Happy Thanksgiving!


I myself won't be eating turkey since I'm a vegetarian but that's cool that you decided to go with it.
Turkey looks disgusting when its raw!
I think an uncooked turkey could be good defense weapon
and
just as effective as pepper spray.
If someone were walking down a dark alley after midnight(for whatever reason) and were threatened by a mugger I think the mugger would totally back off if you yelled,
Happy Thanksgiving!
at them.
Then whipped an uncooked thanksgiving turkey at them.
I think the mugger would be especially firghtened by this if you did it on 4th of July.

I kind of want to start biking again.
I haven't ridden a bike since I was in junior high.
I think the reason involves an incident involving projectile vomiting on my sister.
Whatever reason, I think it's time to pick it up again.
Get a bike.
Get a helmet.
NOT projectile vomit on anyone.
But I don't know...
Maybe I'll become too obsessed with it.
Maybe I'll never take off the helmet.
Or even worse, maybe everytime I go into stores I'll hand the helmet to people who work there and say,
Can you wear this while I look around? I don't want people to steal it.
Maybe I'd be the same way with the bike.
I would never park it outside. I would always bring into stores, friends houses/apartments and say things like,
Hey I'm just going to park my bike on your couch a bit so it's not in anyone's way.

I guess there's no way of telling
and
that's fine because after typing this out, I've come to realize I don't want to start biking again.
It seems like too much of a side project for right now.

Cuteness Alert!!!

I was on a bus the other day
and
a women sat across from me with her dog on her lap.
She had her dog dressed up in a punky kind of style:
A sweater that had skulls on it.

The dog had a perpetually sad look on its face
but
for one brief moment, the dog looked at me and smiled then it transformed it's face back to it's constant frown.
I'm pretty sure it was the first time I've ever seen a dog smile.
This is why I award sad-punky-dog the "Cutest Thing I Have Seen This week" award.

Happy Veteran's Day!

Thank you to all of you armed services types!
I don't think I have what it takes to anything army related
and
I don't want to take the time to find out if I'm wrong about that one.
Watching the war scenes in the movie "Forest Gump" was enough for me!

A woman stopped me on the street today
or
least tried to stop me on the street today
by saying,
Do you want to stop world poverty today?

That's a large task to ask of someone walking by you on the street
and
I didn't feel like I was the right person for the job so I just pretended I didn't hear her and kept walking.

It made me wonder if anyone had taken her challenging question of
Do you want to stop world poverty today?
and
answered it by saying
Sorry I'm a little too drunk to help you solve that one today...

Yikes!
I've been neglecting my blog.
Time to change that!
I finally ran my first half marathon.

It feels like that happened years ago but it was actually about a month ago(10/10/10 to be exact).
I ran it for charity(as well as for myself) and I'm so glad I did it.
I plan to continue running and will definitely do more half marathons.
If I find I experience no injuries and continue to not find any difficulty in doing them I may make the leap to a full length marathon.
We'll see though.
I'm taking it slow because running isn't something I'm naturally good at.
Some people just have it in their genetics to be fast runners.
Remember those people growing up who ran absurdly fast in gym class or around the neighborhood when you played chase/tag?
Well, I was not one of those people :D
So since I'm not a "natural" I don't want to force too much of it on myself because I don't want my knee, hip or ankle to snap off or something.
I don't think that can actually happen
but
I'm not taking any chances!

One of the only things I'm naturally good at is comedy.
If I appear to be good at other things it's only because I put an abnormal effort in an OCD fashion at getting better at them.
I'm too tired to remember what else I'm good at right now so I won't bore you with a list.
Do people do that(make lists of what they're good at and post them on the internet)?
I hope not.
Well, I guess you would do that for a resume.
This isn't a resume.
I hope that's not what my blog is turning into.
I have to post more often so it doesn't turn into that.
Have a fun rest of the weekend!

Gloria! Whatever happened to you?!

In the 80's I wrote a note to Hurricane Gloria on aluminum foil and taped it 2 my parents' kitchen door.
The note said,

Gloria, please calm down!
from
Val

I'm NOT writing a note for Earl.

Gloria will always be my one and only!

Yesterday I registered online to run in my first half marathon.
I had to do it like 3 times though
because
apparently I was too slow in typing in my info
and
was told that I had run out of time
and
had to start over.
It finally worked out.
If I'm too slow in simply typing in my registration info what makes me think I'm not too slow to actually run in the event?
Is this a bad omen?
I guess I'll find out!
I'll be posting more info about this(eventually).
I'll be running for the Dana Farber Institute,
so I will post a link where you can donate money to help me raise money(if you're interested).

A Special Kind of Lazy

So, it is common among many comedians to be secretly or non-secretly working on completing a screenplay.
Sometimes I fall into this category. I started writing a screenplay 8 years ago but never finished it.
I just can't motivate myself to sit on my ass long enough to finish the stupid thing.
I'm too lazy.
Oddly, I'm not too lazy to run 13 miles.
How does that work?
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Shouldn't I be whining and making up excuses for why I can't go for a jog?
It doesn't make sense.
My laziness isn't very practical.
I should probably take a class or find a mentor who can show me how to be lazy the way it SHOULD be done.

Uh oh...

One time as a child I walked down a street and saw an empty can of spagettios on the ground with the spagettios that had initially been in the can spilled everywhere beside it. This image will always haunt me and I think it's why I've made it a point to never try the product!

Damn you, New York Times!
So about 2 or 3 years ago my friend Greg asked me if I wanted go check out "Troll 2".
At the time I had never even heard of it but looked it up and thought it sounded funny.
I ended up going and it was really weird(in a good way).
The people who were there were die hard fans and they were shouting out lines along with the movie.
Kind of like people checking out "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" would.
For some reason I kept jokingly thinking,
I hope there is no evidence that I ever came to this event!
Then suddenly 2 or 3 years later there is evidence
and
it's in the New York Times!
I'm in the second row on the right hand side with the big smile on my face:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/movies/14best.html?ref=movies
How dare the New York Times manage to get a picture of me smiling from 2 or 3 years ago!

Here are some(of many) new photos of me taken a couple of weeks ago by Jeff Demers:

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and wonder if the person who rented my car rental after me in North Dakota a few years ago appreciated the fact that I forgot to take my "Dresden Dolls" CD out of the CD player of the car.
I'll never know!

A Mark Twain quote that has always stuck with me is this one:

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

The quote is from the beginning of his "The Adventures Huckleberry Finn" book.

I remember first hearing it when I was a freshman in college.
Our teacher asked us what we thought Mark Twain meant by that.
For the rest of the hour long(maybe it was longer) class everyone talked and argued about this simple quote.

I thought that what Mark Twain meant was:
Maybe you shouldn't waste an hour of your life arguing and examining a simple quote that tells you to NOT do that.
Yet...
there we all were examining and arguing over this quote.

The whole time I kept thinking,
I bet if the ghost of Mark Twain could sit in on this and watch us doing this he would probably laugh his ass off.

It's because of this that I decided back then and still continue to think that Mark Twain is one of the funniest people who have ever lived.

I

don't know who the 1st person to advise someone to just
Picture everyone is naked!

when they feel nervous about talking in front of a group of people
but
that person was most likely a pervert.
That person was also most likely a genius
because
people have been stealing their bad advice for years.

If

the Mayans were incorrect and the world doesn't end in 2 years,
I predict that being a "comedic yoga teacher" will become a much sought after career choice for people.
Mark my words!

Yoga? What has become of me?

Over the last month I have started doing yoga.
This obviously means that hell has frozen over.
I have started out with the very easy level dvd kind
and
have found that that has prepared me for the kind I have switched over to a couple of days ago: ashtanga yoga.
Ashtanga yoga is a lot more difficult than the other kind(for me) and I am just doing the very basic beginner kind of it(also via a dvd). When my body gets used to this I plan to move on to actually taking a class.
The reason I am holding off on taking a class and taking all of this prep time is to avoid being the person in class who continually topples over and ends up accidentally punching other people in face.
No one wants to be that girl!

And yes, this is really me posting this.
My blog hasn't been hacked.

Comedy nerd moment!

So, 10 years at this time I was completing my last semester of college in Los Angeles(via Emerson College's L.A. program).
I would go to the Hollywood Improv every now and then because some of my friends performed there and I would also go to check out a lot of comedians I had heard of from tv. During that time frame I never got to actually perform at that club. It wouldn't be until five years later when returning to L.A. for a couple of months that I got to take the stage. It was for a Tonight Show(w/Jay Leno) audition. The line-up for that show was super stacked(with talent) and I remember being kind of surprised that more audience hadn't shown up for it and thinking,
Do people realize what a great live show they are missing?

It was fun though and it allowed me to reunite with some friends I hadn't seen in years. That's one of the great things about being a comedian, I get to make people laugh, but also it's an excuse to have mini-reunions with friends I haven't seen in forever.

Anyway, I think I had a point, what was it?
Oh yeah.
After taking the liberty of googling my own name I discovered that the Improv comedy club chain has including me in their "comedians" section. I thought that was cool of them to do that, especially since I've performed at only one of their clubs a whopping one time.

On an unrelated note, I've also discovered that google has a "related search" section and that a lot of my "related" searches are very UN-related to me.

These are the things that happen when you take the liberty of googling your own name on a Sunday morning!

This ends this comedy nerd moment blog post.

This is as rock-climbing-y as this gal gets:

I appreciate honesty

Thought of the day:

Events or parties that take place on a boat must be tricky
because
if you're at one and you don't feel like being there anymore you can't just quietly slip out and leave unnoticed.
Someone is bound to hear/see you diving into the ocean and frantically swimming away to the shore
and
they'll probably get mad and say,
Whoa, I guess the party wasn't cool enough for him/her!

So, in the past I had this problem where if I would be walking about in the city(whether it be New York or Boston or wherever)or in a mall and I'd cross paths with someone who looked like a friend or aquaintence and I wouldn't say hi
because
I would just assume it wasn't them.
I'd think,
The city is bustlin' with what appears to be thousands of pedestrians.
What are the chances that one of these 1000 people would actually be someone I know?!
That must just be someone who looks like them.

But then I'd find out it actually was indeed them when they called me an hour or so later and told me and asked me why I looked at them in a confused way and didn't say hello.

Well, recently I have actually started to say hi and accept the fact that my friends and aquaintances almost ALWAYS pop up in 1 in a million situations and it turns out it is indeed always them.
I'm glad I finally cleared that up!