First I'm sorry I've been MIA this week. I try to post at least once a week-- usually on Monday or Tuesday, but with one thing or another Friday has crept up on me already.

When you hear what the one thing and anothers consist of I hope you'll cut me some slack just this once. I not only got married this week, but after the emails I exchanged with the several different editors I've established wonderful working relationships with--the guys over at Everyday Fiction, Everyday Poets and David LaBounty at The First Line--  I feel like I can finally and officially call myself a writer or at least a writer-in-training. This week I got the joyous news that The First Line will publish not one but two chapters from my very first novella (or more novellette at 12,000 words but that's a weird term). The first installment of the story will be coming out soon, available online or in bookstores around the country and the second installment will be out this winter. More details soon... On top of that wonderful news I received an email letting me know Everyday Poets will soon publish my poem "The Trophy Bride"-- a short poem inspired by my role as Thomas Middleditch's bitchy trophy wife  in the comedic film Michel Jean-Michel: Overexposed.

I'm a little overwhelmed by the events of this past week and need a few days to digest. I'm both happy and frightened if that makes sense. Okay, it doesn't make sense, but I'm a poet and an actor gosh darnit. I get to be a little weird and emotional sometimes, right??  It goes with the territory. Anyway I'll be back to work and up and running as usual this coming Monday (or Tuesday:))

I hope you all have a great weekend and want to thank you for your patience and support! I love maintaining this blog, connecting with old friends through it and meeting new ones. I truly value every bit of feedback and try to reply to every comment and email.

As promised I've been running around like a headless chicken this May.

Or more like a silly chicken with said head getting done up in lots of different makeup styles and wigs and haircuts and costumes galore. (See below for credits for the work above.) Long story short: it's been a mad May in more ways than one.

Exhibit A: My mother's birthday is today and today is the day she's starting her radiation therapy for her cancer. The good news is: the doctor has scheduled only 16 sessions instead of the regular 32, so that's great even though radiation therapy on your birthday is not so great. But still she's really happy about it. Apparently, there's beautiful hiking near the facility-- if you 've seen this photo you know this is something she digs-- and she's excited to have the chance to go for a walk everyday. Talk about looking at the bright side! And well...if she can be so cheerful about the whole thing, then I feel like I can try to be more cheerful about the downs that accompany my professsion's ups. 

Everyone knows how difficult it is to feel cheerful when life is out of your control-- in my mother's case it's her health and in my case it's the way other people treat me and how much it hurts my feelings. My mother is dealing with her illness in such an inspiring way it's inspired me to confront so much of what has held me back in doing what I want to do, because...well..I am a freaking sensitive baby.

But I'm working on that.

Speaking of which here's an update on my anxiety-- I've cut back on coffee and upped meditation and yoga, and miracle of miracles I've been feeling like a different girl. Lucky for me I have a crazy, hippy mother who can teach me meditation, and also lucky for me I can teach myself yoga at home-- I'm certified but I also grew up studying gymnastics and know how not to hyperextend or risk injury. This might not be an option for everyone dealing with anxiety or depression, because yoga is pretty pricey I know. I would say this is something you can teach yourself on youtube or from a book except... yoga can be dangerous as an infamous NY Times article recently pointed out. 

I would advise taking at least a few classes with a teacher and learning what not to do, before practicing even the most basic routine at home. However, once you do have a safe routine down it's the cheapest, least chic, least snobby, most streamlined way to exercise in the whole world-- even more so than running. You don't need a single piece of special equipment. Not even a mat. I read somewhere once that in India they practice yoga on a wood floor, so I trained myself to do that. At first it was uncomfortable, but I kept going because I used to be one of those crazy hardcore people. I'm not anymore (thank God I now  have other hobbies than proving how cool I am to strangers...er unlike blogging, hm?), but now yoga on the floor is my preferred method. And you can't get more basic than that, can you?

And 2: My other issue. The part of life that is out of my control-- i.e. my freaking sensitive babyness. 

The hardest thing about freelancing (for me anyway) isn't the time alone or the unstructured nature of my job, which are some of the things my friends who freelance complain about, the hardest thing for me is occasionally having to work with really mean people. I'm mostly pretty lucky, but I do live in New York and as Kahlil Gibran said it best: New York is the kind of city you might want to carry a sword around with you even if you sheathe it in honey. Or something to that effect. I paraphrase. What he meant (I think) is watch your back in NYC. There are some angry, unhappy folks out there. You can't control that but you can control your reaction to them. You don't have to stoop to their level. The thing that bothers me the most about the meanies isn't that they're mean to me. What bother me most is my fear that their meanness might rub off on me, and I'll stop believing in stuff like love and dreams and kindness and the goodness of other people, the way you can tell they've stopped believing in anything. Well, except for money usually. The mean people always believe in at least that. Anyway...so that's the part that scares me. 

Hopefully I will learn to see these kind of hard times and the aspects of life I can't control as a way to highlight the parts of life that I can and that I think are light and love-filled.  

This quote  inspired my blog post today. It's from a poet whose letters I love more than his poems (for now anyway-- my taste in poetry changes all the time):

"Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background,they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are."

--Rainer Maria Rilke

I hope anyone else who's going through a hard time feels comforted by this quote as much as I did. 

Pictured above are some of the many  wonderful, dreamy and inspiring (for me at least) things I've been up to the past few weeks. 

Thanks to Harley Hall at Modern Magazine, Mark Raker for testing me for another spec commercial, Artikal Millinery and Chris O'Donnell for shooting me in really cool hats and everyone else I've been working with the past few weeks who've been helping me along in my mad May dreaming (but who's pics I haven't gotten yet!)

The other day a model said to me: "You need to let things wash off your back more. It's not personal. It's just business." In my heart I didn't agree with her , but I couldn't exactly vocalize my reasons. Still I love uncovering these spaces within myself where my life experience has bumped up against the shores of a foreign country whose customs and language I have to take some time to learn.

What that feeling I had to take time  to find the words for was this: no, nothing is business. What I feel in my heart, or the area inside myself anyway that adjudicates that which is true and fair and just, is the following concept instead: it is all personal.

And in this (actual) country (not just the one in my heart)  it's this concept that the personal matters more than the business  that has become so inflammatory it's sparking riots and protests all over the country and even the world. While the central criticism of Occupy Wall Street still holds true-- i.e. the movement has not found a unifying voice to express itself in a more intelligble way-- I am beginning to believe more and more in the validity of the grass-roots emotional support it is stirring up even without more success  articulating its goals in a cohesive manifesto. In some ways the OWS movement's struggle for a voice is the same struggle I face when I don't know how to put the feeling of the heart into words, the same as me not knowing  how to tell the model: "You're wrong. It's all personal. How we treat each other is all that matters." In my life and in this country we're both bumping up against uncharted territory of the personal and collective heart.

In fact in a lot of ways I think that simple exchange encapsulates a great deal of what Occupy Wall Street stands for. In the same topsy-turvy way that corporations can claim the same status and rights as an individual, a flesh and blood human being! (an absurdity that one day I believe will seem as out-dated and risible as dunking medieval witches to get the devil out of 'em appears to be to us now) I think people pretending to be businesses is equally as risible. How can a person be a corporation anymore than a coroporation can be a woman or a man?

Be professional is the motto of the times.Professional image first and foremost! First impressions are everything.... But what does that mean? There are courtesies like being on time, which I think will never go out of fashion or appear as foolish as witch-dunking (although undoubtedly viewed then as a courteous attempt back in the day to stop naughty witches from killing your neighbor's cow), but I think allowing a boss or a superior to humiliate or terrorize you in the name of professionalism is an outdated concept. We need to live in a people world not a business world. Businesses should be for people, made of people, by people. Businesses are not people and people are not businesses.

Everything is personal. You are a person and you are here to make your way in the world and discover what feeds you, what fills you with joy, what moves you. Treading on others toes along your own personal path is discourteous and professionalism in that sense is good. Let there be rules to help us not hurt others in our mad daily dash to help ourselves. I think that's what Occupy Wall Street is saying, too. Not: "let there be no laws!" But rather: "let the laws help us help each other and help ourselves."

If a business is a person, and all laws are created to help businesses prosper (which let's face it-- they are)...what of the people? What of persons? And the sacred space of the personal? Soon the personal will be a tragedy of the commons-- a space belonging to no  one and everyone where we simply dump all our trash as we go about our business, never bothering to stop and cultivate this space or protect it.

I've tried to make the business of modeling a personal journey. I volunteered my time a few weeks ago to participate in a sustainable eco-fashion show at the Javitz Center's Green Festival in New York City. Above I'm wearing a hand-made hemp gown, and I had a wonderful time working with Hemptopia Apparel on the show. But then yesterday at a highly-paid gig I was treated so poorly by a salon in a posh department store uptown  that the ups and downs of the modeling business have left this person wobbly. My body is not a business. It's animated by a personality, and I need to take care of that person and be surrounded by people who feel the same way-- business or not.

Beneath the professional facade there is always a person. Always. And how we treat each other is always personal, or it should be. Because knowing the fragile human heart is lying there just inches below that aura of calm, professional certainty we should handle each other gently, remembering we're each here for the same reasons  and not to bump into each other too much even as our paths cross and diverge.

Or that's  what I want to try to do...and I can't really say why. I don't have the words yet. I'm back in that mysertious country of the heart where words come after feelings not before. Taking care of myself, taking care of others...I just know it feels right.

Yesterday I stumbled upon this photograph (above) on Gabriel Wilson's profile . It's an unedited shot from behind the scenes of this commercial (see below) that Gabriel and I shot for J. Hadley Jewelry. That was the day the love of my life a.k.a. Zolie arrived. I had to run out of the shoot before I could get anyone's info and therefore never saw any shots from behind the scenes of the commercial.

It felt like a good sign coming across my work like that so unexpectedly, and for some reason the picture made me think of the line: "I stand alone on the edge of the wide world and think..." which it turns out I misremembered...

When I have fears that I may cease to be
    Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
    Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
    Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
    Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
    That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
    Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

It's one of my favorite poems. I think that's because it explores the strange idea along the lines of death being the thing that can save you. I must admit my perception of the poem is an idea out of an E.M. Forster book, my favorite novelist, and is also the one thing I liked about We Bought A Zoo (see previous post).) So many of my friends work at jobs they hate, date people they don't love, grind away at life as if they had endless days to waste. There's so much pressure on me to grow up (i.e. stop acting and modeling) and take life seriously (i.e. work in a bank/ go to law school/ med school/ ANY professional school), to make more money and earn more accolades but what for and for whom and at what cost? I love what I do, and I always try to remember this is all very fleeting...

Well enough deep thoughts! Here's to prancing around in gardens wearing pretty dresses over the next few days! And please give us a like on facebook if you have a chance. It will help a short play I'm working on be produced. I really value and appreciate the support. Thank you!

                                          Thrifted Paddington the Bear Coat, America Apparel Stockings, Frye Boots

As you might have guessed based on the incredibly clever title above (kidding) this weekend my boyfriend and I watched We Bought a Zoo. I loved all the animals (naturally) but after that I liked how often and how differently they repeated the tagline to each other: we bought a zoo. We bought a zoo! We bought a zoo? Finally it occurred to Ryan and me that the two cats and a puppy surrounding us created a personal meaning and soon it became our own tagline: "We bought a zoo..." It was oddly satisfying (and strangely hilarious, but okay, maybe you had to be there.)  We both liked the movie although it lost us both towards the end...I shouldn't say why and ruin it. Or how about this: I'll say why inside the parentheses coming up-- i.e. BIG SPOILER ALERT. (There was no romance between the two big stars in the film and that was refreshing and then suddenly there were two romances and they were both not very believable and had nothing to do with zoos or family and were meh and kinda ruined the movie but not entirely. I did like its exploration of overcoming loss through a radical lifestyle change. A solid "B" movie.)

Besides our weekend movie-watching ritual, the other ritual observed this weekend was the Great Spring Clean. It went all right so far as the dusting and polishing go, but we ran into a hitch when Ryan tried to convince me spring cleaning also meant throwing out or donating more of my vintage and thrift store collection, which comprises not only clothes and shoes but hundreds of books as well. I nearly did it, but then I saw the Paddington bear coat I'm wearing in the pictures above on the Sartorialist and couldn't part with it...

And then with one thing and another excuses were found; the collection goes on. It also occured to me (much to poor Ryan's chagrin) I haven't been thrifting in ages..well in more than a month! I'll have to try to make time for the sake of my subconscious's health. I actually dreamt about thrift-store shopping the other night. Going through the racks I found this beautiful long skirt with a matching Victorian blouse. Only another girl purchased it before I could! It was both a wonderful dream and a terrible nightmare. Ha. Sad but true. I think that's the kind of post people would enjoy, too: "Where to find the best old stuff crazy rich people in Manhattan throw out... "

Well as you might have gleaned from my silly, chatty tone I'm in a remarkably good mood. There are lots of great projects on the horizon, which is a perfect reason to cheer. I'll be updating my facebook with news and pics more frequently than on here over the next few weeks. And if you could "like" me there that would be a WONDERFUL help-- especially for one of the upcoming projects that I'll be self-producing: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Isabella-David/113768065380209

I really appreciate all the support. People taking the time to read and comment and support my endeavors in any way blows me away. You are all just wonderful.

Thank you!