ITVF Winner? Sweet.

WE WON!

I am officially now a winner of the ITVF Audience Award.

It sounds good, that word "award". Yes, yes, I know I shouldn't get all superficial about stuff like that but c'mon, it DOES sound good. Mmmm.

I have a call-back tomorrow for SKY +. Not only is the call-back on a Saturday but also it's at 9:50 AM!!! OMG! What is this world coming to? Solution = an early drinking night with wonderful company and passing out by midnight so I can be in tip top shape for "Surprised Office Worker" tomorrow at Ocean Park Studios.

Let the good luck carry on!

P.S. Just got the new Harry Potter book. It's BIG.

Kinda Over It

We're probably going to win. ITVF.
I say probably because there's still a good 14 hours before we know for show. But "probably" sounds pretty good to me.

Money for something I invested so much time and energy is going to put a big smile on my face. The past months of weirdness seem almost silly and banal. I've come out to do what I want to do and slowly, gradually it's happening.

I've an audition today for SKY +. I'm always amused by the occasional British commercial that decides to film in L.A. Is it cheaper for them to do that? I wonder.

Still with "Flicka (Not the Horse)", booking "The Big Debate" and progressing through my "Downtown" screenplay, I'm not going to say no to a wonderful satellite commercial that might finally allow some people back home to see me on the tele.

Career has kind of taken a front seat, again. As it should be.

London, L.A. and Luck

Juuuuust for the record, Thai food in London is not what Thai food in Los Angeles is. They don't even serve Thai ice tea?! Very dubious. However the trendy joint I attended with Mr. Askari was quality and a fine way to eat out whilst discussing the usual subjets in life- career, relationships, friendships etc.- over sake.

I spent today buying gifts and cards for friends back in the city of angels because.....well actually for selfish reasons......I thought it would be fun. Something about being in the LDN for over 3 weeks makes it all the more applicable to buy presents for people back home. And by "home" I mean L.A.

Woah- scary.....

Over a month ago, I wanted to zoom off to London earlier than my ticket was scheduled and now, after being here for a while, I have to say I'm pretty ready to return. I love London and always will but I know now (more than ever) my life is really in California, or in America, at the very least. Some unsolved issues stand waiting for me back home, maybe they'll hurt, maybe they won't but whatever happens I can deal with shit a lot better since this trip, especially Latitude, which basically forced me into a state of peace. (Not quite at Budda's level yet but a gillion times better than before.)

One thing I've promised myself is that when I get back, I'll get involved in something spiritual. Now hold on there, I'm not going to become a religious fundamentalist or crazy Scientologist but I do need some kind of spirituality in my life and I'm not sure where I'll find it or how I will but I WILL. That side of me has always existed and I felt like I have supressed it for many years, causing an undue amount of...well...boiling bubbles. I'm naturally a spiritual person and sick of being ashamed of it. I love gospel music, I love listening to preachers or rabbis on the radio. And even when friends make fun of me for doing it, I generally feel inspired by most of the words I hear. YOU GOTTA BE WHO YOU GOTTA BE, right? And I'M GONNA BE WHO I GOTTA BE.

On the very NON-spiritual side, I cleared out my last standing British bank account with today's gift buying. On Thursday I will arrive to an account with just over $10 in it.

We better win this webisode competition, later this month, or "full-time job" is calling my name!

Now you know why I got the Chinese symbol for "good luck" tatooed on my back ;).

P.S. I also saw the new Harry Potter film. Not the best of the series (especially since "Order of the Phoenix" is my favorite book of the lot) but worth a watch even for the who's who of Brit actors.

P.P.S. Ralph Fiennes, you do not scare me anymore as Voldemort ever since you shagged a stewardess in the airplane toilet.

Past the Latitude

Who would have thought that I could become a hippy for 3 days?

Well I did. Tents, sleeping bags, no showers. Tanned and dirty but totally exhilirated. Re-gaining my crush on Damon Alburn when he sang with his new band The Good, The Bad and The Queen. Feeling a peaceful buzz between beer and joints. Henna tatoos, tarot cards, wild, crazy poetry, comedy and theatre.

Next year, I want to go back.

And, as usual, in my breaks, I took pen in hand.


BY THE POND

Amazingly I did not think I needed this anymore
The green, the dandelions
The peaceful water
Streming in swirls past my pale toes
(The fish must be laughing at me)
I was sure that the reeds and their stems
And the squaking hidden birds
Were not worth my time
That nature
And the blearing sheep
Were to be cut from my pleasures
Until a time when I deserved them.

The light breeze has blown away
Evil spirits
A gentle exorcism of all that concrete living
And the automated static chaos
I thought were the way
To be something, to feel something
To mean something.

Funny
Human voices
And steps scurry past me
Traces of urban life in the countryside
And yet
Here
In green stained jeans
Molding the dirt with my weight
Quiet, introvert, personified
I feel alive.


THE STAR

It is amazing that someone so known
You'd think the most confident in life
Would be pulling my pigtails
Like a boy off the football field
After my playground strife.
Does he want me to react?
Does my anger spark his arousal?
He teases me, sometimes meanly
And when my eyes fight back
It excites him
And brings him round again

The girl he brought with him
Just ignored
Poor girl
She is not yet a woman
And probably cares for him
Bright and pretty
Large, sad eyes
And me bewildered
That her object sees fancy
By my side.
Like I am the best ride at the fair
And he will wait in line.

Poor girl, don't look upset
He is not worth your wait
Tilt your cap and vanish
Before your love turns into hate.


A NEW BEAUTY POTION

She says I look prettier than she's ever seen
I haven't even showered
My hair wild, unstreamed
No lipgloss on
My face unpowdered.

So this is what beauty is?
Three days in green, I'm left glowing
Ten times prettier than a month ago
When I was amongst beauty's "all-knowing".

Your creams could not hide my discontent
Or my stumbling eyes
They didn't give the elements
Only self-assured lies.

And the sunshine on my face
Here, in the deepest fields,
Is worth more than colored base
Or dainty, detox deals.

In a dream
He says I look prettier than he's ever seen
And my joys arise
Just when I thought I couldn't gleam
Along a lover's side.

My smile is genuine again
No cover for the dark
And I'll bless the day I got this pen
And wrote in nature's park.

And we're off.....

I have only 3 words to say:

TIME FOR FUN.

www.latitudefestival.co.uk

I shall share my adventures when I get back.
xx

LIVE FREE, DIE F&*KIN' HARD

Bruce Willis rocks.

The man's over 50 and still convincingly kicked ass, saved America and stayed sexy.

Watching Die Hard 4 reminded me of how crazy I used be about action movies: True Lies, Indian Jones, Back to the Future. The adrenaline rush, you can't beat it!

Speaking of "rush", last night I met up with all my old buddies from secondary school. Fun, fun, fun. We had a bit of a white wine frenzy and I'm suffering the consequences today. Poor things actually had to go to work this morning. They must be cursing me out.

Tonight it's Boeing, Boeing, a West End comedy with Rita Pearlman. And when someone asks me what I want to drink before or after the show I will say a coke and stick with it. I will then come back home and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

This is a detox moment.

Part 2: A Little Lovin' Hate

Now for the section of "The Power of Now" that I want to concentrate on: RELATIONSHIPS, and more specifically, LOVE/HATE relationships.

From an early age we're exposed to that familiar couple on screen. First they can't stand each other, then they fall madly in love, and even then their romance is cyclical.

The love/hate couple have been a Hollywood staple ever since moving pictures began. Think of Clark Gabe and Claudette Colbert in "It Happened One Night." "Greencard," "Dirty Dancing," "Groundhog Day," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "A Philadelphia Story"- these are all movies my friends and I watched (and still do) again and again. Is it any wonder that dysfunctional relationships might be ingrained in our minds, our culture?

Eckhart Tolle says: "The drama makes them feel alive." And maaaaaaan, is he right.

Tolle says love/hate relationships are used like a drug. For the rush. The rush that we know won't last very long but will give us an incredible high and low that although damaging, at least provides "an externally derived sense of self."

But, like a drug, love/hate relationships arise from "an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain." In other words, as long as we have someone else to blame our pangs of love/hate on, we won't have to deal with our own inner problems: External drama distracts from turmoil within.

Thanks Eckhart for ripping off the band-aid and exposing my rather ugly wound. I kind of got to realizing my tendency for getting into unhealthy relationships, or turning perfectly healthy ones into minefields, happened when, above all, I was unhappy with ME. How could I live with a peaceful outside when my own soul was so restless?

Yes, I guess that might sound like the definitive screwed upedness (not a word, I know). But at the time it was more of a self-protective device, a fear that my partner might see how truly unhappy I sometimes am, or label me clinically insane. (Hey, I'm an actress, of course I'm f*&kin' crazy. Want normal, date an accountant.)

Am I sad about this realization? Absolutely. For myself and for the men I hurt. But Tolle offers a solution to this unhealthy pattern. He advises the practice of "complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way."

Wow, that's tough!

God knows I've been judgemental in the past and god knows I have also been JUDGED. Any couple that can practice what Tolle advises deserves a bloody Nobel Peace Prize, in my opinion. I mean the judgements that were made in my last relationship and the HORRIBLE things that were said, they came so easy you wonder how we ever got together in the first place.

Maybe I can start on a smaller scale: I promise from here on out that any man I am involved with I will always COMPLIMENT MORE THAN JUDGE. Love ends when loving words and actions end, or when they are overruled by the words and actions of hate. Time to tip the balance in my sweet conscience.

So, my dear Eckhart, as another famous love/hate lady said, when she became enlightened: " After all, tomorrow is another day".....actually blast tomorrow, I'll start NOW ;).

The Power of Now

Oprah's Bookclub got it right. "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle can transform your thinking.

Yes, yes, I hear you cynics babble from the stands about what a frickin' middle class American woman I'm being and that anyone who finds themselves wandering within the aisles of "Popular Psychology" at the bookstore has got to be lonely, desparate and probably suicidal.

(Actually suicide has seemed pretty attractive at times to yours truly. Having a mixed genepool of melancholic, guilt-ridden, Catholic Germans and repressed, alcoholic Midwesterners, does steer you in that direction. Problem is, I can never figure out which is the right way to go. I can't even make a bloody decision on that!)

Eckhart Tolle's basic premise is that the great "disease" of Western civilization is overthinking- using the mind so much that it causes great affliction and suffering to oneself and others. Here are his words:

"The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict." Additionally, he tells his reader: "the mind is using you...you are it's slave."

Oh my God, that's me! (I said to myself when I read it.) I am the overthinker, the person whose mind seems never to be at rest (unless I'm drinking or having sex). My brain causes my own turmoil!

But to be honest, I have never really felt exclusive in this so-called "suffering". Although my ex thought of it as freakish....even with his tendency to torture himself in other ways.....

Before I came to Los Angeles, I grew up in academia. Wonderful thinkers with wonderful minds who wrote wonderful books theorizing on wonderful theories. (Blah, blah, blah- that's what I look back on that time as now.) And though I was a thinker (and believe me, in Los Angeles, I'm a THINKER) there were BIGGER thinkers than I and people- students and professors- who would go into a mind-frenzy and try and breakdown all aspects of life around them intellectually and be totally MISERABLE in the end in their personal lives.

But it's not just a disease for intellectuals. Everyone over-thinks.

For example, girl-talk on guys- "Let's try and figure out what the guy I like is thinking and theorize if he's like my asshole ex who I also never really understood or more like the guy I was sleeping with on the football team from high school...." Blah, blah, blah, AGAIN. And, yes, we've all been guilty of it at one point, especially females. In fact, an entire TV show- Sex in the City- built its success on over-thinking women who, although highly sexualized, cause their own grief through their overactive minds, not their overactive vaginas.

So should we stop thinking at all? Of course not. Just selectively, as Tolle says. And selectively means A LOT less than we are doing right now:

"80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because if its dysfunctional nature, much of it is also harmful...a serious leakage of vital energy."

So all the mind activity I've spent analyzing an ugly break-up, the future of my career and what the fuck is up with the world and Paris Hilton....waste. More blah, blah, blah, that frankly I can do without.

Hey, Eckhart! I'm single now. Wanna meet for a drink and a date where we can set our minds at eassssseeee?

Apologies for the superficial analysis of a very rich book but there's more to come. I'm obssessed (but not over-thinking...I promise.)

4th of July the British Way

So no BBQs for me today. Come to think if it I'm not sure an outdoor grill could last that long in this weather. Soggy burgers? No thanks, mate.

I finished the 1st draft of my short film of "Flicka", based on her London experience before she comes to L.A. I actually renamed her too. Not sure if I'll stick with the new name but at least I have less chance getting sued by Walt Disney for the copyright of their titled horse film.

We're still number one on the web ratings! Less than a week to go. I'm actually calmer than I would have thought. I was told by the book "The Power of Now" that stressing won't get me anywhere. Hmmm. It sometimes requires a book to tell me, not an actual person.

Tonight it's Mexican and margharitas with the girls.

Ironic. I come all the way from California (the home of the ultimate burrito) only to have.....Mexican.........in Notting Hill. I feel a movie spoof forming.

Rainy London

Wow! How much more water can possibly pour from the clouds?

Summer in London. Sigh.

Thank God for scarves and pubs.

Although these next 2 nights I'll be more likely sitting with a hot cup of cocoa doing some reading and writing.

Wednesday, a night out in London, and Thursday my trip to Oxford!

I'm Back. With Poetry.

Okay, its time I got back to writing on this. Reading back on the blog, its amazing that "Flicka" has now come so far and we're currently the number one voted webseries for the Independent Television Festival 2007. Fingers crossed.

Also, it's been a while since I've done my poetry. As the last few weeks have been an emotionally turbulent time for me, its only fitting that I should post some of my poetry. Some was written in the worst times, some in the less worse times. I want to get better at this........

Keep the faith!