Thursday, Nov. 06, 2003 | 10:44 AM

I�ve had this lingering depression over the past few days and I�m overcome by a sort of infantile frustration with myself. I feel like I�m hitting a wall.

There�s an exercise where you outline what you would do if you say, won the lottery�the idea being that you have no financial constraints and can structure your life in any way that you wish. So you make an outline of what you�d do, and then you figure out how to go about doing all of it within the current parameters of your life, in some modified way, without actually winning the lottery.

So I�m going to do that exercise, and maybe that�ll give me some answers.

What I would do if I won the lottery

1) I would give my job three weeks notice that very day

2) All debts would be paid and I�d sit down with a cracker jack financial advisor that wouldn�t let me fuck up my money

3) I�d give 10% off the top away to charity, pay off all my family�s debts, etc.

4) I would probably take a good month off and just indulge the shit out of myself�you know. Partying and the like.

5) After that month I would go to this place all alone and I would get very very healthy physically and psychologically and I would stay there until I got down to a normal weight and cracked every addiction I have.

6) Upon returning to the United States in top physical condition, I would move to the East Village in New York City. I love it there so so so much. I mean, I love all of New York, but that area has always just felt like home to me. I love the bookstores and the coffee shops and the hodgepodge of different cultural influences. I feel so energized when I�m there. It may just be my favorite place I�ve ever visited, and that includes Paris.

7) At this point I am not exactly sure of how I would go about doing things, but I would start going on auditions all the time, and definitely checking out the �alternative� comedy scene (i.e. Tinkle and Stella.) I would take piano lessons and work my ass off at them and I�d start trying my hand at writing music. I might enroll in The Neighborhood Playhouse, etc.

OK�so the point of this exercise isn�t to indulge in fantasy. It�s to pinpoint what exactly is important to me, and what I need to be doing with my life.

I think it�s pretty obvious that I need to get my health worked out. I know this intrinsically, that it�s a major issue and I need to address it. I need to address it in whatever way I can. That may mean doing some things I really don�t want to do. It may mean having less fun. It may mean going to therapy. It may mean (oh christ I really don�t want to admit to this) going to some kind of support group. My weight and my addictions most definitely hold me back, and it�s been going on too long. It�s not that I can�t act and perform or anything being fat and an alcoholic, because I can. I�ve proven that. But I will never be as good as I could be unless I tackle that shit, and I will most likely never be able to quit my dayjob unless I tackle these issues. And I think I need help. I�ve tried to do it myself, but I don�t think I can since obviously I haven�t been able to control these problems in the past.

In a similar vein, my financial picture needs to be squeegeed clean and that�s something I�m in the process of doing and have been in the process of doing for awhile. I feel pretty good about where I am with that and the decisions I�ve made over the past six months as well as the steps I�m taking now. So it�s just a matter of staying on course there.

Obviously this is all tied up together, but I know that in order to do what I need to do creatively I�m eventually going to need to not be working here. I�m going to need to be somewhere with more flexibility and that isn�t going to allow me to be �safe�. I�m going to need to take the kind of job people who are trying to �make it� in a creative field work at�i.e. waitressing or the like. I am very thankful for this job, for everything it has done for me and I�m not in any way sorry to have worked here, but it�s got to end in the somewhat near future.

Until then however, I need to stop fucking around and take advantage of the discipline this job inherently offers me. This is a great place to be while I get shit together, and if I can teach myself to be more frugal, I can start socking money away. This job is giving me structure and instead of resenting it, I should build on it. I think that after all the shit went down last year and I realized how stifled I�d been and how repressed, I just went crazy with the sex and the drugs and the booze and the being a hellion. I mean I literally went fucking wild. And I needed to. But now that in and of itself is boring and outmoded.

And obviously I need to get out of Boston at some point in the relatively near future as well. This place is a fucking dead end or me long term. It would be good for me to be in a different space.