tara king

I'm coming up on one year of participation in the Nerd Fitness Academy.

For the past three days I've been assembling a "lessons learned after 75 days" post in the spirit of the post I wrote 8 days in.

Part of me thinks, "Aw, how cute, eight-days-in me!" And part of me knows I was learning a ton of really concrete lessons that early on.

• Being a fat chick at Target
• How every department but the women's section has great clothes with unicorns on them.
• Related: Can we stop with the pompoms and fringe please.
• Game of Thrones.
• How tired I am of this project
• Camping again
• I did the down part of a full pushup sixteen times yesterday and I felt like a beast.
• I did the down part of a full pushup sixteen times yesterday and now my arms can't decide if they a) never want to do that again or b) want to do that all the time.

In a scary movie when something goes wrong, a LOT of things go wrong. Maybe the tent won't stand up, and then there's a forest fire, and then somebody twists an ankle, and then a bear shows up, and then the fire surprise attacks from some new angle, and then maybe there's a scary bad guy, and then, finally, you make it out all sweat stained but with a clear lesson that life is beautiful if only because you have it. Like Jurassic Park.

A girl laying in the dead leaves, orange light on her face from the sodium streetlight and she feels so sad, she feels like an empty fountain ready for winter, she is the wrong season, she is bursting buds in the middle of October, ready to go, ready to bloom, pent up and whipped in the wind. She lays in the dead leaves and takes instagram pictures. She feels the leaves in her hair and notices her makeup. She thinks about young people and she thinks about what nine years mean to each of us. The leaves crunch under her head.

This entry is cross-posted at Mad King Thomas' website.

We're making a new dance.

It's....hard.

We are rewatching Game of Thrones, although after two episodes of Joffrey, I don't know if I can do it all again. Every episode takes at least an extra ten minutes while we pause and dissect the sigils in the opening credits, or the sets we'll see again later, or the costumes, or the soft baby faces of everyone on the show. Tyrion's golden mane and drunken face break my heart--somehow it's all much sadder the third time through (once books, twice show).

You feel your own heart turning into something new and it is a strange thing. It still beats, and it still works, and you seem perfectly healthy, but something just isn't the same. Your skin tingles with a feeling of self-betrayal or invasion and you think, I must oust this newcomer! It's me against This, but it cannot be removed, it is in you and always has been.

I've mentioned a class I took at the Actors Fund this spring in a few places. If you're working in the performing arts or film industry in LA and you don't feel like you get money and you're always broke, I highly, highly, highly recommend taking this class. It's free and it's life-changing.

Over the course of six weeks, we learned a lot of practical things, but the biggest lessons I learned were:

We're all going to die (and I'm not even talking about Brexit!)

It seems important to be able to answer the question: What do I love to do with my time?