OK, so I can't NOT go in costume to my own party. So I'm recycling an old idea into a new costume...

I thought I would post my competing Before & After Party in the spirit of choice and a free-market economy. My house is small, I'm turning 30, I have cats, and I'm not bothering with a costume for the first Holly-ween in seriously 29 years (even at the tender age of 3 my mother dressed me up as Pancho Villa, complete with moustache and sombrero. But I just can't ask my evil twin Polly to come out for yet another monster bash.) So please come by and celebrate with me, before and after your wilder engagements!

October 29th
623 Parkside Ave.

I thought everyone whow knows Judy, my mom, would like to know that Wednesday night she had a hear attack and was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in Erie. She's going to be okay. Only one of her arteries was clogged and they've already cleared it out, but she will have to stay in the hospital until Monday, and she will have to give up the salty snacks and creamy goodies that are her only joy. The last thing she ate before she started to have severe chest pains was a bowl of peanut butter ice cream covered with chocolate syrup, if that gives you any indication of her usual fare!

You could tell how much everyone loves my mom by the number of people who rushed to Erie at 11 at night to be with her. I came with my boyfriend from Buffalo, my cousin came from Hamburg, my sisters and my nephew were already with her, my niece came from Toronto, and my mom's brother and sister came from Bradford, PA. My mom heard the doctor say "she has a consortium in the waiting room," only she keeps saying consor-ti-um instead of consorshum which makes it sound so cute. I think the morphine helps too. She said a number of funny things while in intense pain, another testement to just how tough that old bird is. One of the orderlies in Bradford used to party at our house when my sisters were younger. My mom was the only one who recongnized him and said "Roger Ludwig, I'm doooomed." Then she told all of us, a la Monty Python, "but I don't want to go on the cart!!"

I can't tell you all how relieved we are that she is going to be okay. It's too terrible to see your Mommy all yellow and cold and contorted with pain on a hospital gurney. Please, everyone, quit smoking now, exercise, eat right, all that shit, so that the people who love you so much never have to worry like we have about our mom. I finally managed to quit smoking now a month, and I was so glad that I wasn't standing outside a hospital sucking a cigarette while my mom (ex, but one-time heavy, smoker) was inside having a heart attack. I know death isn't preventable, but preventable death is preventable, so like, shape up everyone, or ship out, as they say.

If anyone wants to pass a message on to my mom, send me an email, and I'll bring them to her on Sunday. I know she'd like to hear from you.

So I have fallen off the wagon already. On Saturday I drank one beer and smoked one imported cigarette. Ahhhhh Gauloises. I felt guilty and recommitted to the goal. But then today I really started to try to do my Application to Candidacy, which is a really friggin' lame paperwork nightmare that you have to go through in order to begin working on your MFA thesis project. Paul I'm sure wrote about what a positive pain in the ass this is. For me especially, since I transferred from another Master's degree program at UB, I have a ton of classes outside of Media Studies. And for each one I have to find the syllabus and write a justification of why it should count toward my degree, and for some of those, I have to get the signature of a teacher who may have moved (out of the country) or who I have possibly pissed off and never want to speak to again. That's so me. Anyways, I called our advisor, a man many know and love but who has always told me encouraging things like I'll never graduate and maybe I shouldn't even be a graduate student. Which is so ridiculous. So today he told me the same thing again, that despite the fact that I have completed everything except the actual thesis project, I shouldn't have "gone out on my own" and yes, I still won't graduate. Well, I might just follow the lead of some greater minds than mine, like say, T.S. Eliot, Getrude Stein, Bill Gates, and complete all my course work, at a cost of $25,000, and tell them to file their formwork where the sun don't shine and let me go my merry way, with no degree to show for all my hard work. Needless to say, it was either break down in tears or break down and smoke. Since I won't give the bastards the satisfaction of seeing me cry, I begged someone for a Marlboro Red. And then I smoked it. WHY! WHY?! WHYYYYY!!!??? I got a lot of nice and encouraging comments from people who read my Quitter post, but the best and most honest one was, don't say you've quit until 2 years have passed.

Day 6 with no cigarettes. The (e:strip) party was my last hurrah with the smoking. I think it was an appropriate way to end it all; after 10 years of partying and puffing, to toke some last rollies with my old crew. I smoked a smorgasborg of borrowed butts that night, and since I had been cutting back for two weeks before that, they made me dizzy and kinda sick feeling. The next day I think I was more hungover from cigarettes than anything else. This week has been intense with rehersals (one of my ideas was pretty over-the-top and I got grilled by the whole troupe and in the end I had to just cut the skit) but I have still managed not to give in, even though people around me are smoking. Really what I feel like is I've lost an old friend (I almost typed 'fiend'), My Tabaccy, and though I miss it now it's gone, it was time to move on. There just weren't any surprises anymore. Puff puff butt, over and over. The good news is, according to everything doctors have told me, now that I'm not a smoker, I'll live forever, right?