weird...and oh, the lines? Not thinking about those even a tiny bit anymore; all I'd be thinking was GET ME OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW. It was terrifying, and self-esteem crushing, and it made me dread each and every time my phone rang with my agent telling me I had to go in and read for a new part.

While effectively quitting the acting industry (or being forcibly evicted; however you'd like to put it; the latter being significantly more accurate) was obviously one of the most overwhelming (and frightening) moments in my life, it was also kind of…a relief. Because even though I was being faced with starting completely from scratch, looking out into a wide-open future full of uncertainty, I knew one thing: I would never have to audition again.

SNAPSHOTS

Steam Trains And Diamonds And Why I Pierced My Nose

Our one not-house-hunting, non-quarantined day was spent in Berkeley with Francesca and her brother, and we packed in enough good stuff that I went home feeling like, you know: we rode old-fashioned steam trains through the hills. And saw dolphins. I had the best latte I have ever had in my life (at Cafe Med, on Telegraph). And we ate Burmese food and played in the sand, and got ice cream whenever possible. And even a trip to urgent care is…well, it's its own kind of memory, right? (The steam trains were better.)

 

Oh, also: we made a quick stop into Industrial Tattoo and Piercing, and I finally went ahead and pierced my nose (Indy got to choose the jewelry; he went with a diamond over a gold stud; good man).


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