First off, thank you so much for all your suggestions in the comments and via email for my post yesterday. I’ll be following up with some of you and with some of your suggestions, and I appreciate you taking the time to think about it and to help me out. Y’all are amazing.
Tonight I hit up an awesome media networking event with my friend Staci, also from RealNetworks. Look at me! Networking! Except it wasn’t networking at all, since Staci and I got our drinks and then hid in the corner and gabbed about my love life, her love life, and then the love lives of everyone else in our immediate or tangential circle of friends, because that is what we do. Other people were exchanging business cards with total strangers, negotiating potential deals, sniffing around for a job. But me? I was with a girl whose desk is on the same floor as mine, who comes over and hangs out at my apartment sometimes, being like “OMG they did not break up! That’s insane! They seemed so perfect together! Tell me more.” So, yeah. This is why I don’t normally attend networking events. Luckily, I had to leave way early to hit up my improv class, so hopefully Staci got some actual useful networking in after that.
I didn’t want to go to my improv class tonight, because I’d been so uncomfortable and felt like I sucked so bad last week, but I went anyway. I was really glad I did. I had more fun this time, and, more than that, I noticed an improvement in myself since last week. I’m still by no means good, but I could tell that I’d been learning. I could tell that my classmates had, too. That’s still such a cool feeling for me — to know that I’ve grown better at something as a result of instruction or practice. I’m by nature an all-or-nothing kind of girl. Like, if I can’t rock at it immediately, I should give up right now, because I can never improve. But that’s not true, it’s just a lie my brain tells me. I did improve since last week. Who knows what a good little improv improver I might be by the end of the course?
It was really sad, though — at the start of class we were playing some silly games, and this one girl just kept messing up or getting confused. She’d been one of the girls who was really cool to me last week and who I really liked. Finally she was like, “You guys, I can’t do this. Something really bad happened today.” And then she started talking about her friend, who was shot four times today by her ex-boyfriend, who then killed himself. The woman had two kids. She died soon after at the hospital. What the police are admitting they know about the story — which is less than this girl knew — is here. I was just so heart-broken for her, I gave her a big hug, and then she decided she should probably leave. But it was just so crazy — you hear about these stories on the news, but these random shootings never seem to impact anyone I actually know. It just got me all angry at guns in general. Like, why are they legal again? I understand why they were important in a different time in American history, but do we still need them now? Are your hunting trips really as important as this woman being alive to care for her children? I think no.
