Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in ashleyseashore's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
3:32 pm	urbanotarded Save the Assistants is doing really well, so I launched another little venture, just for fun. Heh. Check it out: URBANOTARDED. Happy New Year! Current Mood: opinionated Current Music: TV on the Radio (Comment on this)
Friday, December 1st, 2006
1:28 am	December 1 Only one more month left till the new year. A lot of good stuff has been happening: starting STA, spending Thanksgiving in Denver with dear friends, researching suburbia, the Democrats are back in action, and Britney finally ditched K-Fed, y'all! I'm not posting to this blog as often as I'd like because so much of my energy is going into other things. I just finished an aritcle on yoga for Beliefnet so that should be up within the next couple weeks, and Save the Assistants is officially launching on Monday, December 4 (with press releases and everything!). I'll be wintering in California (word) from December 11 to January 10th-ish so more fun stuff will come from that. I'll be, like, totally bi-coastal. And hopefully I'll be, like, totally posting more often. If you're interested in hearing some sweet tunes, check out these current personal faves: "What's the Altitude" - Cut Chemist "Knock 'em Out" - Lily Allen Anything by Charlotte Gainsbourg Current Mood: nocturnal (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
10:01 am	Save the Assistants! Our blog is up and running. Well, it's walking. Slowly. Check it out and send us some feedback. We're still putting everything together, but you can get a general (albeit remedial) idea of what we're doing with it. Save the Assistants! Current Mood: chipper Current Music: "Get a Hold" by Tribe Called QUEST (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
11:58 pm	Don't Go Jason Waterfalls This morning I found out that my friend, Jason, committed suicide last night. And then I cried, remembering little things here and there about him, and trying to understand what would have driven him to jump off a roof. I remembered that he made me something once that I thought was so brilliant, it’s one of the things I think of when I need to laugh. But here’s the twist: I’d never met actually met him. I knew him through Myspace and had been in contact for almost two years now. (And, yes, I realize that this makes me sound like a dork, but a loss is a loss when you boil it down.) We emailed and chatted quite often. He knew all about my anxieties about moving to New York, my family, what I want to do with my life. We encouraged each other and joked around and posted funny comments. My favorite thing he made for me, the thing that still makes me laugh, is a photo of Klaus Kinski dressed as a bear, chasing Timothy Treadwell around in heaven. (If you’re not a Herzog fan, that will be lost on you.) A few months ago, I told Jason that I was getting tired of Myspace. It had become a playground for too many people. What was once at least sort of private or exclusive was becoming too public. I was getting emails from girls I was in Girl Scouts with 20 years ago and it was irritating me. I stopped checking in everyday, stopped replying to posts and comments. I needed to back off and focus on my real life. I’d never been a total internet addict to begin with, and I shied away from people who spent day and night online. The internet can be fine for expressing yourself, but what you express is rarely who you really are. It goes without saying that the people you meet online are rarely who they really are as well. We spill secrets, ideas, even fantasies to people online. We reveal our idiosyncrasies, our odd characteristics and parts of our identities that our closest personal friends might not even be aware of. Things we would never say out loud, we type out. We explain ourselves. I think Jason found that, probably like a lot of other things, internet was ultimately empty, even though he had a ton of people that posted on his page daily, people that he actually did socialize with and see on a regular basis. The day he committed suicide, I’d emailed him asking what he’d been up to since I noticed he hadn’t checked his page since the beginning of the month. I think the point I’m trying to get to is that no matter how much we confess, how many deep dark secrets we type out and send, we still don’t know how to ask for what we want. Maybe Jason wanted companionship but all he was finding was company. Maybe he mistook the two. I lost one of my uncles this summer and the same thing crossed my mind. My uncle was an alcoholic who’d pushed most of our family away by the time he died and was living in a downward spiral of jail and alcoholism. He always made demands of the people around him, pointed lots of fingers, occasionally took responsibility for what he had done, but ultimately he could not articulate what he wanted – from himself or from others. Just a lot of flailing and pain. Jason couldn’t ask for what he wanted either and he jumped. As for me, I’m working on my articulation. So far I’ve got it down to this: I want love, to love and to be loved. I want that for everyone. And I’m asking for it. Beyond that, I want to succeed as a writer, I want to continue to know the wonderful people in my life, I want to be in this world and participate in it. From other people, I want openness and compassion. Jason’s page is still up and people have been posting parting comments all day, as if he’s still there. It’s a bizarre homage, but fitting. If he could see how many people felt the loss, he would be so happy. But of course he can’t. I like to think that maybe he’s part of the Kinski-Treadwell tableau now, rejiggering different images with some kind of super-Photoshop and laughing. Current Mood: Very sad (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
10:01 am	Fungus among us Pico has some kind of funky dog fungus. I suspect he picked it up from one of the mutts in the neighborhood, which leads me to curse living in godforsaken Queens once again. But it's not just Queens. In general, people in New York do not take good care of their pets. I've had a hard time adjusting to the differences between having a pet here versus having one in Colorado. I still call my vet in Denver for advice because the nearest animal clinic to where I live here in NY is notorious for horror stories (most recently, they killed a puppy by using too much anesthesia during an operation) and the vet is creepy and cold. It isn't headline news that New York is a filthy place. It's dirty and there are loads of germs flying around. I've been sick here more often than in Los Angeles or Denver, and even had pink-eye twice this summer. I've never had pink-eye in my life. And now my dog has a fungus on his belly. My brother, Ryan, is visiting and has agreed to bring Pico back to the warm environs of California for the winter, possibly longer. Probably longer. I can't subject the Snork to a dismal winter of more fungus, less walks, and a tiny apartment. I keep telling myself it's for the best, but after Thursday, I'll probably be curled up into a sad little ball of loneliness. Current Mood: sad (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
12:16 pm	Don't get hit I started sparring in muay thai last month. Monday night I had my fourth class and got paired with a professional fighter for three rounds. Let's just say... ouch. We spent the whole class doing lead-hand combinations and she found just about every opening she could. She's much smaller than me. I'm at least four inches taller and 30 lbs heavier but a professional fighter is a professional fighter (especially when they're undefeated). After getting punched hard straight in the face a few times, I finally asked her to chill out a bit. Thankfully, she did and was really helpful after that. I learned to defend myself better when I wasn't seeing stars, and also, surprisingly, that it's better to shrink to the size of your opponent so they have less surface area to hit. Just to be clear, I'm not saying I learned a lot from getting punched in the face. What I learned from that is that it sucks. The lesson came from speaking up and saying, "Chick, you're kicking my ass. There's pretty much no doubt that you can do that, so how about taking it down a notch and teaching me something instead of just taking advantage of my lack of experience?" Smooth(ish) sailing after that. Current Mood: pummeled (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
8:50 am	Getting my time back So I quit my job. And I got certified to be a yoga instructor. Nope, I'm not kidding. I've been slacking on calling people for the past couple months because there's a lot of new stuff circulating for me (see above), and I needed to be doing things instead of just talking about doing them. You know how it goes - talking about doing things becomes really circular, and everybody's got an opinion whether you want to hear it or not. I've only been off of work for a week now and in that time I've made amazing progress on three different projects I'm involved with. First, obviously, I got certified to be a yoga teacher. Very exciting - I'm recruiting guinea pigs in the New York City area, if anybody's feeling particulary daring. The second thing is that my friend and I are starting a blog targeting all those poor, beleaguered assistants slaving away for the promise of a greater tomorrow. Having freed ourselves from that very sort of predicament, we're empathetic towards the disempowered and also idealistic enough to hope to make a change. I'll post more when it's ready and will probably be contacting some of you for stories. The last thing is actually the most important. As you know, I've been wanting to write for a very, very long time. I keep doing little things here and there, but I really need time and flexibility in order to make any serious headway. Ultimately, I'm making these changes in my life because I need time to write. But I also need to do other things. After spending a year in that craptastic hellhole on Madison Avenue, I figured that there's no way I could make less money, and I'd rather be doing what I want to do than dealing with other people's drama. I'll be updating this blog on a fairly regular basis, probably covering the gamut of stuff I've got my hands in. I've learned some great yoga tips and am learning all about blogging, plus I encounter some crazy stuff just living here. And we just got a kitten so you better hope I figure out how to post photos. I hope you'll check in and leave me comments or call me or whatever. Now that I have my time back, I'm much more available for a little tete-a-tete. Current Mood: peaceful Current Music: Nikka Costa, "Everybody Got Their Something" (10 Comments |Comment on this)