Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in my life and I have spent large portion of it watching Apple trailers on my laptop.

In two weeks I set out on the journey that all my other journeys have led to. Finally, after years and years of wanting to do one thing, I have resolved to do it and it’s getting closer by the minute. I am moving to Los Angeles to attempt carving out an entertainment career for myself, something I have wanted to do since the sixth grade. Now I’m finally doing it. So, I should be stoked, estatic… prepared. And I’m not.

I have found the best way to deal with what is happening is to ignore it. I have moved across the world with very little possessions to essentially start over in a completely new place, only taking a mild detour to my childhood home to gear up. And what am I doing now? Pretending that I don’t have to pack, to buy health insurance, a car, bedsheets and just downloading the Harry Potter movies instead.

I’m terrified.

I’m terrified of failing, of succeeding, of being depressed, of being happy and I can’t tell you why. I’m terrified I’m going to be mugged in the grocery store, I’m terrified I’ll mismanage my money, I’m terrified no will hire me to do anything much less what I actually want to do, I’m terrified I won’t have any friends. So many good things can come from this terror, but right now, all that is coming from it is denial.

Life’s too hard, so I’m going to pretend like it’s not there.

I broke down and got an iPad back in January because they finally went on sale.  A day later, I found out they were releasing an all new and improved version.

My feelings towards this can be found here.

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PLEASE CLICK ME!! I AM AWESOME

Screenwriter John August writes why it’s important to have a general education before a specialized one and why Ron Weasley is more than likely illiterate.

Follow this link or check it out on my Articles page.  And don’t be lazy just because I didn’t post it in it’s entirety for you.  It’s one click, dude.

Alanis may call it ironic, but I call it most unfortunate.

Just think about it: there is a small yet earnest number of people who honestly believe that Satan himself personally sent me and my kind to earth to destroy the morally sound humans of this mortal coil.  And that number is ever expanding.

What if, just what if, they are right?

What if my very existence is single-handedly destroying people lives?  I don’t even have to do anything that directly affects the lives of others, just being harms them and their way of life.  I can go to the mailbox and fetch my bills and BAM three Evangelicals I take down with me. A trip to the gym?  By merely running on a treadmill I can crumble a Republican’s marriage. Grocery shopping?  WHAMMO! A basket of kittens destroyed beneath my feet.

What other demographic can wield such destruction? The answer?  None.

There was a time where these same people believed that black people were less than human, but they, subhumans, did not have the benefit of holding the power to send others to hell simply by looking at them.  No, thinking about them!

Just think.  What if these haters are right?  I can be the queen and the humans my playthings.

un·der·whelm  [uhn-der-hwelm, -welm]

–verb : to fail to interest or astonish

This is my first post in almost three months.  My record to date.  It would have been closer to two months if I hadn’t spent the last two weeks pondering my glorious return.  Everything I remotely came up with was so underwhelming and certainly not glorious, so I have decided to embrace it.

I figured I would dazzle you with some trivia on the word, or at least an etymology of sorts.  The googled results are surprisingly underwhelming.  Not really sure what I was expecting, now that I think about it.

In the past three months, I have:

• Gotten my first technical writing job.  I am writing procedures in the corporate office of Westpac, an Australian bank.
• Submitted a second round of immigration application which in theory will lead to permanent residency.
• Discovered The Oatmeal
• Sanded and oiled six deck chairs we found in the trash pile of a Mormon church.  Surprisingly, this project has taken the entire three months.  I put the final coat of oil on this morning.  I still smell like turpentine.

All I  can do is apologize promise to attempt to be more dazzling, or at least more consistent, in the coming months.

I leave you with this profound quote:

Chastity: I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?
Bianca: I think you can in Europe.

God speed.

Now, I understand the uproar.  I get why they would come running to the defense of Sean and other’s like him.  However, I couldn’t quite gel with their arguments.  And I have figured out why when I read an article posted by the genius himself, Aaron Sorkin.  Immediately I felt “this is my opinion.” Funny that, I knew I had an opinion, I just couldn’t articulate what it was.

Me trying to recount it would only butcher the grace in which he writes, so I have posted Sorkin’s response in it’s entirety below.

Now That You Mention It, Rock Hudson Did Seem Gay

This is a sentence I never thought I would type: I’m coming to the defense of a theatre critic.

Newsweek‘s Ramin Setoodeh wrote an article last week titled “Straight Jacket” in which he argues that gay actors can’t and shouldn’t play straight characters. His “Exhibit A” in the piece is Sean Hayes, the stunningly gifted actor who came to our attention playing Jack MacFarland on the much beloved NBC half-hour comedyWill and Grace. (This was back when NBC broadcast television shows.) Mr. Hayes just opened in the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises, a 1968 musical by Neil Simon, Burt Bacharach and Hal David that was based on The Apartment, the Academy Award-winning film by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. (Izzy) Diamond that starred Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Are you following so far?

It doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that Sean Hayes plays C.C. Baxter in this great show, and that C.C. Baxter is a man who is attracted to women.

Ramin Setoodeh, unlike the overwhelming majority of the people in the audience at the two preview performances I attended, was unhappy with Sean Hayes’ performance. This reaction was not due to Mr. Hayes’ acting, singing, dancing, comedy, unique charm and exceptional rapport with the audience. Mr. Setoodeh’s problem with the star’s performance was that in real life, Mr. Hayes is gay. And as if the studio had given the screenwriter a note that the story had to be spicier, Mr. Setoodeh is gay as well.

Much is being made of the Newsweek piece. Much should be. I’m proud to say that my friend, Kristin Chenoweth, who stars opposite Mr. Hayes in the show (and about whose performance I can’t possibly be objective — she’s sensational and we’ll leave it at that) led the charge — posting an online rebuttal to Mr. Setoodeh in which she called him homophobic.

For an actress who makes her living and her reputation on Broadway, throwing down with a prominent theatre critic isn’t something you do as a career move. In her response to Setoodeh, Ms. Chenoweth made good point after good point after good point…

…and missed the point.

So did Setoodeh.

First things first. An actor, no matter which sex they’re attracted to, can’t “play” gay or “play” straight. Gay and straight aren’t actable things. You can act effeminate and you can act macho (though macho usually ends up reading as gay), but an actor can’t play gay or straight anymore than they can play Catholic. The most disturbing thing to me about this episode is that the theater critic for Newsweek didn’t know that. Of COURSE gay actors can play straight characters — it’s impossible to believe that Mr. Setoodeh would prefer if Ian McKellen would stop doing King Lear.

But with sincere respect to Ms. Chenoweth and the hundreds and hundreds of Internet posters who’ve crashed down on Setoodeh in the last few days — some understandably passionate and some unfortunately hostile — I don’t think Setoodeh was being homophobic. Just wrong.

The problem doesn’t have anything to do with sexual preference. The problem has everything to do with the fact that we know too much about each other and we care too much about what we know. In one short decade we have been reconditioned to be entertained by the most private areas of other people’s lives. We’ve become the family dog who’s allowed to eat anything that falls on the floor, and the press is the little kid in the family who keeps dropping food. Sandy Bullock’s life falls apart? That’s for us. A golfer gets caught with strippers? We’ll take that, thank you. Lindsay Lohan’s an alcoholic? Mmm, mmm good! When Jennifer Aniston plays a movie character who’s looking for love, her performance — always sublime — doesn’t stand a chance against the real story we’ve been told it’s okay to pay attention to, which is that Jennifer Aniston is looking for love. I can’t hum a single John Mayer song but I can name five women he’s slept with. Sean, for Setoodeh, the show began before you even showed up to the theater that night.

The volcanic eruption of tabloids, Internet insanity and — you better believe it — reality TV, has de-creepyized voyeurism. More than that, it’s made the private lives of public people — in the vocabulary of television writers — the “A” story. And in a not-so-convoluted way, the “A” story has an author — thousands of authors in an extraordinary collaboration. When I need the audience to know that a piece of information they’re about to hear is important, I can use words, a close-up, a push-in, music… when the authors of the no-longer-private-lives “A” story want the audience to know that something’s important, it shows up on our Yahoo homepage. (The third story on my homepage yesterday was that Britain, our closest ally, has a new Prime Minister. The first story was about Justin Bieber. Unless the new Prime Minister is Justin Bieber, something’s obviously gone wrong.) Is Sean Hayes’ sexuality relevant to his performance? It has to be — the “authors” told us it was important. (Though Setoodeh would have done well to have asked himself if Mr. Hayes’ performance would have been any different if C.C. Baxter was in love with a man instead of Ms. Chenoweth’s Fran Kubelik. It wouldn’t have been.)

I would never presume to — and those words are almost always followed by whoever said them proceeding to do exactly what they just said they would never presume to do — but I would never presume to tell someone how they should feel about something. I can only imagine that Setoodeh’s piece felt like a solid kidney punch, not to just Mr. Hayes and the other actors tagged in the story, but to teenagers — kids who live in daily fear of what their parents are going to say, of getting the hell beaten out of them at school, of being an oddity. Gay actors, you’ll forgive the expression, are caught between a rock and a hard place. Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are. And in addition to living their own lives in sun and not shadow, these actors want to — admirably — be role models for these kids. But they also know the blanker their canvas the better their chance of marginalizing the “A” story. They know that even in 2010, there’s still no such thing as an actor who’s gay, a movie star and alive all at the same time.

So while I would never presume to tell someone how to feel, if it were me, I would re-direct my energy away from Mr. Setoodeh. (Ryan Murphy– the very gifted creator of Glee whose cast member, the invaluable Jonathan Groff, was also smacked in the teeth by Setoodeh– has called for a boycott of Newsweek. I get it completely, but I say please don’t boycott Newsweek — it’s still one of the very last places left where we can find news. Boycott the red carpet instead. You’re going to win the Emmy, Ryan, and you’re going to get the whole publicity bump that comes with it. You and your cast should proudly walk past every microphone that’s shoved in your faces. The people holding the microphones are writing the “A” story and you don’t have script approval. Boycott In Touch and Us Weekly and Brangelina Daily and every other piece of crap that makes us feel like we’re all sitting under hairdryers.)

Gay actors are in absolutely no danger of losing parts in Broadway shows, so if it were me, I’d re-direct my anger to the real problem. The honest-to-God, no kidding around, small-minded, mean-spirited, hysterically frightened, pig-ignorant bigots who don’t think homosexuals are fit to get married, adopt children or fight and die for their country. The ones who hold signs saying “God Hates Fags.” Those people aren’t in the backwoods of Idaho, they’re in Congress. Fight THEM. I’ll help.

And you know who else will help? Ramin Setoodeh. I promise you he’s on the side of the good guys.

Hollywood University OR: How to get a job in Hollywood

and

A TV Calling

Also, my earnest apologies for the lack of updates.  The joys of an crazy life.

Mary Sue

a term used for a character in a piece of fiction who is really the author’s idealized self-image, often shallow and uninteresting to anyone but the author. Mary Sues dominate any story in which they are included and are most often seen in online fan fiction. The term originated with Paula Smith’s 1974 character from Star Trek fan fiction.

I added a link taking you to a “Mary Sue Litmus Test” to help you determine if you’ve fallen into lazily writing this over-cliched character.

Note: There are many many Mary Sue litmus tests available on the web, some pretty extensive ones at that.  I chose this one because it specifically pertained to the creation for characters in original fiction, whereas most include one or more sections of FanFic and/or RPG characters.  I figured this would be more helpful to people are writing something intended to be actually published.