Help Desk

Hi. Can I help you?

Yeah. I'm looking for a clue.

Ok, we have a variety of those. Is there a genre you're interested in?

Um. I was leaning toward Grad School?

Ah! School Advice. That's a popular one. We have:
"Should I Go to School? Vol. 1-15"
"Liberal Arts Grad School and You: Advice on How to Get Poor Quick"
"Delaying Real Life For a Degree."
"My Parents Hate That I'm an Actor"
and "I Don't Know What Else To Do So I'm Gonna Go To School... Again." Do any of these titles work for you?

Yes. Actually. The "I Don't Know What Else To Do So I'm Gonna Go To School... Again." sounds like my cup of tea.

Ok. Just be forewarned: it's a how-to guide, not a "10 Commandments" kind of book.

Yeah, I just need a guide? I'm looking for a clue, not an answer.

Ok, great. Then I think this book will work for you. May I ask, what Graduate school program were you thinking?

An MFA in Creative Non-Fiction.

Oh, interesting! I think you'd do well with that.

You do? What gives you that impression?

You look like you have a lot on your mind. You look smart. Your family values education, and your boyfriend already has a second degree, no?

How do you know?

You also write a lot, a blog, and you read a lot, and I'll bet you constantly say to yourself: "I could have written that better."

...Yes. I do.

Don't get me wrong, but I think this is a bit of a no-brainer.

Like, you're saying I should go to grad school and get an MFA in writing? And spend 2 more years in New York City and take on debt for a seemingly innocuous degree?

You used the word "Innocuous" in that last sentence: I think that says it all. You've got talent that your mother says you've possessed since you first learned to put pencil to paper. You'll thrive with the training.

But, this book? This'll help me get a clue, right?

I don't think you need a clue, Natalie.

Who are you?! How do you know this about me?

I'm just the lady behind the Help Desk counter of your sub-conscious, Natalie. I've always been here, and always will. You can take the book if you want, but I don't think there's anything in there you don't already know.

Wow. Thanks. I'll... Give this some real thought.

Okay! Come back if you need more advice or more clues!

Well, actually? Since I'm here... I was looking for a clue about long-term international relationships with members of the opposite sex.

Great! I have a bunch of those... looks like you could use a few.

Machu Picchu

I want to go to Machu Picchu in Peru. I want to put together a 4 week trip to Peru and Bolivia. Bolivia is cheap, has a lot of great things to go see and is traveller friendly, Machu Picchu is, well, a World Heritage site full of wonder, beauty and awesome-sauce. I want to cross another amazing World Wonder off my list. So far I've got: Empire State Building, Big Ben (London), Stonehenge, Taj Mahal, and Angkor Wat. My bucket list includes the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, Easter Island, Jerusalem, Tokyo, The Eiffel Tower, The Great Wall, and Mount Kilimanjaro... to name a few.

An amazing thing I can't wrap my mind around is how little international travel Americans do. I was on Facebook the other day and noticed a recent update from a girl I met while in Bangkok. She is British and had been traveling on her own around South East Asia. He recent update was a photo of her in Africa teaching children. A friend of her's asked what she had been up to and she responded with a list of countries she had recently been to in Africa and how she was bopping around the planet exploring and teaching the whole way. Her friend then responded in turn with an anecdote about how her and her hubby decided to take a year off, fly into Brazil and then travel around all of the Americas, ending in Alaska before coming home and getting a new job. You know, just a year in the life, right?

Jesus.

I can probably name ten people I know who have travelled outside of the states for more than a month. I've met quite a few travelers here in the states who are visiting from other places, but the sheer amount of trekking so many of these Australian/British/European/Canadian people do is astounding.  Don't get me wrong, Americans travel quite a lot. It's in our heritage to travel. We are constantly skipping around the country, occasionally going down to Mexico or the Caribbean for a real treat, but mostly we stick to our hemisphere. And I am lucky to have had the opportunities as a girl to have gone on a TON of road trips around the states, seeing many places that my contemporaries have not seen; so I don't feel the itch to explore places I have already been.

The wonder to me lies in the fear so many of my contemporaries have of somehow "missing" something if they take themselves out of the game for a month or two. Especially in New York, even leaving for a weekend can make one feel like they've fallen behind and that they need to catch up with whatever is going on. A Month!? 2!???! It's like shooting yourself in the foot, right? How will you ever hope to be competitive and reliable and successful if all you do is piss off for a while leaving everyone wondering how awesome your vacation is and how you can afford to pay for it all what with student loans and bills nagging at your heels. My answer: you've only decided to take on a parallel path, not one that stumps growth, just challenges it in other ways.

Oh, and none of the traveling whiz-bangs I have met have student loans to worry about. Credit Card loans: yes. But no one has 30K in debt yet... With that reason alone I can see why so many people won't travel. Who has money to cough up 600 bucks a month while on the road? That's a flaw in our national education system and is really the cause of stumping growth.

Meanwhile, I'm finding myself wistfully planning a trip the minute I get back from one. I keep telling myself I'm an actress, yet all I can focus on is how the next adventure will make more stories for me to write. What does that say? (That's too scary to think about just yet... not ready to confront those decisions.)

In a perfect world, I get a deal with a travel magazine and I write for them as I travel around with a guy who is also a junkie for adventure. I'm 25; life's got endless roads ahead of me, and I'm looking at a really steep, misty 7,000+ foot high Incan City Trail that's calling my name in the mountains of South America. Just gotta save up some money and make it happen.

The Perfect Morning

I imagine the perfect morning would go as such:

I wake up to the soft and hushed breathing of his warm face wishing me a good morning. There is a whole lot of beautiful sunshine in the room and I know that no one else is in the apartment because it is our apartment and our bedroom and my stuff and his stuff and our city and we are waking up in this really comfy bed we just spent the entire night having a lot of really mind-blowing sex in as a celebration of an amazing show I had just done. 

Anyway, he wakes me up with kisses on my face and I giggle and we snuggle under the comforter that is like a warm cloud engulfing our deliriously, sickeningly delicious love. I ask what we’ll be having for breakfast. We slept in a bit, but it’s not so late in the morning that I feel like I need to really bolt out of bed in preparation for the day, let’s say it’s like, 9:45. He says we ran out of eggs yesterday and the only thing we’ve got is that artesian coffee that he bought a few days ago and we hadn’t yet finished yet. I groan in a mock “Oh, so what do we do now?” when really I am not worried about any of that, not at all. I have to be at the show again later in the day, but otherwise: we have the whole day together. He has the weekends off and other than the improv show later, I can look forward to spending the entire morning and afternoon with him. 

He chuckles at my groan and makes to get up to make the coffee because he knows I love coffee in bed. I stop him with a “where do you think you’re going?” look that also says: “Let’s get some cardio going this morning so we can really make that coffee earned.”

We finally spill out of bed to begin our slow weekend morning. I go in to take a shower, a nice, warm, wake-you-up shower and when I step out of the bathroom of the artfully and practically decorated apartment that we call our own, I smell that warm coffee. I hear him in the kitchen talking to someone on the phone. 

When I’ve changed into something really cute I just bought from Banana Republic on sale a few days ago, and walk over to the kitchen, he has NPR on and is reading the news on his ipad. A steaming cup of coffee is waiting for me on our wooden table that my Mom gave me when we moved into the Brooklyn apartment we share. 

“Who were you talking to?” I ask as I sit down and sip at the deliciously warm caffein. 

He looks up from him iPad and smiles. “I just ordered us some breakfast from that diner you really love.” He says. 

“No! Ohhh! You are so sweet! Did you get the eggs and bacon special that I really like?”

“Of course.” He says, like it’s really not a big deal, but secretly he knows it is a super big deal. I love small thoughtful things like when someone remembers my favorite meal or when someone makes a decision for the two of us and makes an order for food so that we don’t have to venture out into what looks like a relatively chilly morning. 

I look out the window as I drink and ponder the tree that sweeps its branches in the wind and wonder where all the leaves that have fallen off go. The doorbell rings. I get up to answer, he stays reading and NPR’s playing something really fun like some folk music. He loves music, and I love music, so there is always some wonderful piece playing to make the silences of our relationship toe-tapping.

We’re both working professionals at what we do. He makes really good money working for some kind of nerdy, know-it-all job like an internet start-up company, or as a professor, or a researcher or a lecturer or an architect or engineer, something like that. I’m performing constantly on all sorts of improv teams, and working part time for Comedy Central. My agents are working on getting me a good deal with some producers about this great idea I have for a movie. I’m making good money, too. 

The delivery boy hands me our hot, delicious smelling breakfasts and I tip him really well. I can see him admiring our apartment as he looks past my shoulders at the warm reds, browns and greens that decorate everything. We have healthy plants in the window that get watered everyday by my Boyfriend who has watered them ever since he got them a few years ago. We’ve got beautiful picture frames of the two of us madly in love while posing in photos of the places we’ve travelled to together and photos of our families. Our cat is playing with a small toy on our big persian rug that I love to run my toes through so as to not feel too cold on November days like this. 

We eat breakfast in relative silence, except for an occasional comment on something in the news. I check my email on my up to date and well thought out laptop, like a MacBook Pro. He’s still in his boxers and a tee shirt and has bed head and thick plastic hipster glasses that I just melt when I see him in. I like to steal glances at him whenever I come to a break in reading about the recent developments about my life, like what my agent said to the producers and when I may need to be flown out to California. He doesn’t notice the looks at first, but after a couple times catches my eye as well and smiles. He mouths “I love you” and I blush. “I love you, too.” I say out loud and I hold my hand out across the table and he takes it. Life is great, and it’s only 11:30am.