I need to get away – hop a plane, turn vicariously into Abby for a few days – find some inspiration, some relaxation.  For to rid myself of this nonsense and negativity will certainly require both a change of scenery and a change of pace. I wish I lived closer to the city.

Hurt feelings morph, all too quickly, into this protective veil of resentment, which flows fluidly into frustrated abandon.  I’ve lived well enough without having to deal with such trivial things – I’m downright programmed to survive as an emotional minimalist.

I thought of new stories for my dear compadre, Ms. Harris.  Old tricks and forgotten successes, complete with associated revelations, will only serve to strengthen the resolve of one who is more determined than ever to find something more meaningful on which to focus her pursuits.

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Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve signed up, along with the Greater Boston ComedyRelay, for the American Cancer Society Making Strides Against Breast Cancer. I know you’re busy so I’ll keep it quick.

Please support me with a donation!

http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR/MakingStridesAgainstBreastCancer/MSABCFY11NewEngland?px=6966253&pg=personal&fr_id=28135

OK, that really was the quick (and honest) version, but if you have another minute, I’ll tell you a little more. There are 2.5 million breast cancer survivors who celebrated another birthday last year because people like you made a donation in support of people like me.

One in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, and I want to make sure that more and more women – and men – survive the disease. I also want to help ensure that the American Cancer Society can meet the demand for its programs and services for breast cancer patients – help finding clinical trials and affordable health insurance, temporary lodging during treatment far from home, rides to treatment, weekend retreats, and the Look Good . . . Feel Better program that helps women cope with the appearance-related side effects of treatment.
I am proud to be part of Making Strides, can you tell? I’m hoping you find the cause as worthy as I do. If so, please take just a few minutes to make a donation on my personal Web page. I would be so appreciative.

When you support my efforts to fight breast cancer, more people in our community will …

· Have information and tools they need to stay well from breast cancer or find the disease early when it’s easiest to treat
· Have a place to turn for help 24/7 if they are faced with breast cancer
· Benefit from the progress being made toward finding breast cancer’s causes and cures
· Get access to lifesaving mammograms and treatment

Last year Making Strides raised $60 million – literally one $10, $25, and $50 donation at a time – so please, no matter how much or how little you can give, click one of the links at the bottom of this email and support me with a donation of any amount. Together we’ll save lives and create a world with less breast cancer and more birthday celebrations. What could be better?

Thanks so much!

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I’m having increasingly intense nightmares these days, which, while may not shock some (given my inclination to choose the most controversial horror flicks by which to ‘relax’), took me by surprise simply due to their non-horror and atypical nature.

I dream about my mother.

These dreams are not based in reality, save for the negative feelings associated with and throughout them – I’m not reliving or rehashing the past, or caught up in some unfulfilled childhood fantasy.  Instead, she takes on the ultimate antagonist role – successfully thwarting each of my random attempts at successes of varying degree.  In some dreams, she’s a Vorhees-like figure of terror…in others, she’s merely a Joan Crawford caricature whose aim is to sully any semblance of meaning and fulfillment I might scrape up within the dream. This recent one was striking, leaving me teary-eyed and foul for most of my waking day.

I wanted revenge.

Perhaps revenge is too strong a term for what I sought, but I certainly wanted to make the maternal figure suffer and seemingly went to great lengths to accomplish such.  But it didn’t work – no matter how desperately I tried to contact her (manically calling her mobile but not making it through a 30-minute greeting), I couldn’t get my point made to her that part of me wished to make her suffer much more so than she had made me in the past.  I couldn’t get through to her.

Instead, I could almost hear her voice expressing her joy at my most recent failure in acquiring a new job (one that I was very much pushed to apply for by those whom I figured knew better).

Don’t get your hopes up…you know you’ll only disappoint yourself.

In this dream my father stood staunchly next to me, not necessarily for encouragement, but more for catharsis, methinks.

I do not wish to dream such dreams.

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Jim Florentine ticket giveaway – May 29 at The Wilbur Theatre

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Hey check it out! Listen to Angie on WODS Boston 103.3 as she talks with Julee Marra about the Greater Boston Comedy Relay!

5-10-10 OUTLOOK GREATER BOSTON COMEDY RELAY (1)

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Tom Simmons delights the cancer-fighting crowd at GBCR

If one simply does the math, the coming week, by all accounts, should be a spectacularly better one than the last – due primarily to Thursday’s random vacation day. Five day workweek minus one word day = better.

This past week had a rather strange atmosphere to it – not just to me, but to those around me as well. I’m hard-pressed to find a friend who has had a decent week. Just when I thought the sun was shining through towards Thursday, I got the bad news that I had lost my headliner for next week’s GBCR show (ahem…Wednesday, at Mottley’s….just sayin’) AND got the news that the event for which I had been raffling off four tickets to next weekend had been canceled.

I’m better able, today, to see the positive spin on both bits of unpleasantness. While I would have liked to have my headliner here, I have more than enough locally-based comedic superheroes to fill his space. And as for the raffle prize, well – thankfully the theater is trying to work something out for me.

It feels good to shake off the utter disgust that had been coursing through my veins all week. Monday morning’s interview with WODS about the Greater Boston Comedy Relay is airing tomorrow – granted, it’s at the crack of dawn, but I will be able to download it.

I was tipped off to some really good music the other day, this band ‘Does That Offend You, Yeah”. They’re pretty amazing, and the awesome find has improved my mood significantly.

Things you should consider:

• Going to the Banshee Pub tomorrow night for my buddy Dave Kennedy’s open mic night.
• Signing off the computer and going outside right now because none of us really knows just how long today’s gorgeous weather will last, and soon all of us will be complaining incessantly that it’s either cold and raining, or far too hot and humid.
• Getting advanced tickets for Wednesday’s Greater Boston Comedy Relay show over at Mottley’s Comedy Club. I could tell you how amazing the lineup will be, but trust me – simply listing names doesn’t do this group justice. Something happens when you put all these folks in a room together for a worthwhile cause. But you’ll have to come down to find out just what that is.
• I’m sorry, I got nothing yet past Wednesday. Kind of looking forward to that.

Off and running, recharged, rebooted. Enjoy today.

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Is it customary to give out your phone number to a girl when you’re already out with another?

Though I do understand that said girl was a mutual friend, I’m not so ignorant as to not catch on to the endless banter and borderline flirting taking place around me – certainly not when I’m the date.  And the half-drunken demand for my date’s phone number (which he happily provided to her) as well did not go unnoticed.

I hadn’t the expectation that my night out would stray down the path of third-wheel-hood for me, and though I did my best to brush it off, I still woke up with that all-too-familiar Wait, what? feeling.  Thankfully, I’m far too tired to ponder the matter further.

And there’s too much to do.  The Greater Boston Comedy Relay heads over to Mottley’s in just two weeks to kick off its May stretch, and I’m far too concerned with where my headliner is going to sleep when he arrives in two weeks to think about much else.  You’d think it would be far easier to get a hotel to donate ONE measly room in the name of the cancer fight.

I’m vastly overtired and because of this, can’t let go of the whole number-giving thing.  I mean, he had to let go of my hand in order to give his phone number to this girl.  And as one would expect, they are already BFFFs (best Facebook friends forever).

Have at it, sunshine. I don’t need this shit.

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A comedian friend of mine posed this question to me in an over-crowded coffee shop in a rather busy shopping center the other day, and I couldn’t help but laugh. It was a good way of putting it.

I don’t like to not be busy – not necessarily running hither and thither incessantly, with little downtime, but cerebrally busy.  Busy planning, thinking, analyzing, creating.  There has to be some meaty little project I can sink my teeth into, or else I run the risk of becoming a perpetually lazy creature. I sit here, right now, in the sunshine of my living room, trying to coach myself on just doing nothing today (but I’ve already broken that promise to myself several times).

I had the pleasure of attending Charlie Murphy at the Wilbur Theatre on Friday evening, in order to write a review for bostonist.com.  While I’m well familiar with his movies and his role on the Chappelle Show, I’d never actually seen his stand up.

Holy crap.

I was blown away, to my amazement – I expected a lot of similarity to his opener, Freeze(?), or to Eddie Griffin (meh).  Not so much, as Murphy was a comedic mastermind. I’ve not yet seen an entertainer quite as skilled at his trade as Charlie Murphy.  Still gotta write my review, which will be stellar.  I’m not rushing, since I’m waiting to get my info for my own publishing interface for the online blog (yay).

My 18 month-old nephew arrives from Tuscon this week.  I’ve not yet my nephew. To say I’m excited would be like saying that I have a slight fondness for coffee – an obscene understatement.  I also haven’t seen my  brother in something like two years, and my sister-in-law in even longer.  I just have to get through two measly days of work, first, and then it’s time to hang with the little man. Yay!

Wednesday night is Angie’s Anti-Cancer Comedy Birthday Bash at the Vault, which I hope will be amazing.  News of the event (courtesy of my own doing, naturally), ended up making the American Cancer Society’s daily newswire, which is sent out nationally to ACS staff.  That was pretty badass.

After a long period of repression, I’ve finally accepted the undeniable fact that I have rather hefty crush on a dude.  I won’t get into details, but he’s significantly younger than me, probably won’t reciprocate, yet may drop by the birthday show this week.  I hate that I still go down that road – that whole, ‘it won’t be disappointing if I already have myself convinced he won’t be attracted to me’ thing. Lame.

So we’ll see. He intrigues me, which is something that has been significantly lacking in the dating pool for a considerable amount of time.

So…nephew’s arrival, nephew’s first meeting of the J-Bear, birthday show, birthday, maybe Russell  Brand on Saturday, definite interview with Steve Hofstetter on Sunday.

If the object of my crush unfortunately doesn’t end up feeling it, who’ll have time to wallow?

Not this chick.

Not me, not neva!

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It’s April Fool’s day, which, oddly enough, has seemingly marked an end to a very nasty stretch of foul-mood and foul-weather days.  Rain sucks, flooding sucks more, and I’ve been very negligent (marking the second time in ten minutes I’ve used that word).

I lamented to a week-long house guest yesterday that I was in dire need of some alone time, hoping he’d take the cue to simply be somewhere else for a few hours.  Instead, I came home to find all of his stuff gone, leaving me to play the role of Satan.  It’s okay for a while, but red’s never really been my color and the forked tail makes my butt look big. I managed to clear the air, while retaining my new, more private environment. So that’s something.

In two weeks, Alexander the Great arrives in water-logged Massachusetts.  I simply cannot wait to scoop up my little nephew for the first time and blow raspberries on his tummy. But I must. For now.

What else? Still hate Dane Cook and fail to find the funny in anything he says (especially his Twitter feed, which merely exists to anger me).

Two weeks into Zen Garden 2010 and hope to be selling off baby tomato plants to raise some fundage for Relay For Life, but hanging onto the rest: lettuce, strawberries, mammoth sunflowers, more tomatoes, peppers, hot peppers, peas….going a little crazy with it this year.  I need to, methinks.

A month till the Greater Boston Comedy Relay heads to Mottley’s Comedy Club.  Have you purchased your tickets yet?

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