"The Good Life"

I am struggling not to cripple myself with the uncontrollable guilt that I am presently feeling for living what I have come to call "The Good Life". I've been travelling with a theatre job for the last two months, followed by some vacation time with old friends, and now that I'm home in Toronto, I've pretty much just been hanging out with friends, eating, drinking, sleeping and hanging out on the internet. I was out with my friend Mark last night and made some sort of "good life" comment and he sort of scoffed and said "well, I guess that depends on how you define The Good Life". Point taken. I'm not exactly living the way I want to live forever these days... But that's all the more reason to enjoy this un-employed free-for-all of a life while it lasts, no?

Sooooooo, for those "good life" days when you have no major responsibilities, and it isn't quite Spring outside yet so you wanna stay in and loaf around on your computer all day (while you do this, I recommend listening to CBC, or NPR, or your region's equivalent to public radio, so that you can feel justified by your aural exposure to news, and cultural/political/social commentary)... I recommend the following:

Go to www.myheritage.com, and upload a photo of yourself. Do a search to see what celebrities you resemble, based on similarites of specific features like cheekbones, face shape, eye size & shape, mouth size & shape... It's wierd, and slightly disconcerting. And changes depending on what photo you give them to compare with.
For example, based on this photo of me (see below), which I don't really like but the site is sort of picky and you need to a have a headshot-like image of yourself for their scanning needs, MyHeritage.com told me that I most resemble Ashley Tisdale (whoever that is!), coming in second was Halle Berry (ha!), then Sophie Marceau (again, whoever that is), Hilary Swank (%76) and some GUY named Takuya Kimura (what?!?). Also, Kathy Bates and Melanie Griffith came up - oh brother!!



Two more searches, with different photos, turned up another slew of Asian celebrities that I have never heard of, Julianne Moore (%75), Sharon Stone (%75), Alexis Bledel (%74), Kiera Knightley (%68), Gael Garcia Bernal (%68 - hahaha!) and a young-looking Barbara Stanwyck (%74) - cool!

And when you get sick of public radio, go to http://txc.libsyn.com/ and listen to Tom X Chao's peculiar utterance of the day. He is a NYC-based playwright, comedian, performer, whatever... whom I met at the Frigid Festival in NYC earlier this year. He also wrote one of my two favorite shows from the festival, a play called "Can't Get Started". I laugh out loud listening to these random utterances.

If you're craving more mainstream, celebrity-based distractions, check out: www.laineygossip.com Robin and Sarah told me about this Vancouver-based Lainey, who is quite entertaining with her celebrity gossip blog. Also, I think she seems pretty cool, as Sarah tells me that she still volunteers for Covenant House in Vancouver (a safe-house for street youth) and I see that she has donated ad-space to them on her website. I'm not really a celebrity follower, but if you are, check out Lainey!

Finally, if you feel the need to redeem yourself and learn about something important, check out: www.milleniumcampaign.org, to learn about how you can help the world achieve a set of eight time-bound goals to end extreme poverty worldwide by 2015. We are the first generation that have the means to eradicate poverty, so join the campaign!

Alright, I'm gonna go look for a job on Good Work Canada now. And then hit the streets with my resume with the slightly more realistic ambition of finding a serving job for the summer. But first I think I'll google "Ashley Tisdale" because she came up TWICE on my MyHeritage.com celebrity look-alike search.

Preparing for "the good life" to end soon...