Hilary Swank, and counting my blessings...

I just watched The Black Dahlia, and was impressed with Hilary Swank. I remembered being impressed with her in Million Dollar Baby too. So I looked her up and found this quote from her:

"You need to study and work on your craft. If you're not prepared when that dream audition comes, you are not going to get that opportunity. To me, the definition of success is when opportunity meets preparation. So I really recommend that actors always work on their craft and their skills. Obviously you can't make a living doing that, but you can get a lot of joy from it and learn and be inspired by the people you're working with and by your teachers and by the material. As long as you're still being inspired by it, you're going to find joy. Then hopefully the role will come along. I just want every actor to know to keep chipping away at it." - On giving advice to beginning actors.

(Now I just need to find ways to learn and be taught and work on my craft without having any money for classes... How I would LOVE to be attending regular classes and workshopping with other actors and playing around with skills.)

Anyway, it was a little moment of joy for me to watch her performance tonight in Dahlia, because I was just thinking today about my list of actors that I admire the most. The three I always think of are men (Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Alan Rickman), and I was bemoaning the lack of any female acting inspiration in my life. So there you go, now I have one. Hilary Swank.

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I realised that yesterday was Winter Solstice. Perhaps that's why I was in such a cranky mood... or perhaps that's why I got so much bad news, which put me in a cranky mood... either way, the universe is probably out to get me, don't you think?

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I said yesterday that I would count my blessings sometime... so here are some I managed to scrape up from the deepest recesses of my tired cranky brain...
* My beautiful daughters are awesome and amazing and healthy and, the most brilliant part of all, they love me (me! really! people love me!).
* My darling Noel who also loves me, and provides a roof over my head and all that good husbandly stuff.
* I'm wealthier than probably at least 95% of the world's population. I have a life and opportunities that millions of people could never dream of having.
* I have some wonderful online friends who make my days a little bit more shiny.
* The gorgeous darling J who I met recently and is one of the best friends I've ever had.

Five'll do, right? Life's okay, after all. ;-)