Crisis

As you may or may not have heard, Crisis is being cancelled.  I'm pretty sure that they are planning on airing the remaining episodes, which is nice, at least, but I'm bummed.  Crisis is the first television series I've worked on, the first recurring background work I've been lucky enough to get, and was an overall very positive experience. 

It's rare, I've learned, to walk onto a set with a group of background actors as patient, polite, engaged, and talented as the folks I shared the Core FBI title with.  We spent 12+ hour days together in holding on below-freezing Chicago winter days.  We built rapport with each other, the crew, the stand-ins, and everyone else involved in the production (including Michael Beach!)

I've been holding on to an anecdote about Crisis for awhile, hoping, I suppose, that the last time I saw the FBI set would not truly be the last time after all.  But it was, and so I'll tell you. 

The first time I walked onto the Crisis FBI set, it was like walking onto the bridge of JJ Abrams' Starship Enterprise.  Everything glinted with a strange kind of ethereal light, bright and clean and too modern and too real.  You accessed the set from a kind of interdimensional portal, one side a sheet of reinforced plywood, the other a gleaming elevator door.  The crew fluttered around you, doing their noble but ultimately endless task of setting everything up JUST RIGHT, with rolls of gaff tape and sandbags and cabling scattered around the floor. 

Everyone knew each other, except for me, it seemed.  Most of the Core FBI actors had been hired in the fall, but I was added on in December, along with a handful of others. 

I worked maybe 12 or 15 days total on Crisis, including two days at the beginning of filming when I was not FBI at all, just a random bystander.  On the last day of shooting, as everything was winding down and we were preparing to wrap, I realized that every single item of clothing that I was wearing, and even my hairstyle, was identical to what I wore on the first day I worked, the first day of filming.  I thought it was poetic. 

I looked around at extras' holding, at the FBI set.  I looked at the walls and windows and lights that had once looked gleaming and almost supernatural in their existence in my life, and I saw a kind of home.  I sat with my fellow background players and felt I was with family.  We had trekked through frozen tundra, through slush, across frozen and pothole-pockmarked Chicago streets to get to the studio day in and day out.  We had gotten up at 4 or 5am to come in from the suburbs, and wrapped at 11pm or midnight.  We had bonded. 

Family

This is us.  Me in the grey suit/pink shirt in front

It's easy to forget when you're watching a television show, how many people worked SO hard to make it a three-dimensional, realized world.  We're people you probably barely even see in the finished product, the blurs behind the principle actors, the motion half out of frame.  I was so, SO lucky to get to work on Crisis and to be a part of this family, and I hope like hell I get to see them all again someday, and not just piecemeal, one or two at a go, when next season's filming begins in the summer. 

Into the fire

Well, this is it, kids.  I'm down to my last dollar.  My literal last dollar.  I've been spending an awful lot of time agonizing about what I was going to do once I got to this point, but you know what?  It's not really all that different from anything else I've done so far.

I had my dad ask me if I wanted to be talked up for a 70k-salary job that I'm not really qualified for, if I would just move back to Detroit, and I basically said that A) I'm still more concerned for my mental health than I am my monetary situation, and B) they'll take my body out of Chicago before I leave this city.

Seventy thousand dollars is so much money it almost makes me want to vomit at the thought of how extravagant that is.  Maybe I still have issues determining my self-worth, but I really don't think I'm qualified to make too much more than twenty, regardless of what I'm doing.  Do people really live on more than that?  And what are you supposed to do with it all? 

I'm down to my last dollar, and I'm still sitting in a coffeeshop, editing photos and wondering how I stumbled into working with such wonderful (and unreasonably attractive) actors. 

Is it just me?  Probably. Image (C) Me.  Duh.

I'm sitting in a coffeeshop, paying for my coffee with laundry quarters, and somehow, I'm still managing to fangirl over how stupid cute the gent on the right is.  I didn't think so when we started rehearsals, but people grow on you.  We're finishing up tech and opening the show this coming weekend, and it's been really strange to work on another Equity production.  I didn't think I'd find myself doing Equity theater again, but here we are.

I'm down to my last dollar, and I am going to be fine.  This isn't going to kill me.  The universe provides. 

Writing without a net: Convergence, Chapter 2

You can find Chapter 1 here!

Chapter 2

I found myself stumbling blindly through the jungle, disoriented and confused.  Charlie, Sayid, Jack, they had all claimed the Others possessed the strength and cunning of ten men.  So what was this broken rag-doll of a man in our Hatch?

And yet, his eyes were not pleading, but immeasurably hungry and calculating as they searched my face.  Contrary to my purpose, this encounter had answered nothing, but only intensified my curiosity.  Who was he?  And what was he?  As weak as his battered and half-starved body, or as sharp and cunning as his gaze?  I kept looking back on his face in my memory, split lip, black eye, clothes ragged and torn, and I found that I felt pity more than anything.  What were we keeping him in a cage for, anyway?  From the whispers on the beach, no one was even certain he was an Other, and not just some hapless survivor like ourselves. 

I began again to think about Ethan.  The only true Other I had ever met.  Had he not been helpful, if not aloof those first days?  I remembered him hauling firewood.  I remembered him slicing mangoes.  And wasn’t it true that, when Charlie shot him, it was in the middle of the jungle, witnessed only by Jack and Sayid?  I grew a little cold at the thoughts I was entertaining.  These people were my people.  They were only trying to protect us… right?

                As the days went by, I found myself returning to my previous state, existing as the silent cog in the wheel of our camp.  Each day, I considered trying to go back to the hatch, trying to get another look, or at least to snoop outside long enough to hear his name.  If they knew his name.  If they had even bothered to learn it.  And then something happened.  Michael returned.

I was far from the first to find out, predictably.  In fact, the only reason I found out at all was because, about a week after I first visited the hatch, I finally gave in to my temptation to try again.  I came this time, armed with the laundry of half the camp, hoping that, with the addition of Ana Lucia into hatch rotation, I could finally convince someone that an all-night laundry bender was someone’s idea of a good time. 

Unfortunately for me, the Island decided that it just wasn’t laundry day.

I found myself on the path to the Hatch not long before dusk.  Jack and Kate were out doing… whatever it was that Jack and Kate did.  Locke was off duty on the beach.  Hurley was even more cheerful than usual.  I thought I had it in the bag.  The sun had begun to set as I found myself deeper in the jungle, and I suddenly remembered why it was unwise to leave camp in the evenings. 

If anyone else would have known where I was headed that night, I would have sworn up and down that I hadn’t heard the gunshots.  And that much was true.  I was pausing to adjust my pack of laundry when I heard it, almost quiet enough to miss, the sound of rapid footfalls, deftly in the brush. 

I found myself suddenly awash in a pool of torchlight.  As my eyes began to adjust, I saw that it was him.  As he registered my face, his expression became overwhelmed by what I could only describe as terrible disappointment 

“It would be you, wouldn’t it?”  He asked quietly.

“What did you do?” It tumbled out of me, absurdly. 

“Nothing.” He stated simply. 

She really had been the last thing he expected to see on this god-forsaken path.  Gardner.  He couldn’t remember anything else about her, save the fact that her passport photo had very much resembled a mugshot, she had looked so surly.  In the dancing firelight, as at the Swan, she didn’t look surly at all, just delicate.  And right now, she was trying very hard to stop staring stupidly at him.  As she straightened, he barely registered a hint of movement at her collarbones.  She was wearing a necklace.  It was an ankh.  He silently cursed Jacob for this. 

“It would be you, wouldn’t it?”  He asked quietly. 

“What did you do?” She was practically shouting. 

“Nothing.”  He stated, emotionlessly.  “Walk with me.  Quietly.”

                “What did you do?”  I asked again, this time with purpose.  Who was on duty tonight?  I moved to drop the laundry and leave him on the path, but he shot out a hand and stopped me.

                “Nothing.” He repeated.  “But if you go back there, there is a very good chance that Michael will kill you.”

                “Michael?” I asked, perhaps too shrilly.  His eyes flashed in the firelight.

                “Yes.  Michael.  It’s really quite astonishing, what someone will do for their child.”  At these words, he began to move off into the jungle.  I hesitated, then stumbled off after him. 

                “Take me with you.”  I hissed.  It burst out of me, unbidden. 

                “No.”  He didn’t look back, but instead continued to pick through the underbrush, torch flickering ahead of him. 

                “Take me with you.  Please.” 

                “Tell me, I’m curious, why on earth would you want to just take off into the jungle with a strange man you’ve just met?”  He asked, tonelessly, picking up speed.

                I caught him by the crook of his elbow, swinging the both of us to a sudden halt once again in the darkness.

                “You may know, in your heart, that they had every reason to beat you and lock you in a cage.” I murmured, meeting his eyes again for the first time.  “But they don’t.  So take me with you.”  

                He rounded on her.  If she was going to be in the habit of just asking the same questions until she reached a satisfactory answer, she was going to be far too much trouble to accompany him further.  He scrutinized her face.  She stood her ground, resolutely.

                “I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve misplaced your implicit trust.  That belongs with Dr. Shepherd, not me.” 

                “Jack and Locke have no justification for their actions, aside from the excuse that you are the Other, and they fear the unknown.  I’m tired of fearing the unknown.  I want to know it instead.”

                They stood in silence for a long moment, one expectantly waiting for an answer, the other perking his ears for the sound of encroaching footfalls. 

                “Take me with you.”  Nine-year-old Ben was pleading with Richard Alpert.  What had he said?  He had closed his eyes, composed himself, and his eyes had filled with the same vague disappointment that Ben was busy twisting his expression into now. 

                “Maybe that can happen.” He finally said, demeanor softening deliberately, and she straightened with surprise.  “Maybe.  But if that’s what you really want… If that’s what you want, I want you to think about that.  You’re going to have to be very, very patient.” 

                He turned away again, and conducted her through the jungle in silence for some time.  Eventually, she stopped once more, shifting the pack of laundry and clearing her throat. He bristled and came to a halt. 

                “Yes?” He murmured testily.

                “If I’m not coming with you, just where do you think you’re leading me?”  She asked, half proud of her cleverness, half dreading the answer to her query. 

                “I am sorry, Tristan.  I am.” He responded quietly and, before she could even process what he had said, he had pulled Michael’s gun from the waistband of his pants and slammed the butt of it into her left temple. 

I'm really good at being mediocre at things.

As the title says, the only thing I seem to be any good at lately is being mediocre at everything.  Granted, my definition of mediocre is probably pretty subjective.  But, before you raise a hand to argue that I'm probably doing just fine, hear me out. 

I have been technically "unemployed" for going on nine months now.  I've figuratively gestated a full-term unemployment baby.  And... I'd like to think that nine months is a whole lot of time to get oneself together, to learn some new things, to change, albeit at a glacial pace.  What have I learned?

1) The first couple of months are really fun.
The first few months after cutting loose from a toxic work situation are FANTASTIC.  And terrifying.  But mostly fantastic.  You're sailing through your life, collecting your unemployment checks and feeling invincible, because you're no longer tied to a situation that was draining you.  You've got all the energy in the world, I daresay I was practically vomiting rainbows every morning while skipping off to the coffeeshop to write.  It was great.  You think that phase is never going to end, that that's what "creative self employment" is always going to look like.

2) The first couple of months are NOTHING like what "creative self employment" really look like. 
At least, not if you're me.  Was I employed creatively?  Yeah.  Was I master of my own domain?  Of course.  But the thing you tend to forget while you're munching your 90th egg sandwich and writing chapter 28 of that LOST fanfiction is that egg sandwiches and LOST fanfiction don't make you any money.  Egg sandwiches, in a fit of cruel irony, tend to COST money, actually.  And, let's be honest, your love for Ben Linus might carry you through a lot of things, but he's not coming to bail you out when your bank account is empty.  You need to do things that actually help your situation. 

3) (counterintuitively) Thinking about money all the time is a shitty way to do things. 
Sometimes you need to sit in a coffeeshop and eat an egg sandwich and write about how stupidly in love with Ben Linus you are.  Sometimes you need that.  After seeing what February did to me, hoo damn, do I appreciate the sweet, sweet sanity of egg-cheddar-sesame bagel and five hundred pages of surly glances and snide comments. 

4) I'm really good at being mediocre at things.
Guess what?  Full circle.  One of the biggest discoveries of... probably my life... is that you actually need to WORK on things to be good at them.  You need to put effort into the shit that you do.  You're all sitting there thinking "well, duh." but this is kind of a big deal to me.  You're talking to the kid who put ZERO effort into schoolwork for the first 12 years of schooling and still walked away with straight-A's.  The kid who had a nervous breakdown after having to TRY to be good at something (literally one thing) in undergrad, and then subsequently sailed through the rest of those four years working on NOTHING and predictably being utterly forgettable at everything. 

Fast forward to... this morning.  (Maybe not quite this morning, this concept has been boiling under the surface for a few days, really)  It's like an epiphany.  You want people to think you're pretty again?  Stop wearing shitty clothes and no make up.  (I mean, by all means, wear shitty clothes and no make up if you want to.  But it occurs to me that I can't remember the last time a random dude catcalled me on the way to the Jewel, and that shit used to happen every. single. day.)  You want to fit into your jeans again?  Quit eating the whole box of mac & cheese in one go.  Also, you're supposed to be training for a 5k.  You want to stop being so forgettable as a performer?  Maybe if you practiced, or watched your acts, or asked for feedback, or did any of the things you're supposed to do? 

I have a feeling it's going to be a ridiculously difficult habit to break.  Partially because it's so ingrained in my being.  Partially because living hand-to-mouth leaves very little room to think about the things that are happening even as far away as the day after tomorrow.  But, really, here's the last thing I'm in the process of learning:

5) Concentrating on living hand-to-mouth isn't really conducive to improving your life situation.
When you're spending all your time worrying about where your rent is going to come from... a week before rent is due... you really aren't spending a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to put enough money away so that this problem doesn't repeat itself next month.  Because that's a fucking fantasy.  If I can't even pay rent this month, what use is it for me to think about next month? 

But here's the thing.  You end up spending all your time taking jobs (ANY jobs) that will pay you a little money right now.  You sign up for that extra day on set.  You take another Stage Management gig.  You sign up for those asanine online websites where you can review songs for a whole 10 cents per song, or sell stock photography, or copywrite in your so-called free time.  You take the job that pays you $20 because you need that $20 RIGHT NOW, instead of using that time to run your acts a few times, or finish your props (FINISH YOUR FANS, MEGAN), or researching who you should be emailing to get more diverse bookings.  (how does that even work?  Really.  I have no idea.  I'm the worst freelancer ever.)


I'm not saying you shouldn't be taking those $20 gigs, because they do add up.  But there's a point where you suddenly realize you're exhausted, you can't remember where the hell the last two months went, and somehow you're still broke.  Maybe I could have just said "work smarter, not harder" and that would have sufficed. 

Maybe that's the biggest irony of all.  For all that I've always been a smart kid, I've never quite figured out how to work smart. 

Cooking without a net: Spruiced up Mac & Cheese

Oh, hey.  Guess what?  Sometimes, I'm known to actually cook food.  (This doesn't happen as often as it should.  See also: Why I continue to be poverty-ridden.)  I'm one of those lucky people who gets a little assistance from time to time, when it comes to my groceries, so I'm lucky enough to be able to put together the occasional chicken pot pie (or the delicious tortellini soup I made last week), but when things are tight, we all revert back to our days as starving college students and pick up boxes of that wonderful staple: nuclear-orange macaroni and cheese. 

I admit it.  I love the stuff.  But I also love not feeling like a broke-ass, so I tend to spiff it up a little.  This is my standard procedure:

1) Make mac & cheese.
2) While boiling noodles, heat saucepan with some olive oil or butter.
3) saute a clove (or two.  Or three) of garlic
4) slice mushrooms (button are fine.  I like the baby 'bellas) and add to garlic.
5) sprinkle mushrooms liberally with oregano and rosemary
6) throw a bunch of baby spinach on top and cut off the heat.
7) drain your noodles.  While they're draining, stick your veggies in the pot with the cheese powder, butter, milk. 
8) put your noodles back in, mix, and consume. 

Yum.

Etsy (again)

I wrote about my Etsy shop once upon a time, about a million years ago.  At the time, I think I was still (unsuccessfully) selling handmade feather fascinators, with terrible photography skills and very little confidence in my finished product. 

Somewhere along the line, I stopped selling fascinators.  I let my Etsy shop grow weeds and languish empty for awhile.  I just didn't have the energy to keep it up, and I kind of hated making the fascinators when I wasn't really all that sure of what I was doing. 

But then something happened.  I impulse-purchased a box of vintage sewing patterns.  I was fueled by the memory of the box of 70's patterns I had borrowed from one of my sorority sisters in college.  Her mother had what seemed to be a treasure-trove of them, all in sizes absurdly too small for me.  Years of searching finally led me to cave in and buy a box... probably 30 or 40 of them in total, with the plan to weed out the ones I wanted to keep for myself, and then flip the rest on Etsy... hopefully for enough profit to buy another box and do the same thing. 

And then I bought another box.  And another.  And another.  And eventually I amassed enough patterns to fill an entire chest of drawers, plus two boxes in the trunk of my car.  I own over a thousand of them. 

Sales were slow, predictably, at first.  I'm one of those impatient sorts who wants things to pick up and be successful immediately, so that was tough for awhile.  I started filling up the shop the August before I left Provision for good... since that was the first time I was threatened with a lay-off.  I thought maybe I could close the gaps and pay the bills with sales at that time.  But I ended up staying at Provision for another 10 months, and I got lazy.  I updated the shop, but not as much as I could have. 

This year though, I've been seeing regular enough sales to pull in about $50 each month.  Not a fabulous number, but hey, the shop pays for itself, at least. 

And, oh.  By the way.  If you're interested in dipping a toe into sewing your own vintagewear, you should definitely check me out on Etsy.

These are a few of my favorite things

We have a bit of a departure for me today.  (Although, at this stage, everything is a little bit of a departure.  Cohesion has not yet magically happened in the way I keep expecting it to.)  I just want to talk a little about a few things that I find to add whimsy to my otherwise grey and poverty-trodden life. 

1) Coins that are older than me. 
There is nothing like being reminded of your impermanence on a lazy Wednesday afternoon at the cafe.  I mean that, however, in the best of ways.  This morning's example comes by way of a weathered dime from 1978.  Sometimes you fish into your pocket and pull out change from the 60's, battered and worn, and you wonder what it was used for when Nixon was president.  Did someone buy new shoes?  A phone call to a distant relative?  Eggs?  Other times, it's a quarter from 1980, still impossibly shiny and fresh after 30 years. 

These coins are like people.  Every one of them has lived a different experience.  Some of them come to you covered in gunk.  Some of them are bafflingly pristine.  Some of them may have been carelessly spent on gum or comic books by your own 10-year-old parents.  They might have been unwittingly carried into war, seen other countries, spent three years in the sofa cushions of a suburban household.  But they each have a unique story to which we will never be privy.  And that fascinates me. 

2) Reading the beginnings of blogs.
This is actually the thing that inspired me to write at all this morning.  I have a number of blogs I follow (or... peruse on a somewhat infrequent basis...) and, while I love following these people and hearing about their present escapades/successes/wild failures, the first thing I do when encountering a new blog is scroll ALL the way back to the beginning.  It's not that I feel the need to know everyone's origin story, although that is a powerful motivator in and of itself.  It's that I love the fact that I can identify with everyone's bumbling, stumbling, trying-to-find-their-feet first posts.  Those first months where you write everything because you're shooting-glitter-lasers-from-your-eyeballs enthused about your new project.  The halfhearted excuses why you let your blog languish for a week or two (or a year or two *cough*).  The "revelations" that seem so profound when you write them, but they really aren't, because you're a baby at your craft and what the hell do you know about anything?  Or you do, in fact, know what you're talking about, but so does everyone else in the Western world.  It's oddly reassuring to me.

One of my favorites (of course it is, I'm a photographer, after all) is Jamie Delaine's blog.  She started her photography business when she was 16 and it blows my mind how wildly (and seemingly instantaneously) successful she's been.  She's someone whose writing I have read over and over, in a desperate attempt to attain through some form of osmosis the kind of relentless drive and optimism and enthusiasm she exhibits. 

I'm also fond of the blog for Oz Images Photography.  Her first months of blogging sound much like my own, I feel, and, hey, she found her voice and created a successful business in time. 

Exhale

This week may well have been one of the most stressful on record.  I clocked a day on set, tech for one show, and fully costuming a burlesque act. 

It was down to the wire, but I finished the important things, and I rolled with the things that didn't end up happening.  And I learned a few things. Like... that apron I had planned for my burly-q act is totally unnecessary (and also to tie my bustle underneath my corset, because I almost got stuck this week.  O_o)

In the moment, having to finish ten thousand things in the span of about 72 hours is absolutely hellish.  But I say it over and over again, and it's true.  I work best when I'm standing on the edge of a knife.  I don't meander through my projects, I shoot through them with laser focus. 

This week, I'll be spending another day on set, and I have work or job interviews or rehearsal or shows EVERY DAY (except Wednesday.  whee!).  Let's hope we can keep this train moving along. 

Television without a net

I'm sure I've mentioned that I'm a background extra.  And, since I posted those lovely photographs of myself last night, you know what I look like. 

I invite you to join me in a colossal game of Where's Waldo (Raven-edition) on March 16th (and subsequently) by watching the premiere of NBC's new show Crisis.  I'll give you a big ole' hint:  I'm in the FBI. 

March 16th.  Crisis.  Do it.

Closing the gap

Just a quickie post tonight, since I'm on set all day tomorrow and I still have a million things to do for the burlesque act that I'm debuting on Saturday at Stage 773. 

I spend a lot of time carefully curating my Facebook page.  My real-people Facebook page, that is.  My sparkly alter-ego takes care of herself, and she is free to say just about anything.  But, at the behest of my mother, I comb through pretty much everything on my personal page to make sure I'm presentable to the rest of the family.

And the more I think about it, the more I wonder... why bother?  The people who love and accept me are largely going to love and accept me, and the people who don't... well, they either never cared about the real me in the first place, or they just don't understand the world I choose to live in.  Neither of those things is a crime, both are kind of a shame, in my opinion. 

It just seems to me that the people who should be the most aware of how you present yourself and what you do with your life are your family.  Why should I curate a benign false life to please the people I see at Christmas, only to have to dance around the truth and tell lies to their faces about what I do when I actually do see them? 

Like, yeah.  I'm an unemployed bum, Grandma.  I work on film sets as an extra so that I can eat and keep a roof over my head.  If you play Where's Waldo, you might see me.  I take my clothes off in front of strangers in the name of artistic expression.  Being a Stage Manager doesn't really pay me anything, but somehow I still keep suckering myself into doing it.  I have no friends, but I'm only bitterly lonely every once in awhile.  I cannot stand being within arm's reach of 99% of the population, but I can name a whole handful of people whose shoulders I desperately ache to lean on, and none of those can ever, ever happen without consequence.  That's a whole other post for a whole other day. 

The point is, I've been quietly trying to close the gap between my perceived reality and my actual life for some time.  And it can be summed up in the change of my profile photo from this:

to this:

(courtesy of Warren Perlstein.  Facebook version contains less, erm... decolletage.)

I sound like a dick in my cover letters

A few months ago, I was trolling the internet looking for my next gig, something to keep me going just a little longer, because I'm a freelance-everything, and that's pretty much just what you have to do with your life.  I was looking at Stage Management jobs, and I happened to come across a post for an off-night show which was... pretty much perfect for me, since I perform on Saturday nights.  I composed a cover letter for this job, and pretty much immediately thought I sounded like a self-important dick.  What the hell, I thought, and sent it anyway.  I got that job within the hour, no interview required. 

I've been keeping it in my back pocket, for the times when I really want to be considered for something, and I've had some good opportunities crop up in the last few weeks that called for its modification and return to service.  Surprise, surprise, I got called to schedule an interview less than an hour after I sent it in. 

What I've discovered is something that isn't exactly new.  In fact, it's something that I totally already knew, once upon a time.  I must have forgotten it somewhere along the line of spending three years frying my brain cells out under someone else's fluorescent lighting.  Confidence makes you look competent. 

Confidence makes you look competent. 

I'm not saying that confidence alone is going to qualify you for a job you're not competent at, but it sure seems to go a long damn way.  I've spent so long apologizing for myself, apologizing for somehow managing to be good at Stage Management and writing and photography.  When you write it out, it doesn't seem to be so nonsensical, but in my brain, somehow being demure and apologizing for my abilities equaled being a humble and hardworking employee.  Someone who wouldn't be difficult to work with.  Someone who would just put their head down and do the job and not bitch about it. 

But, to employers, I'm guessing what that says is "I need handholding, because I cannot see how I can possibly manage this task on my own."  or "Ehh... I was mediocre at this, but I still want to keep trying."

Walking into a room, however, and announcing to the group that yes, I'm here, and yes, I'm fabulous... well, that either makes you look like an ignorant blowhard... or it makes you look like yes, you're here, and yes, you really are fantastic at what you do, and you don't need anyone else's validation or handholding to tell you that. 

Who knew?

Bonus post time!

God love Nongshim's kimchi ramen noodles.  The best food stamps can buy. 


Jesus Christ, I'm so sick of being poor.