Moving Day Hard Cider with a Side of Gluten

What do you do with a packed-up apartment, 5 flights of stairs, and a pair of crutches?

How many actors does it take to move an entire set up 3 flights of stairs at 7am?

If you take 1 cab every day from 204th St. to 108th St. at 6am, how much less expensive will it be vs. an Uber?

How many swings are necessary to obliterate a professionally made Tinkerbell piñata?

What percentage of the NYC subway stations are handicap accessible? (Oh, sorry. Too serious.)

How much trail mix, popcorn, and apples can you eat before never eating them again?

At what point does strapping your $290 full-sized mattress on top of an SUV with rope and driving in rush-hour traffic through all of Manhattan into Brooklyn with strong signs of rain become a good idea?

And, please, someone, tell me: How did I end up in Amherst, Ohio?

RECIPE: Moving Day Hard Cider with a Side of Gluten
Prep Time: 3.5 months 
Bake Time: 2 months (6-8 weeks)
Chefs: 3 (someone to carry you + a podiatrist + an idiot)
Nutritional Value: Calcium
Allergens: Obviously gluten; maybe a little pride

Ingredients:

• 47 years of total formal schooling between your 2 sisters and you that end in a split second. Tears. All the stupid streaming tears.
  
• That's all the the happy you get: and it wasn't even that happy: I mean, it was happy, but there were tears: Let's go: One broken foot
• If you can try to fit it in here, aim for a misdiagnosis of a foot sprain instead of a break. That way, you can properly damage it further. (re: "idiot")
• If you're lucky, break ("sprain") the foot exactly one month out of the end of your touring production. This ensures that you'll be less than two weeks out once you receive your proper diagnosis. This means... I think you know what this means.
• Aim for the tour on which your injury occurs to be fully dependent on the actors to load in, set up, and load out the set. That way this means this ensures TOTAL USELESSNESS AT LEAST PART OF THE TIME.
• That was severe. Don't aim for that. Try to be useful. You are. Just never express it. Never say at the 7am Bronx elementary school with 3 spiral staircases that you "wish you could help." Just... be quiet. 

• 
• The date of June 12: The date in which your transportation system up & down stairs flies to Costa Rica. The date you must go home.
• One particular airport, the only particular airport near your particular location of residence, that cancels every flight to Cleveland for the next few days due to "air traffic control."
  (I really wanted to find some sort of meme that truly captured my frustration and plane-old utter confusion at how air traffic control could be responsible for canceling flights days in advance. I mean, I get it, but give your customers a less vague reason. I need to share with you what you find when you Google Image search "air traffic control memes", because I kind of feel like they knew that bitter people were going to Google that, so they ensured that only the snarkiest, most specific air traffic control references were used to cause alienation and thus further confusion.
   
  
   And, finally, two I found right beside each other that, together, may be the reason why everything we think we know about air traffic controlling is wrong:
• $119 cab ride from Brooklyn to New Jersey during rush hour. There's a working airport there. And while I appreciate everything you do for my life and the lives of all of the people in the sky, air traffic controllers, I am clearly still a little mad.
• But you'll get over it once you settle back in your (1) cozy childhood bed in Amherst, OH.
  
• Speaking of Women's USA Olympic Gymnastics, there's a (1) movie being shot in Amherst, OH this summer. I'll let you take a moment.

OK, are you ready to come back?

Let's begin again.

• (1) Movie: Written and starring the hilarious Melissa Rauch from you and your father's favorite TV show together, "The Big Bang Theory". Set entirely in Amherst, OH, shot entirely in Amherst, OH, living and breathing the energy of Amherst, OH. A feature film. Guys. When you watch this movie. You will see my high school. The small-town Americana Main Street downtown. One of our really sketchy bars (or maybe it's the nice one?) in our row of sketchy and nice bars. A real live Amherst home. Perhaps our 1-screen $3 movie theatre. Perhaps my old substitute teacher famous infamous for being an extra in the Shawshank Redemption. I don't know. But it's really pretty ironic that it's shooting here, now, and about a gymnast with an injury. 

Are you still not ready to finish these ingredients? Because I can stop now and come back--- OK! Let's finish talking about coincidences.

• ... Nope, that's pretty much it. Just find 1 summer of your life right after your first real acting job in which you then have to leave New York to return to a small town in Ohio for an indeterminate period of time, and then stick a big feature film right smack dab in the middle of your town, and then show up at an open casting call at the same mall as where you once worked at Victoria's Secret. Oh, but do remember that you're on crutches. You know you still can't do anything on crutches. Right? Making your last ingredient: PATIENCE. 

Instructions:

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

OK, OK, I know, I know it sounds so silly but yes patience is key-- ... Ha-HA-- ... No, but seriously. 

1. Take, for example, a young girl's stomach. Can she expect it to be in proper working condition at all times? Well, actually, I guess that's not too much to ask for, but-- Take, for example, someone who has had stomach issues for years. Is there going to be a 1-cure-fix-all method? Will he or she need to reevaluate the eatability of his or her favorite foods of all time, ice cream and pretzels? Patience, my dear stomachs, patience will let you know when it's time to enjoy those glorious rounds or mounds of dark wheat and yeast once again. Patience will guide you away from nightly bowls of lactose. PATIENCE... gives you this:

A stylized photo of your first breakfast sandwich in years, in plans of starting a new hashtag, #tastytuesdays. You rightfully held that back. 

2. Think of the young man who moves all of his (booted) girlfriend's belongings down 5 floors in 90° heat with only 1 other guy, puts it all in a storage unit, and then by himself drives a full-sized mattress he strapped to the top of an SUV through NY traffic, only to unload it & her suitcases again at his apartment. Patience? Saint-ience. There's another young man of another young lady's hand who jammed all of her grad school belongings into a teeny tiny little car two times, once by himself, and then drove all the way to a different city to drop it off. Who are these young men and why do they have so much PATIENCE? To the aforementioned mattress strongman, his patience was rewarded with a 6-pack of  and a carton of . And that was our dinner. (Did I also feverishly pop open a beer-shaped bottle of alcohol when our moving day ended, sweaty and exhausted, even though I didn't move a single thing? Yes. Yes, I did. It was a difficult day to watch.)

3. You have to think to yourself: What can I do with a 100% free, open schedule in a beautifully quiet, peaceful, Midwest town in the beginning of summer? You have no job, ability to drive a car & thus leave the house, or real responsibilities. I made myself a daily schedule that was full of memorizing monologues, writing, playing the piano, searching for jobs, and working out. Have I ever followed it? Absolutely not. However, I have spent hours (more than schedule-ly alloted) memorizing a new song on the piano & fiddlin' out a few others. I've had a phone interview with a new start-up organization by one of the New Housewives of... somewhere. I, only yesterday, finally wrote down in a Pages document (acknowledging your judgment, moving on) some scenes to a webseries I've been thinking about. And my stars I have gone through approximately 80 episodes of "The Office" and that is not nothing. Yes, I wanted to write every day. I wanted to be truly productive. Have I wasted my time? Maybe some days, a little bit. But, with time, with PATIENCE, I have at last gone through all of my emails, applied for a plethora of new nanny jobs, and now am finally fed up enough with the fact that I haven't written anything that I AM! See! You just have to get angry enough at yourself. Don't do something, wait a bit, still don't do it, and then retaliate! Against yourself.

I'm not saying you should stop doing productive things. I'm not saying you shouldn't properly follow a to-do list. Getting things done feels great. Making that phone call or answering that email that you've been putting off for weeks feels splendiferous. But if you need time to do other things (more prevalent-- or less prevalent, sometimes), do them. Just do something. Maybe I shouldn't be watching 5 episodes of "The Office" in one day, but 1 is OK. And, in time, with patience, there's always that one day in which I don't watch any. And I feel good about it. 

More practically and honestly, I could merely say "don't waste your time like I usually do." But where's the learning in that? Only PATIENCE, my cumquats, brings you a calmer stomach, a healed foot, a larger perspective on motivation, and the newfound, passionately heartfelt statement: 

I NEED NEW YORK CITY. 

~*~*~*~*!*~*~*~*~

Howdy, there! I thought it'd be real fun to rediscover some of my favorite memories of my now FOUR boots! Wow! I am truly a lucky girl. Enjoy-- and let's stay safe out there! LOL, am I right, ladies?! 

             

The glory of living.