Released from Captivity

I'm freeeeee! I was released from the house-bound quarantine on Saturday, and we celebrated by going to see a local production of RENT followed by a Rocky Horror Picture Show-esq production of Jurassic Park, complete with cardboard jeeps and people on stilts with Little Foot heads. Good times!

Thanks for all of your love and well wishes (and the cookies someone sent!!) for my bout of H1N1. I'm fine, I didn't get anyone else sick, so it's all water under the bridge at this point. However, when everyone is getting sick with it this fall and winter, I'll be immune. WOOT!

This week I've been getting up far to early to be far to peppy- after I lost the week-long gig modeling, I picked up a week-long gig teaching cheerleading. People tend to be surprised when they find out that I was a cheerleader... I guess that I'm too nerdy or something. Well, here's proof. (Yes, I still have the uniform. Yes, I can do the splits.) I'm happy to be done with that gig- I'm not a morning person at all, so it's been rough on me. Going to bed before midnight does not come easy.

I'm performing this weekend in a production of Cabaret that has been going on for much longer than I care to remember. We've got four shows left, and I'm to the point where I'm pretty sure 50 years from now you could start singing "Money" and I will be able to do the dance. (I'm the same way with most everything I've learned for cheerleading. It's stuck in my head FOREVER.) Here is an awesome (ha!) self portrait of me in my show hair and makeup. I'm almost out of clown white foundation... I think it's time to hang up this show!

No real insightful things today, I suppose, just the phone-call home sort of synopsis of my life at the moment.

(photographs by Carlos Moreno, an unknown yearbook photographer, and myself)

Swine flu. Not kidding.

Well, it's true I've got it, though no one seems to believe me when I tell them.

Let me tell you that it sucks. Started out at four in the morning on Saturday with severe headache and body pains less than 24 hours after a mis-diagnosed infection. Turned into vomiting, fever and the inability to move without crying. I had a bit of a struggle to get my agent to believe that I wasn't going to be working, first off because I'm sicker than snot and secondly because I'm vomiting with a fever. I've been a food employee for quite a while in the past, so I know legally I couldn't be working in a food service capacity with the possibility of having an infectious disease. Went to the quick care thinking that it was a reaction to the anti-biotic I had been given the day before, she looked at me and sent me to the urgent care down the street. Mind you, I had been crying since about 7 am at this point, and it's now... 10? I was sitting in the waiting room at the urgent care, crying, when a lady came over, gave me tissues and gave me a big mom hug (the kind that last forever). "You will be blessed today, child, you will!" she said. She made me feel better.

So I have the misnamed swine flu, or H1N1, if you prefer to be elite and non-sensationalist. And because of said flu, I have lost 4 gigs (one being a week long for next week). This is putting serious pressure on the household income.

I'm stuck in my house until saturday on a quasi-quarantine. Someone, please send sushi delivery to my house.

(photograph by Chris Young)