GAH! it happened again!

i am a terribly inconsistent blogger. sorry internets :(



quick highlights of my last couple weeks:

improv is going very well, for now. i am really enjoying my scenes and what i am learning and i feel energized and excited by it. improv is definitely a rollercoaster, and right now i am at a part where there is nothing too scary, just fun and exciting. it's pretty exhiliarating, but i know it won't always be this awesome. damn, that sounds pretty negative, huh? sorry, i will stop it. time to live in the moment!



this past weekend was my first Del Close Marathon at UCB. it was intense, but went so much more smoothly and more fun than i could have possibly expected. i took two workshops with mark sutton from the annoyance theatre in addition to working an 8 hour shift as a volunteer and watching ~26 hours of various kinds of improvised theatre. it was great. i over-prepared like whoa, got about 8 hours of sleep from friday to sunday and had an absolute blast. also saw lisa loeb and met ed helms (again), who is awesome.



my roommate, chris, is getting ready to leave for grad school in chicago. my new roommate tay is preparing to make the trek from kansas to nyc. it's exciting but disconcerting at the same time. i have been increasingly busy for the past 8 or 9 months and chris and i haven't seen too much of each other, but it will definitely be strange not living with someone i have known for 6+ years and generally get along with very well. CHAAAANGES! tay is totally great though, i think we are going to have weekly nerdgasms about the dark tower and various tv shows.



got ready for the august installment of the lorelei. the line up is fucking balls-out awesome. i am totally psyched. more on that later. I PROMISE.

hey did you know that some peacocks are vampires? no, no one did, until this man saved us all from our ignorance. by violently beating and kicking a glorified goose, pretty much to death. thanks, asshole. beating up foppish birds totally makes you more of a man. jackass. http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/070701/K070102AU.html

A TITLE!

awesome. i can now enter a title on my blog entries. my computer and blogspot are clearly conspiring to convince me that i have gone psychotic, but very slowly over a long period of time. but that would be my own fault for letting a silly little thing like not being able to aptly (possibly cleverly) title a blog entry cause my precarious mental balance to slip and crash into the sea of insanity. good thing it doesn't bother me in the slightest! >too wide grin/darting eyes/white knuckle grip on the mouse<



anyway, i did have something to blog about. i wanted to blog about my general lack of facial accessories. and yes, that is the punchline to an excellent mitch hedberg joke. i always feel surrounded by people who get to wear totally awesome and trendy and sexy glasses. last night i decided to rectify that by putting on the total of my companions' three pairs of glasses at the same time in a poor impersonation of my art professor from college. it was pretty dumb. then i decided to explain what mung was to the table. i am pretty sure i was using hand motions and doing my impression of jumping off of a gravestone. also, i am pretty sure i used the word fermented more than once. later i was pretending i had a mustache by holding a lock of hair over my top lip to simulate what a luxuorious golden 'stache would look like on my tiny imp-face.

that i am saying is this:
sometimes alcohol reveals a person's true personality.
and sometimes it makes them act silly and incredibly inappropriate... while revealing their person's true personality.

i promise to write something worthy later, and possibly review all the kick-ass shows i went to this week.

(so i don't forget: tuesday: harold night, wednesday: 7 fights with decoster and hines & invite them up with patton oswalt, thursday: an open mic & cagematch, friday: now that's what i call rogue elephant! & rogue elephant host a night of improv)

i don't know why but blogspot isn't letting me type in the title box for my entries. this is more annoying than it should be.

i googled myself recently. it could have been disappointing if i occupied a space in this world beyond utter obscurity, but i don't, so it was actually really cool because i found an article i wrote for my college's paper my senior year. for some strange reason it is in the 'sports' section of the online version of the spectator... which is odd since it was written for the arts and entertainment section. anyway, it's actually not as bad as it easily could have been... so there you go for wishy-washy self-praise! niiiiice!



Love, Actually, is all around...


By Katey Healy-Wurzburg Jan. 28, 2005



What!? A review of a romance?? BY ME?!? I know, I know... I am your faithful Katey, ever-nerdy, never-sappy and oh-so-crazy. Well, even I can get sucked into a romance... if the romance part ends with -tic and is attached to -comedy that is. Anyway, like many people over this past break, I maybe watched a smidgen of television. Luckily for me, my family got digital cable (ooooh!) right after I left for college. Which means my breaks are scintillating non-stop thrill-a-minute adventures... okay, no, of course not, I sit on me bum all day and watch the telly. And I do mean the telly. 'Yay!' to BBC America. And HBO, as it turns out. HBO's near Christmas scheduling was a flurry of British programming... must be the whole Scrooge, Charles Dickens-complex-we don't feel properly holly and jolly until the Brits help us along. Anywho, we must express deep and ever-lasting gratitude to HBO for doing this because they are responsible for exposing me to a wonderful movie, Love Actually.



Wow. Okay, that was the longest introduction ever. Anyway, back to the review. If you haven't seen Love Actually... because you have been living under a rock, or because you have been feeling extra sensitive about romantic stuff because of a recent break-up... or lack of romatic activity... or because you just sort of suck generally... GO RENT IT NOW! Buy it, even. It was on sale for ten dollars at Target last week. Boy, girl, man, womyn, young, older, single, married, dating, whatever, watch it! I really think this is one of those few movies that can appeal to nearly everyone. Except maybe Pol Pot. He probably would have disliked the general lack of genocide. It is funny, it has a great soundtrack, it is sweet... okay, okay, enough unqualified praise, lets get down to the nitty gritty.



The movie is first and foremost British. It is secondly a cast. The movie is centered within a period of time and on certain storylines, as opposed to a traditional single-relationship romance. For me, this is what made it so funny and yet realistic. It is set in the Christmas Season, in the month leading up to Christmas. You see the rather rapid development of storylines and relationships between eight primary couples. However, none are traditional or ideal relationships... as much of our own lives tend to unfold. Burning, never-revealed crushes, contemplated infidelity, the struggle to overcome the loss of a love and the never ending attempt to be an appealing version of yourself long enough to find someone to keep up with you... familiar encounters to us all, I think. Love Actually is admirably and unflaggingly British. The appearance of Rowan Atkinson, who I think epitomizes his country's quirks and best qualities equally, is a cameo whose value and hilarity is comparable only to those of Christopher Walken. Most fascinating to me was the director, Richard Curtis', use of music as a palpable, universalizing force nearly took on the role of actor itself, serving to help the story and people's actions to be eased remarkably. However, many of my favorite actors are actually in it as well, including Liam Neeson, Alan Rickman and Keira Knightley. A Jedi Knight, the Voice of God and a bad-ass pirate. Sweeet! Also gracing the screen with their excellent and super sexy performances were Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and Rodrigo Santoro (Karl). In my horny, er, I mean, humble opinion, the movie could have just been these two standing around being hot, and I would have been happy.



But the best part is that it wasn't. Love Actually was all of the stories-pain and love and laughter together, weaving a lovely, somewhat cheesy, but profoundly true story of the family of friends and loves possible today. Love Actually is funny, sweet, hilarious, silly, optimistic and also somehow true, all at the same time. It is amazing, and I quite simply love it. I give Love Actually 11 out of 10 stars... or maybe hearts.

SUPRISE!

• today i woke up.
  
• then i hopped on the internet and posted on a messageboard. in the star trek discussion thread.
  
• then i went to a cafe and read a great novel that was written as if the wonders of space travel were accesible in the age of victorian england.
  
• after that, i walked to a bookstore and bought two young adult fantasy novels that were on sale, to keep the two i had in my bag already company.
  
• then i walked to forbidden planet, braving the BO of and lecherous stares of it's clientele, in order to purchase the next two volumes in stephen king's magnum opus of fantasy fiction series, the dark tower.
• feeling the need to bloster my base caffeine levels, i went to starbucks (again) and got into a discusion about said series with a barista.
  
• on my way home, i decided to blog about my day for all the internets to partake of.

i am a nerd of gargantuan proportions.

i am so bad at blogging! oh noes!

and apparently i still type like a cat! double oh noes! EN EE WAI, i apologize for my extended e-absence. sometimes i become overwhelmed by all the non-responsibility i put on myself which matters (ultimately) not at all that i can't even bear to think about doing something that is so easy i can answer 3204 to 4298280930982323089 calls while doing it. it's ennui, but it is totally stupid ennui. 'totally stupid ennui' would be a great band name.

so yeah, sorry. arby's sucks donkey dick & duck cloaca because they charged me 50 cents for a seedless bun AND THEN taxed me extra on that 50 cent extra charge. never mind that the button for 'exchange seedless' costs 0.00 on the register; they feel they can fuck me in the ass for not being able to eat seeds AND THEN hand my waiting, already raw anus to the new york government for some sweet 8.75 sales-taxing ass-raping. too far, readers? or not far enough?

other than brief forays into fast food-originated rage-induced psychosis, i had a good rest-of-june. the july installment of 'the lorelei' came together well. the line up was pretty fucking great, i am very proud of the shows these people have helped me do so far. the original line up was nick kroll, max silvestri, dan upham (i love that d00d), merritt gurley and sean donnelly; HOWEVER, i ran into hannibal burress the wednesday before the show and offered him a spot because he was in town from chicago through the weekend and is hilarious and awesome. you will be seeing that name a lot more soon, he is a very smart and and funny guy. so the lorelei ended up being 6 (instead of 5) comics plus me hosting, so i did shorter bits and gave everyone a couple minutes less just so we could get out of the room in time for the 9:30 band; we were still a little late and they hated us. OH WELL. i love doing the show, it is a great opportunity for me and it is alot of fun. and comedians really seem to enjoy doing it, which is great.

improv through june: june was a pretty fantastic month for me, improv-wise. i was taking a 'special' class with ari voukydis. i want to marry his vision of improv. it's pretty awesome. the class was about getting out of your head and it was great. i felt so fucking energized and excited by what we did in class, and the crazy shit we messed around with, just playing with the conventions of the 'new york' form and it was unbelievably cool. i am so sad it was only a month long. i wish i had 3 hours of improv with ari every week. it would make my life pretty much 93% better, overall. unfortunately, i don't really have a venue for playing around with a lot of the stuff we played with in that class. my improv group... well, we are still pretty new and a lot of coaches feel more comfortable not 'pushing the envelope'. the thing i LOVED about ari's class was that it was like 'yeah, you aren't super experienced at long form or harold, but fuck learning ALL about the form first, have fun and respect the SPIRIT of improv first'. literally tossing us in the deeeep end of the improv pool first... uh, metaphorically. i am waxing poetic about something i can barely articulate, on a subject that very few people understand the context for... so i apologize. suffice it to say, i have another new passion, and it is going to be annoying for you all.

i also started my level 301 class with joe wengert. i would link to his blog but it hasn't been updated since february, so eff that guy, amirite? just kidding, joe is totally awesome. i have watched him perform more than i have watched any of my other improv teachers or coaches i have worked with, and he is a brilliantly funny guy. he is also extremely smart and gives excellent notes in class. he really pays attention to scenes and remembers the little details that tend to run together for instructors. he is always 'on point' in class. it's a great learning experience. my class is also REALLY small and there are some ridiculously funny ladies in it, it's fantastic.

mmm what else? my sister alexis came to visit, that was really fun. she wasn't able to stay for a day that i wasn't totally fucking swamped and busy though, which was too bad. hopefully she will be able to visit again this summer. we have had houseguests steadily since last week, and will continue to have them for the next couple weeks. which is tough, but also fun. it also makes me realize just how much i use listening to my ipod to deal with shit emotionally. it's pretty fucked up. in other news, my marriage to my ipod (mozart, after a bit from 'the office') will take place late next fall. watch your mail for an invitation!

well, i am sure there was other bullshit i was going to write about, but fuck it for now. and FUCK YOU, ARBY'S!