Good News

Guess what everyone?! I just got offered a job with the Sundance Film Festival! I will be an Assistant Coordinator for the Salt Lake City Box Office. The job runs from December 15 to January 26, so I get to be home for Christmas!! And I get paid for it! Yay! I'm looking forward to the snow, open air, family, friends and good times with everyone! See you all soon!

I'm Just Gonna Put it Out There

After finding out that two of my friends had to defend their vote for Obama to their friends and family, I just want to say how glad I am that my family is so supportive....of everything that I do. I've made some pretty crazy and bad choices in my life (New York, that thing in Vegas), but they always love me and support me, even if they don't support the choice I made. Maybe they didn't get my subtle hints of voting for change (read: I voted for Obama), but I like to think that they did...and it didn't matter to them. What I love about my family is that they're pretty open-minded.

(As a side note, I don't mean to say that my friends' families aren't supportive. I just wanted to say that I didn't get any flack from mone for voting the way I did. Hope this doesn't offend those friends who had to defend.)

And, to keep with this political strain, let me just say some things about Prop 8. This has been a hard thing for me to come to terms with. I'm still not sure I have, yet. I absolutely believe in marriage for all, regardless of sexual orientation. I don't enjoy the Church getting involved with it, and can understand why people feel the need to protest on Temple Square. But the LDS Church was not the only one involved. Read about Catholics supporting the church here.

Last night there was a protest at the temple here in Manhattan. I happened to be in the area just before it all started at 6:30 (the time I had to be at work) and saw some people walking with signs that read Prop h8. While I didn't attend this one in the city, I do have friends that attended the one in Salt Lake. And I have friends and co-workers that are gay. This is what some people in the gay community think about the protest last night; I love that he talks about Outreach being the solution, not Anger.

I don't know what's going to come of all this, and I'm trying to see the bigger picture and why the church would choose to get involved. I just don't like the blind hatred and ignorance on both sides of the issue. I believe that we should all just take care of ourselves and govern our own lives (which is why Marky Mark thinks, and confirmed by an on-line test, that I'm a left-leaning Libertarian). I have friends that believe strong on both sides, and I'm just stuck in the middle trying to defend my faith while defending what I believe should be a right to everyone.

But what's so great about America is that everybody is given the right to vote and protest as they see fit. Now if only we all had the right to be married.

Eleven Eleven

Today is a special day for three people that I know. Well, four I guess, since one of them is a wedding anniversary and so it involves two people. And it's probably an important day for their son, as well, so we'll say it's an important day for five people that I know.


So my first wishes will go out to my favorite cousin in the whole world, Rachel, and her husband Tyler, as they celebrate two years of being married today. Elevens are an important number to them, and got quite lucky when November eleventh happened to fall on a Saturday. Of course this was a sign of their had-to-be-together and were married at eleven o'clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Whenever I see a clock that reads 11:11 I think of them. (Since I've only met Tyler once, I have no pictures of him, and the only one I have of Rachel is this one with my sister that I took at Temple Square before I moved to New York.)


Next I send birthday wishes to my ever-great roommate Rosemary. Hope she has a great day, seeing a show, walking around, eating cake, and enjoying the city.




And last, but not least, birthday wishes to my friend Stefanie. She subletted Rosemary's room when she was in Italy for six weeks and we spent the summer doing cool things together.

Coat of Recognition

I got some photos from my friend from when we went to the Pumpkin Blaze in Tarrytown. They're pretty cool so I thought I'd share them with you.

Pumpkin Stonehenge

Crates of Pumpkins to go with the Pirates; all were elaborately carved.

That's my friend Brook in the middle, and the rest are people that she works with. This was sort of a going away, last-hurrah type of night, as the next day was the last day for the guy in the picture.

A couple weeks after this, I was getting on the subway at 66th street. I was on my way to work after picking up a book at the library. I was wearing that same orange coat because it was super-cold, and when I walked into the subway car this girl looked at me and smiled and waved. She didn't look like a crazy, so I waved back and smiled. It was the girl on the end in the white coat! She recognized me by my, and I quote, "beautiful coat" We rode the train together til Times Square where I had to transfer, but I loved how it was so random, that in a city of a million people you can still find the few people that you know. Sometimes it helps, though, if you have a totally awesome coat.

Nerts Champion

Last night Maria, Marky Mark and I went over to some friends' apartment, and after some talking, laughing, eating, and watching of Bruno, we introduced them to Nerts. I've played a lot of Nerts in my life, as my sister can attest to, but I never thought of myself as "good" (cuz really, how good can one be at Nerts, it doesn't involve that much strategy) because my sister, who was my usual opponent, was just as good. But when I played with just Maria and Marky last month I won nearly every match. It was clear that I had some sort of skills.

Apparently there is some sort of strategy/skills involved, and mine differs from what Maria and Marky Mark do. And clearly mine is better because I'm always winning :) I simply choose to place and play a lot off of my four work piles, something they are wont to do as it ties up cards they could place in the middle. I never thought of it that way; I saw it more as giving me more to work with.

So last night we were playing with six people! Around an oval table! of which I was at the tip point instead of the flatter side and thus had to reach farther across the table to play cards. It was sort of frustrating and chaotic,as it is with lots of people as opposed to the two I usually play with. The new people did fairly well, even winning a few rounds, but I was the ultimate champion. And yeah, I felt good, because when it comes to Settlers of Cataan I've only won once!

I learned to play in grade school from a friend, Jenny Axford, and it was pretty simple. When I taught it to my sister I couldn't remember how to keep score so we just never did; we'd just play til we got bored. But there's apparently lots of different rules, and names, to the game, which I learned not only from playing with Maria and Mark, but also from googling nerts. Check them out here. Did you know that Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word "nerts" as slang: nonsense, nuts? I think that's a pretty good summation of the game last night!

Subways and Street Names

The Tribeca Film Institute moved offices this week. It used to be right at the tip of TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal street), but it came time to merge the offices that were working in a separate building. Since our office was smaller we moved into theirs....on Spring Street, which is not even in TriBeCa! It's in SoHo (South of Houston--pronounced how-ston)! But the main main Tribeca offices, the one that Bobby DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal would most likely go to, is on Greenwich (pronounced Gren-ich) Street, which is in TriBeCa.

So I now take a different subway to work. But a different subway means a different part of town. When I first got out of the subway Wednesday morning I was a little turned around. I wasn't sure which way was uptown and what was East because I couldn't see the Empire State Building. SoHo isn't a part of the city that I go to a lot; the streets aren't numbered down there so instead you get names like Broome, Chrystie, Grand, Centre, Prince, Spring, Mercer, Greene, Walker. But it's fun; I like exploring different neighborhoods of the city that I wouldn't normally go to if it wasn't for work. The streets are small and cobble-stoned. There's tons of shopping choices, from Armani to Zara. There's little delis and eateries but hardly any chain restaurants.



Yesterday for lunch I spent my time just walking around in a huge square to get a feel for the area. And I got a feel for which streets run up/downtown and which ones run east/west. And if I can see the Woolworth building then I know which way is downtown.

New York's great like that--every neighborhood is different but it's all New York.

The Day After

Riding the subway and going to work this morning felt different. And not just because the Tribeca offices have moved and I now take a different subway to work, but that the whole world feels different. If feels like a better place. Maybe it's because I live in Harlem. But I just felt different riding the subway.

I was walking down the subway steps when I overheard two girls talking, saying something about, "She's white and we're Puerto Rican, that's why." Now, I have no idea what their actual conversation was about, having just heard that little snippet. But the guy walking down the stairs next to me, who was black, was saying he was amazed people could talk like that after what happened last night. He said everything's different after last night. And I couldn't help to think that everything is different. And for the better. Isn't that amazing? It's something I don't know I could really feel the weight of if I was living in Utah. But here, being surrounding by so many people that were deeply affected, and hopefully positively impacted in the near and distant future, by last night's outcome, it feels so powerful. It really is a whole new world.