Time Flies When You're Being Evicted

Goodness. It's been two months since I spoke a word here at all. I have indeed been pushed out of two places to live in the meantime, so if anyone was wondering where I've been, I've been itinerant.

Today I'm sitting in a ghost world.

I work with a law firm - I fill in for secretaries when they aren't here, among other tasks. I dislike it, and I dislike the firm more and more as time passes. When first started here, I was full-time, and I worked for two lawyers, mainly, with some extra tasks thrown in by other people. One of them was the reason I was hired here. I temped for Ric for two days in December of 2001, and as I hadn't done much legal work, I kept my mouth shut and tried to follow his corrections. He was an graying, bespectacled man given to wearing bow ties and his fedora, and his bookcases were full of Best Short Story collections or philosophy books or new fiction like The Life of Pi. Not law books. I thought he was very business-like and serious but couldn't help making a sidelong comment about the case we were drafting documents for - two brothers in an all-out fight for control of the family company. Ric was at the marble counter by this desk, and he stopped for a second and looked at me, with an impish grin, and said, "Oh, yes, the furniture is FLYING."

And eventually, months later, he talked me into coming to work for him, which I never did like, not even a little. But he turned out to be a very interesting guy - well-read and interested in people, and taking all of life with that wry sense of humor that a man who wears bow-ties must have. I quit a years or so into it, but needed the money enough to keep working at the firm on a part-time, flexible basis.

I never missed his frantic pace or his incessant waste of paper or his occasional stress blowups, but I missed chatting with him day to day, and he always had a sly smile and a joke for me when we crossed paths in the office. He was one of the few lawyers who was truly good to his secretary on a daily basis, even if he rarely put much effort into secretaries day or Christmas. He spent time on pro bono cases, did favors for friends, threw a surprise birthday party for his wife, doted on his only son. He had a sense of humor, and a feeling that the world was much much bigger than his law office. He did not compromise who he was but he was willing to learn and grow and experience something new.

A year ago, he died of a heart attack, quite suddenly, while on vacation with his family. He was 57, I think. His son was 21. The partners of the firm called us into the conference room and told us what they knew, and a week later we all went to the visitation and funeral. He'd been cremated and his signet ring and glasses were on the table behind his wife. I told her I used to work for Ric and she immediately exclaimed, "Oh, you're the actress!" The idea that he'd gone home and told his wife about the secretary who was really an actress was touching.

I find it much harder to work here without him. But today, of all days, I'm back at my "old" desk, which is right outside his old office. His elegant, tasteful furniture is gone, and the room is piled with extra files and chairs and cabinets that the office doesn't have any other place for, but from here I can only see the edge of the door, like always. I want him to be in that office, and come out with yet another draft for me. No, I don't, not really. Because I don't like working here and if I were to wish him alive, I'd give him the option of retiring. But I do wish that he could be here on earth somewhere, so that when I spy a fedora or a bow tie, it might be him after all.

Strange to see your story end

I rode the el train last night from Harlem to the city sitting in the front seat looking through the window. It was beautiful - dark patches of unpopulated streets intermittently punctuated with sparkly Christmas frippery. I used to ride the front seat of the top layer of the London buses in the same way - walkman plugged in, unwinding a soundtrack of love and loss and all the while, riding the sound, riding the streets, I was high above it, myself and everyman. London is doing away with doubledecker buses, so I won't be able to do that again.

But last night I was blissfully alone. The Green Line out to the west is nearly a straight line, and using it to inch closer and closer to the city you can feel the activity of the Loop like a homing device, or a planet drawing you into its orbit.

I love that the tracks are elevated. It lends a superiority to mass transit, that as you wait, you stand above the milling, confused commuters in cars. It's far better than being plunged deep in the earth for having the temerity to use public transportation.

Now if it weren't so dishearteningly cold, it might have been a perfect evening.

Polygraph

I ran out of things to read on the train the other night, and the only thing I had instead was a journal. (Those of you who know it can insert the Oscar Wilde quote for themselves - it's Make Your Own Allusion Day here at t&t) I keep an exceedingly fitful journal, sometimes months or even years pass with nothing making it onto a page.

The bit I read the other night started in April of 2004, and so much has shifted since then. But here's the strange thing - it's like opening a series of Russian dolls, as I move farther along, I discover the things that I seek, and yet the real need is just beyond that discovery. Or maybe it's more like Super Mario Bros. - when you master a level, there's a new level just beyond that, with completely new quirks and secrets and skills to gain.

In keeping with the simile, I have jumped up to a new level, and there is hardly time to celebrate without realizing that this level has a brand new set of issues and goals. It's exciting, though, because in making discernible progress, I suddenly feel all goals are achievable with time.

What makes me Miss Pollyanna all of a sudden? In the midst of realizing I don't want an acting career at the expense of having a family I care about (and I use the definition of family loosely - pets, boyfriends, friends, stray relatives, etc.), I booked my first national voice over commercial and was asked to be in a show in the fall without an audition, strictly on the merit of my recent performance. I feel...and I hesitate to call it this, because pride goeth before a fall...I feel...successful. It's euphoric.

Success is in the eye of the beholder, and I have a lot farther to go, but this is still a big step forward for me. I'd love to make more of my money from commercial work. You have to start somewhere and I have finally started.

That's how I described it yesterday. I can start living the next part of my life, the part where I am doing more of what I want and less of what I don't want.

Acting is a strange business, and there is no job security, so I may book this and then go straight back to obscurity - that's possible. But I feel the power of what I can do, and I believe I have enough work ethic to get more work. I'm not sure I'll ever win a Tony but I hope to be a dependable actor, a journeyman.

So I read my journal from April 2004. A lot of the things I longed for then are now part of my life. Time to set up a whole new set of goals. And this time, I know achieving them is a matter of time, not talent.

Surge

I'm broke. My quasi-regular job has just assigned me the equivalent of those impossible tasks you read about in fairy tales - collect the feathers of a thousand birds, or find the one silver straw among millions of, well, straw-coloured ones. I need to make friends with mice, or rabbits, or some other helpful work source. Although with this task, I need mice and rabbits that READ.
I am tempted to up and quit today. I am suspicious that this task has been created to make me do that. But, see above, I'm broke. So, I must begin the task. Maybe after lunch.

I am less broke than this morning, however, in that I now have money to pay my rent and other bills that are coming due right now. This morning, I had $58. Total.

Part of the broke-ness is waiting for money that has not yet arrived. Part is a committment I made to put money in responsible places for a while (like, say, an IRA, or towards a debt I have).

I do feel fairly sunny and positive, however, and I think that's because being broke is not the drain being in debt is. Being broke is a bummer. It keeps you from doing things. You cook your own meals from things you have had frozen for months. But being in debt can make you lose sleep, or your hair (which, frankly, you can't afford, I've seen your pillow of a morning), or your ability to think about anything other than the debt.

So, I'm happily broke. It could be worse.

Ten Women. Two Days. Toffee.

I managed to have an adventure a few weeks ago. I did a two day industrial shoot for a product that shall remain nameless. The shoot was set up in a single family home - the family was away in Africa on vacation, we were told, and although they left behind the furniture and most of the furnishings, there was very little clutter, which made it seem like a model home and which led me to suspect some of their personal belongings had been moved off site while a film crew invaded their home. The shoot was set up like a gathering at someone's home, with a total of ten women involved.

Now, I could detail the shoot, and how much waiting around there was, and how the catered lunches were wonderful and how it was a really fun experience to be paid for being an actor, put up in a hotel room and given per diem and things like that. I could talk about that, but what was really fascinating was the people! However, I may have crippled my ability to do so, because the first day involved a massive, massive error on my part:

Ten women are wandering through the upstairs, lounging on the beds, examining the furniture, and generally making small talk to move the day along. (This could be the beginning of a fabulous murder mystery.) One of these women has her laptop out, which leads to a desultory discussion of blogs and websites (we range from "I update my blog everyday" to "I never could see the point of having an email address until very recently....computers are greek to me"), and I say, "I have a blog, but it's not a big deal. I think maybe three people read it."

"What's the address?" she asks, perky and interested.

And I told her. As well as a couple of other people who were in the room and who asked later.

Now, that's not a huge problem. But for the most part, I have been content with my small virtual space where I could say what I wanted and no one would be looking. I'm not so obnoxious as to imagine any of those women are checking this page regularly, but the very idea that they COULD, that they might stumble back upon it, leads me to an unhappy conclusion.

I can't write down exactly what I thought about it all. Because it's work, and I could run into these people again, and it's unwise to bite the hand that feeds. Not that I have much to say in the negative column, but I can't even make fun of them! It would be rude!

So I've been stymied as to how to talk about my adventure, because I have to come up with a edited way of approaching it.

I'm beginning to see why so many people turn to fiction.

Maybe it was good I wasn't there

My Love Biscuit was away for a wedding this past weekend, which time away I enjoyed, though I wish I could have been at this wedding, as it sounds amazing. (Crepe station at the reception, anyone?)

His friend who got married was the last of his high school friends to marry, and at they are all in their late 30's now, he got a lot of prodding about when HIS wedding would be. He's the only single one left, you see.

Now, to be fair, he is hepped up on the idea of marriage. I am the one standing in the way. My friend Michael suggested I have a t-shirt made that would say "I'm the Problem" to wear to events like this. True, true.

Anyway, I have been completely ruined by a photo taken of us at another wedding this summer. One look at the photo (above) and the whole group of his friends nodded their heads, as if one person, and said, oh, yeah, let us know when your wedding is.

Damn photo. If we didn't look so bleedin' happy....

Forward but not upward

I have a headache. Because I've been eating tons of chocolate. Otherwise...
Overall, I'm grumpy. I would like to be working as an actor, or if not, something to do with acting. I am still working, currently 4 days a week, in an office. I am working a lot in an attempt to hack away at a long outstanding debt and to throw money into an IRA, but there is nothing challenging to do here. Yet I can't leave, because who else would let me write my own schedule?

Part II: This week, being here pays off, because I booked my first ever industrial two day shoot and I was able to say, hey, I'm not coming in for 2 days next week. I won't make a ton of money, but it should be worth doing, and it will be a New Experience. I need one desperately.

I guess progress is being made, but it feels sooooo sloooooow. I don't need "drama" in the classic sense, but I do need challenge, and that has been in precious short supply. Watching "Joe versus the Volcano" the other night, I noticed that line about how most of the people in the world are asleep. I've been feeling like that. I mean, this has been my workplace for THREE YEARS. But again, it allows me the money and freedom to GO on auditions and yet still get paid. Right now I have the freedom to work 4 days a week because I have a show on Friday. It's incredibly flexible, and I won't get that anywhere else.

Except for the fact that I dislike it intensely, it's a great job.

Romantically, everything is healthy and happy and fine. My (what do I call him? Sweetheart? Love? Smootchie face?) paramour and I talk about getting married and I just don't know. He's super fun to date, he'd be a great person to go through life with, but I can't see into the future. How long will my life be like this? Will it change into something more artistic? We're both poor - how could we ever have children? Heck - we're both poor, how could we ever have INSURANCE?

The more I analyze the kinds of worries and problems I'm having (and it's me, so clearly I do this often), the more I notice a pattern - the "rest of life" looms, and I don't feel equipped to move into it. I haven't made money, I haven't established myself in my chosen profession, I haven't married into a place in life. How do I get older without achieving anything visible? Or rather, how can I be content to age without seeming to move forward?

Outside of it all

On the train, after a stressful situation was competently handled, I relax reading Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries. It's lovely - irascible and unapologetic, Gray simply writes down whatever he needs to. He has turned 64 and seen his friend Ian Hamilton die. Within the first twenty pages, Gray has dinner with Harold Pinter and his wife Antonia (Fraser, the writer and biographer), and Pinter announces he has cancer.

I don't adore Gray's plays - I saw the critically trounced Cell Mates in London on its debut, Valentine's Day, 1995 (or 94?), and remember being seriously underwhelmed, even before the reviews did their dirty work. But this book, in which he putters along, speaking of his famous writer friends and looking kindly but honestly back at his youth and wishing he'd studied Anglo-Saxon more thoroughly so he'd know more about the origin of the word shiffen, this book soothes me. I think it eases some fret in me that he is an intellectual and feels no need to apologize for that. That he can argue about Auden not being a good poet without anyone taking him to task for his elitism. It is a world I miss, and yearn for, and, truth be told, am not really smart enough to belong in. I like Auden, and know barely any Latin, much less Anglo-Saxon.

The book eases my malaise so much that when a man sits next to me in the train, I have enough room in my brain to notice the wonderful smell of his coffee - clearly a flavoured roast, hazelnut, perhaps, or almond. He's studying a book about foundations, the page neatly blocked in diagrams.

The otherness of a life spent studying foundations further soothes me, like a french window into a new idea sliding open to allow a breeze.

I wish I could go to college again. Now I'm ravenous for knowledge, now I care less for the grades and more for the sheer knowing grace of grappling with the new idea. I'm still more at home arguing plays and poetry than philosophy, but I'm like to branch out into anthropology, biology again, maybe buckle down at a language. Who am I kidding? Languages are my stumbling block, and ever will be. C'est la vie. I'll bet - I'll hope I'm spelling that wrong and proving my point.

I love reading. I feel very sorry for people who don't or can't read, because I feel I have entry into whole worlds they deny themselves or are denied. I'm extroverted in company when the occasion allows, but some child in me longs always for a quiet space and a book to ride into the wind. When I read I become engrossed, so that conversation directed at me has to penetrate a thick haze ("I'm sorry, what?"), and any interruption aggravates, even sleep. Last night I made up my mind, after losing yet another whole night's sleep to a book, that if I ever have children, I will enforce lights out with an iron hand - all flashlights will be confiscated! As a child I found any loophole I could to keep reading whatever was at hand, thus beginning a habit that keeps me sleepy by day. Like all parents trying to root out the parts of themselves they dislike, my plan is doomed to failure, I should think.

In closing, I have the impulse to apologize for the last-post-but-one. I catalog the impulse, but I do not apologize. In the calm of another day, my rightness (or wrongness) is not as important as my shock that so few people even try to get things right - not intrinsically right, per se, but at least as right as they can. I deplore the thought that a person's objection to my personality could obscure the possibilities of my ideas (i.e., your smartness threatens me, therefore I will dismiss you as being too intellectual), but my own tantrum at not being respected reflects the same kind of thinking. I must decide I have something I want to say and say it, then whether or not people listen is external, and secondary.

And I still think I'm right

I'm frustrated. A friend of mine wrote a play, and I'm involved in a reading of about ten pages, and last night we had a rehearsal. I have very strong views about this play, though I have a sneaking feeling I have no objectivity left in this friendship, and thus my views are suspect.

I've read most of my friend's plays, and I think he's a good writer, but I've known him about five years now, and I have formed ideas about what he's trying to say, as many of his plays have similar themes and characters. (That's not a criticism - so does Chekhov, so does Tennessee Williams, so do many great writers.) I admit to feeling a little on the inside of his work, as if I know more about it than an outsider. This, I have realized, may or may not be true.

I went to the rehearsal with very clear comments and criticisms, and first, found there was no forum to air these, as my role had gone from "well-informed friend" to "reader of scene controlled by director", and second, found that the problems I had with the play were not universal, as several other actors disagreed with my views.

I'm shocked that not everyone shares my aesthetic for clarity. And I'm shocked that because I want clarity, there's an inference that I think I'm smarter than the rest of the group. This infuriates me, because I then waste time trying to play low status to make my point in a non-threatening manner, a ploy that probably doesn't work. I am thrown back to a college professor who graded a play journal of mine and wrote the comment: "It makes me sad to see someone so young have such strong opinions."

This comment and others like it have shut me up and haunted me for years. I have been told over and over again than no one wants to hear what I think, and certainly no one wants me to talk about myself. And I have accepted this as true, because it is. Even this blog is an effort, because I can't imagine what I might have to say that someone would find enlightening.

I am angry. Enough. When do I get the right to speak? When am I old enough to have opinions? Is there a day when I get to stop apologizing for having some thing to say and people will just listen to me say it?

Yes, maybe it's me. Maybe if I could train my ear not to be upset by this kind of comment, perhaps I would command the kind of respect I'm looking for. But the lesson has been hammered in for too long by too many to just shrug off.

The title of this post does not refer to the fact that I think my comments are unarguable, inherent. But if I say, this is unclear, I didn't know what this meant, don't fob me off with, well, people speak unclearly. Of course they do. But if you're trying to tell a story in a scant two hours, you need to chose every piece of information that goes into that story. If you PLAN to confuse, fine, that's a choice, but don't pretend your laziness makes you more authentic.

Someday, I will bear down on some script like an angel of the apocalypse and there will be no mercy. Of course, in a just world, that script would be mine, but as we've established, no one is interested in what I have to say.

An adventure

I'd like one, please. An adventure. 'Sfunny, I spend about eight hours every weekend playing out someone else's adventure, and yet I'm surprised as how much I want my own. I've always threaded the line between the responsible and the devil-may-care, but I've been trying to feed more money, time and energy into responsibility lately. I'm sure it's very grown up and forward thinking, but I'm feeling very trapped. Ugh. I feel an escape coming on.

To be fair, I don't want to escape acting. I like acting. I like the commercial auditions and gigs as much as the high-toned theatre acting. It is an adventure, and it changes all the time. It's just that currently, I spend a lot of time in the office to give me the opportunity to eat as well as audition. And I'd like to escape the office. It seems ironic that so many "creative" people have to pay for the chance to be creative with truly mind-numbing days. I suppose there's a nobility to earning your right to success, but I feel like I've been slogging away for four years - I'd like some success now, if you don't mind. Sadly, my life has never been run on my time line.

So in the meantime, I'm secretly planning an adventure. Hmmm.....it should involve derring-do and disguises. Also the judicious use of code words, and probably some interpretive dance. I'll report back with the mission is completed.

Insaniquarium

So I've been playing this game online called Insaniquarium, a complete waste of time when I should be putting mailings together to casting directors enjoining them to come see my show. Oh, the reviews, the ones I was worried about - the Tribune put it in the paper Monday, the Sun-Times on Tuesday, and the newest Time Out Chicago brought out an issue on Wednesday with a blurb. All were positive, all enjoyed the show, all feel the show is a massive fun romp with no substance. (Well, it is.) All three reviewers compare me to Emma Thompson.

This is flattering, certainly, if somewhat unnerving. Do these reviewers hang out in the reviewer bar afterwards? Do they phone each other before they publish? Did one of them watch the show while the other two slept, and so were forced to copy each other's notes?

The only problem with being compared to Emma Thompson is the shocking number of people who have no idea who she is. I'm sure that an overwhelming majority don't know who Edith Evans was, or Ralph Richardson or Gielgud, but Emma Thompson? I mean, even if you didn't see it, surely you'd be aware of Sense and Sensibility from 1997? Or have seen the Harry Potter movies, at least, that's just last year. It's not like she's an obscure British stage actress, like Victoria Hamilton or Joanna Riding (I can't stand the former, and adore the latter).

There is just one more problem. My character is described as insouciant, and I do know what it means, but apparently no one else does. So they all make little "insouciant" jokes throughout the day. YAAWWNNN.

So I should be putting mini press packets together and mailing them to Important People to tell them to come see the show. But instead I'm mildly obsessed with this odd game. You have to feed the fish regularly or they turn yellow, and eventually die. Sometimes the tank is teeming with fish, turning odd colours and requiring you feed them immediately.

Last night there was some bad news - a stroke in the family, not my family, but my sweetheart's. And I feel powerless, and guilty to be doing so well, and I have nothing to say but "I love you," over and over again, and that doesn't seem like enough right now. And I held this person and tried to sleep, and in the back of my head behind my closed eyes, animated fish swam. They rose in my dream state, turning green and yellow and orange again, shifting colours incessantly, wave upon wave of fish rolling around my mind.

I guess I'm lucky I haven't been playing Grand Theft Auto.

Pop Music

The air has that leaves-brittle-and-bright-as-confetti feel, and I want to go driving with pop music playing and the windows down. "I'm not strong, and you'll find out, how the girls love rock and roll..." I wanna warble. I want to be on the way to a high school football game, and be sitting on the winning side. I'd like to wear a scarf but no coat, and corduroy trousers. I'd probably look a little like a Sears ad.

What is it about pop music? Well-crafted pop music is like a tapeworm: it sneaks into your brain and devours you. You can't help being manipulated by it, and you like it, although you feel guilty. Once it takes over a moment, it's like a watermark, you can't hear the song without triggering the memory, and you never have the memory without thinking of the song.

Some pop songs end up being tenaciously enduring, but you can't predict that beforehand. Some are amazing songs but become dated, while others have some timeless groove, so the song sounds as if it were just released. Personally, I think one of the most perfect pop songs of all time is "You Can't Always Get What You Want." I think that's a hard song to hear without wanting to do a huge head-bopping dance that will encompass bystanders and perhaps even nearby dogs before you're done. It is hard to be completely unhappy after hearing that song.

Anyone else? Got a timeless wonder? Whotcha fancy?

Autumn

The weather is perfect. I love being able to put a jacket on, and extra covers on my bed. For some reason, autumn always seems so cozy. It would be nice to jettison my wretched day job and begin a round-the-world journey (funded, of course, by a grant that would allow me to live without worrying about money), but even without such a plan, autumn holds that kind of adventure and promise.

Who knows, maybe it will come to that. I'm opening a show on Friday, and for once, I'm actually in it enough that my performance will be reviewed with the show. There's no squeaking by without a mention now, no peripheral character. I'm glad, of course, but it's overwhelming. I'm not used to getting what I want. I love this play. I love being in it, I love the people, I enjoy spinning out the scenes and building up the story bit by bit. I adore getting a laugh, I do internal dances of joy when we get to the happy ending (complete with a big romantic kiss - yay!), I even relish the bits where I get beaten up. I also love fainting and being carried up the stairs. The show is a great big swashbuckling romp of a delight, and no matter what the reviews say, I will enjoy it.

But I feel exposed. As a perfectionist, I don't like criticism, as I will obsess and worry about all the things I got "wrong". The possibility exists that the reviewers might not enjoy it, and no matter how grown up and mature I am about that, I will be disappointed. I want to spend my life working as an actress - it's a nightmare to think reviewers will tell me I should scurry back to my day job.

Logically, the reviews won't matter. I love the show - I'll still love the show, no matter what gets said. And I doubt I can stop acting for long, no matter how discouraging a review may or may not be.

But isn't it about time I'm forced to accustom myself to getting what I want?

A True Story

My grandmother and I are negotiating the kitchen of her snug farmhouse in the middle of South Carolina peach farming country. She is nearly ninety, her white hair set off with a bright blue outfit, and she is very pleased with herself, because despite the fact that she recently had a hip replaced and should not be doing any more than absolutely necessary, despite the fact that I made it absolutely clear that I wanted to take her out to lunch, she has foiled this plan by having lunch already prepared. It's the South - you haven't visited unless you've been fed. In addition, she is meeting my boyfriend, and because we live in Chicago, she is determined to give him a "real taste of the South". Of course, he grew up for the most part in Pensacola, Florida, so he's tasted the South before. (When she discovers the Florida connection, she exclaims, with a big smile and note of relief, "Why, you're not a Yankee at all!!" Sigh.)

Grandma hobbles and I bustle. She has at least cheated the meal by buying most of it at a barbecue place, but she has made two gleaming, golden pecan pies with her own hands. We are in the midst of reheating barbecue and slicing tomatoes when there is a knock at the door.

"Good afternoon, ma'am. Maurice said I should come by about noon, twelve thirty for my gun." The older gentleman wears a hunting cap and a shirt with a nametag, "ROY". My uncle Maurice repairs and makes guns, and Roy has had some emergency work done on his gun so that he can go dove hunting this afternoon. The season starts today. I don't know what Roy does with his days, but his skin is reddish from being outside often. His deference to my grandmother seems genuine. Does it stem from shyness or respect? No matter which, it pleases her.

"He's not back yet, but he told me you'd be by, he should be here shortly. Roy, son, would you like a slice of pecan pie?"

"Oh, no, ma'am, I don't have no bottom teeth." He smiles just widely enough as if to be showing his gummy lack of tooth, but you can't see much. "I'll just go out and pick you folks some peaches."

In about fifteen minutes, he is back with two enormous shopping bags of peaches - the bags are full, and the peaches themselves are massive. By the time he returns, Maurice has brought Roy's gun home and everyone wanders off happy. My mother and I are sent home with one of the two bags of peaches to divide between us.

We haul softball-sized peaches on and off of planes and buses and finally into my apartment. All this hauling seems like trouble until the gluttony of peaches begins. Every time I eat one, I think of Roy, and how proud and ashamed and glad I am to be from the South.

And for the record, the pecan pie was amazing.

And I am

listening to Kanye West, and feeling hip and urban. (I am, actually, very hip, and urban.)

It leaves me fretful, though. I dislike such a liberal use of the n-word, but issues of race are touchy. I do (illogically) feel some burden of guilt for the evil of slavery, as a Southerner. If the inequality the system of slavery introduced into the New World had been eradicated, maybe I could separate myself entirely from what is in the past. It isn't.

And I find myself really intrigued by African-American culture, and yet I think to participate in the culture would make me the target for scorn, suspicion, and hosility. I don't think I'm allowed to have opinions about that culture. I grant you, my exposure is on the sidelines - I'm addicted to watching "Girlfriends", I'm listening to Kanye West, I think Taye Diggs is hot. (Well, he is.)

I guess really every individual is different, and the truth is I'd like to know a few who are very different from me. But human nature being what it is, befriending the different remains a threat for both sides.

Peace out, brutha.

City Girl

I went to get my hair cut yesterday for free at a shi-shi salon. Exposed brick, funky decor, and a gaggle of stylists wearing flip flops and sunglasses and anything that would generally make them look as if they had walked out of a fashion magazine. And of course, every one of them had feisty, layered, stylin' hair. The girl cutting my hair was a petite, dark-haired beauty sporting incredibly shiny lip gloss and slightly preoccupied by her upcoming move to Lincoln Park - she's moving in with a friend she grew up with in the suburbs.

I grant you, having your hair wet down and plastered to your head while someone cuts it is rarely a good look for anyone, but I started to feel a little insecure, surrounded by these uber fashionable girls wearing the latest tube tops and gossiping about movie stars and Eva Longoria. I hate wearing flip flops. I've got too much chest to keep a tube top in place. Lip gloss is wasted on me as it inevitably ends up all over everything but my lips (my hair, my fingernails, papers I handle...). I have, in barber's chairs, a large neck. It distracts me. Also, a wide face. Somehow, outside of the salon, things blend and never bother me, but when I'm having my hair cut I worry about my tremendously wide neck and face. Bye, bye, Hollywood, you wouldn't be able to use this sagging flesh. I have lines on my forehead nowadays, too, which I suppose is normal for someone who is 31, but those lines are still a shock, every time I see them.

The two stylists I can see very clearly in the mirror behind me (who have been gossiping about their drunken night on the town) have clearly come in early so that one can dye the other's hair. The application of the dye looks truly complicated, all these small sections wrapped intricately in tin foil, and then more dye applied to the straggling hair that escaped the sectioning. And wait - I suddenly notice that the woman whose hair is plastered against her head with dye looks dreadful - that indeed, she appears to have a very large neck.

It occurs to me that I am in Chicago. Probably most of these women are from the suburbs, and have moved into the city in a desperate attempt to wash that Middle America right out of their hair. I'm making a big generalization, but I'm guessing not all of them went to college, that they've never lived anywhere except Aurora before moving to Wrigleyville. They HAVE to dress like this, and have their hair cut wildly and use lots of styling products, they have to use glamour to remove themselves from the average, colourless existence they left behind.

I'm originally a small town girl myself, I admit it, but I've lived in a series of difference places of varying size, and Chicago isn't the largest. I am, at this point, a City Girl. No matter what I wear. Or how my hair is styled. I don't have to work at it.

Although, with a little product and a blow dryer, I have to tell you, it looks FABULOUS. I might start wearing eyeshadow. If the next issue of Cosmopolitan tells me it's still cool.

Don't skip TIWRBD

I almost hate to write something more current than Things I Would Rather Be Doing, as I don't think I get a lot of traffic here and what there is tends to read to the top, but it struck me that one of my least favorite things is to be frantically busy, and then get morose emails from people saying:

"It seems like we never see each other anymore."

Things I would rather be doing

It's true, when I work in an office I am making money, and that money allows me to do things. Barring that benefit, it seems like a spectacular waste of time. And mostly, it's because I have created an environment where I don't have to work that hard, even though I'm a person who thrives on challenge. However, I don't want to waste my energy being challenged to make copies or some such nonsense. Hmmmm. A quandry and no mistake.

One of my co-workers has been with this office for thirty-one years. Maybe it's thirty-two. This boggles my mind. Oh, yes, I know everyone is made differently and just because I hate it doesn't mean it isn't ideal for someone else. But this person doesn't seem in any way happy to be here. How can you stay somewhere for 32 years without planning an escape??

Me, I'd rather be:

Sailing down the Ganges.
Hiking in the Andes.
Riding a camel in the Sahara.
Scouring the whaling museum in Nantucket.

I'd rather be on a train taking me to a place I've never been before.
I'd rather be talking to someone who is an expert in some particularly fascinating field: psychology, foreign relations.
I'd rather be watching Open University, or Call My Bluff.
I'd rather be trekking across open fields armed with a very good map, a bottle of water, a sandwich and perhaps some gingerbread.
I'd rather be creating some kind of whimsical and bizarre plan with Tee, something involving disguises and word play and giggling.
I'd rather be cooking something, maybe fresh fish with white wine and lemon, or a pasta salad with herbs I cut out of the front garden.
I'd rather be talking to Anna and Maeve.
I'd rather be cleaning my apartment, a really deep-down clean that smells citrus-y and makes me feel I can control at least the dirt.

And with that, I have given myself a reasonable goal. I have the day off Friday, I shall try to clean. With loud music playing. Singing at the top of my lungs. And mayhap I will make pasta salad for lunch.

That's better.

A Mystery

Why is it that my family can painstaking slather sunscreen on ourselves and yet inexplicably end up with subburn patches? Stray sections of skin that escape the sunblock and get beaten by the sun instead. After a week of lying on a beach every day, I ended up with strange red markings on my knees, a small patch of red near the elbow on my right arm, and a few stray wisps of burn where suit meets skin.

Once, my brother couldn't find anyone to put sunscreen on his back, and just slapped his own hand across it, only to find the next day that his back was entirely red, save for one white handprint.

I never notice such extra tan sections on other people. Maybe it is genetic.

Interruptions

Don't tell anyone I work for, but I'm dreadful at multi-tasking. One-track mind, that's me. Can I accomplish many things at once? Yes. But not if you keep (that was one right there, someone had a question) interrupting me.

I really hate being interrupted. Watch, it will happen again before I even finish typing this sentence. . . ok, that time I got away without one, but (oh, there we go - had to send someone a fax) it won't last (and, as you note, didn't).

On the up side, today a school kid who came to see my children's show liked the show and gave me a purple rubber bracelet that says "Heluhelu" on it. What does that mean, I asked this very sweet girl. "I dunno," she said, with the classic kid I'm-not-supposed-to-know shrug, and then her friend flashed a sneaky little smile and said, "But it means you need to read eight books over the summer." Done. I was tricked into it but I'll make that commitment. I wonder if I can manage it without trying or whether it will take a little effort.

Bring it On

Ok, people, I'm ready. I can handle it. I will even welcome it. Go ahead and . . . post a comment. When I started this shindig, I was doing it much like a bad yet enthusiastic dancer risks a few tentative shimmies in a dark corner of a crowded floor. I thought, I'll write myself a few snippets and hope no one ever goes looking for them.

But I find I like the comments. (Thanks to the two of you - I know who you are.) So, if you are one of the handful of people who ever take a look at this page, I invite you to join the fun. I will even challenge you to a) come up with your own Missed Connections ad, b) Offer your own personal rant subject, or c) write a haiku praising your favorite food. I had a co-worker who had a sideline in Spam haiku, see if you can top that.

Try it, people! Hey, I could ask you for money, but I just want your thoughts. So much cheaper.

(Also, it's very uncool, but I still love Oasis. I can't help it. I try to stop but the backbeat gets me. Please don't tell anyone. Well, anyone else.)

I'm not addicted, I'm not

So I'm reading craigslist again...but this time I Know When To Stop! It's almost immediately, before the poor grammar or misanthropy get to me. I thought I would love the missed connections section, as that's a favorite of mine in the Reader, but no, somehow today it doesn't strike me.

I love Missed Connections. There's something so desperate, yet so hopeful, about it. I doubt anyone finds the person they are looking for, partly because I suspect most missed connections are completely forgotten by one of the parties said to be connecting. If you're as hot as the ad claims, are you combing ads to see if someone noticed you? Do you remember the geeky guy/girl that tried to catch your eye but was TOO CHICKEN to say anything?

But if you come across the Missed Connections section, there's a part of you that can't help looking for yourself, to see if you made an impression on someone.

I used to laugh at the ads that gave very little information, as if the connectee were fortune telling, keeping the edges vague to ensure the info could be interpreted multiple directions. "We were on the El, I wore a black jacket, you had on a hat. Call me." ?? But it occurred to me that many people don't even mind if they find THE person (there might not be a person), they're just looking for people, casting their fishing line out upon the waters, and missed connections is their excuse.

The most memorable one I've yet read was a study in transparent pretense. "I missed your ad a few weeks ago. You said you look like Juliet Binoche but what really interested me was that your favorite movie was North by Northwest." Riiiiiiigggghhhttt. So if she'd said she looked like Ann Widdicombe* or Janet Reno but still liked NbNW, you'd still be trying to find her?

The ones I love the best are so specific that either the writer really did see someone or they're working really hard and constructing their perfect person, either of which I can appreciate.
"We met at a party - you were wearing a purple ribbon on your belt loop, I asked you what prize you had won. I wore glasses and a shirt that said "What Would Jesus Do for a Klondike Bar?". You told me your favorite flower was daffodils; I grabbed some out of the neighbor's yard for you. We talked about Jack Russell terriers and Jane Russell, but I was distracted by the shine of your green eyes. You rushed off at midnight but lost one of your sandals. I have it. Wanta talk some more?"

You can believe in an ad like that, that indeed, a connection was made, and that maybe both people wanted more and didn't get it, and perhaps this ad will be the way that they find each other and regret will shift to elation.


* As I researched Ann Widdicombe to make sure I had spelled her name right, I see her image has improved vastly. So this seems a touch unfair. Apologies to you Widdicombe fans. The blonde hair is quite attractive.

Eventually it palls

So I made a mistake. I can admit it. I started reading Craig's List "Best of". Yes, it's fairly amusing, and yes, I'm certain reading it as opposed to reading a whole category of posts weeds out a lot of crazy rantings and poor grammar. But eventually, I came up against people who, while I support their right to be as different from myself as possible, I just wouldn't want to spend any time with.

Particularly troubling to me this afternoon are the incredibly mysogynistic men. Really, for them, women aren't individuals at all, merely variations on a stereotype that has been cobbled together from all the women who wouldn't have sex with them at the exact time and position they desired.

Now, I'm trying to be fair here. (Why bother? you ask. Because I don't want to become the thing I hate.)

I know, I should have a sense of humor about it. But I always think the gender war is largely constructed. No, I don't want to argue that men and women are exactly the same. But isn't it a huge disservice to all to assume men merely want to hit things and have sex every moment (hit things and "hit" things, I suppose) while women just want to cuddle and put on lipstick? Couldn't we all take a moment to remember that individuals exist? After all, who in their right mind actually wants a picket fence? And yet that's the symbol of the stereotypical American dream. But hardly anyone has them! (They're a bitch to paint and it's easy for kids to steal the pickets, so your fence is like a smile missing teeth.)

There are a lot of people out there who don't fit your idea of who they are, and thank goodness. How boring would it be if everyone did? So, thank you, mysogynistic man, for showing me that people can be mean, petty, lacking in self-awareness and devoid of empathy for anyone else. Because the moment I realized that, I was grateful for the kind, sexy, caring men I have encountered, one of whom I currently date, and who allows me to be whatever I wish, whether it fits into his stereotype or not.

Muster it up

Everyone plays roles in life - no matter how true to yourself you are, you still alter yourself to fit different situations, like pressing certain keys on a piano to produce certain meoldies. It's always a piano, even when a few notes are silent. And I like to think I am fairly honest about myself in the world - I keep a lot more to myself than most people would guess (given my propensity for chatter), but I maintain a consistency of self.

It wasn't until I got really tired I realized how constructed and effortful the animation of that self can be. I am tired - not sleepy, not exhausted, as my physical self is coping pretty well despite some late nights. But my psyche is road weary.

I went off to lunch with some people the other day, one of whom I have a distaste for that I endeavor to keep to myself, and on the way there I nearly cancelled. I didn't have enough energy left to be civil and social. I was going to say I was too tired to pretend I cared what people had to say but actually, they had interesting things to say, and listening helped galvanize me a bit. However, it took great effort to ask questions. I would have preferred eavesdropping to having to participate in the conversation.

So I think it's time for a break, a mental wander in the landscape, an escape.

Right after I finish pretending to be a pig for three performances. I've heard of playing your type, but after the past few children's shows, I'm beginning to worry my type is actually a motherly pig. Frightening.

A Chance to be Sally

Denise had never liked her name. She was a tall girl, mismatched in so many other ways that the ordinary disconnects in life failed to make an impression: she never noticed when the blankets on her bed didn't even cover her shoulders, or if there weren't as many buns as there were hot dogs, or if the battery in her walkman went dead a mere half hour before she'd finished her run. When you were a tall girl with a short girl's name, a brunette whose eyes really belonged on a blonde, a size 10 shirt but a size six pant, when your life was measured out wrongly from the very first day, you didn't notice petty quotidian miscalculations.

Denise hadn't known as a child that she would be too tall for her name, naturally, but even then her dark hair and some deep seriousness had marked her as, well, not a Denise. Also, from the outset she had differed unmistakably from her older brother and sister, who were close in age and temperament and gave off the clannishness of a salt and pepper shaker set. David and Julia were both blonde and cheerful, and while they didn't look alike, exactly, there was something about one that reminded you of the other. Denise was so unlike them that teachers who had taught David and Julia didn't even ask if she was related to either of them. Penny, Denise's best friend of the third, fourth and fifth grades, had three older brothers and a pale, pale complexion from sitting in their shadow. Penny was jealous of Denise's clean slate. Penny's life was like a constant mountain climb with one or another of her brothers adding to the mountain's height all the time. Compared to Penny, Denise was walking on level ground. But it was deserted ground, or if not empty, filled with incongrous images, melted Dali clocks and plinths.

When Sam first called her Sally by mistake, it resonated, absolutely, but her life had been so calico and kalidescope that she didn't recognize the pleasurable sensation for what it was. She didn't correct him, hoping he would do it again and she could dissect the feeling. It was, she realized months later, the elusive click of fit.

Please don't kill the cyclists

I bike as often as I can. I love it, and love the bike as a means of transport, especially in the city. It wouldn't be efficient for every city, but for the City of Chicago, it works really well. I just have two basic requests of the world at large, and I don't think they are that unreasonable:

1. Please don't kill the cyclists.

and

2. Do you need to ask me Every Single Day if I biked to work/rehearsal/an event? If there is a foot of snow outside, Do You Really Neeed to ask me if I rode my bike??? What's your wildest guess? If it is raining outside but my hair and clothing are obviously dry ten minutes after making it to a location, do you NEEEEEEDDDDD to ask if I rode my bike??

Now, I know what you may say - it's a joke. Here's my point: I have heard it before. And not even nce has it been amusing. If you're just looking for something to say, look for something else.

All right, now, back to Number 1. In this I am partly at fault, but I'd like to make a case for cyclists. I fear for my life on the roads, even when I do obey every single traffic law, and I feel that fear stems from the general dislike of cyclists. Motorists just don't care about helping you out. I'd like to expand that view. Sure, I appreciate that cyclists seem to get in your way - they take up some of your road, their travel patterns can be difficult to anticipate, and they occasionally cause you a few seconds delay. But people, I beg you, think of the difference in your situations. If you lose a few seconds waiting on a bike to pass by, you tap that gas pedal and you're on your way. If you cut off a cyclist, they lose momentum that they physically sweated and groaned to achieve - they had to get up that hill using their on muscles, not an inch or two of fossil fuel.

Which leads me to my argument. You're looking at this the wrong way - you're forgetting that you really WANT cyclists on the road. The more people who take to the bike to get around, the more who are NOT in their cars snarling up the road in front of you. Cyclists aren't using up precious resources, so there will be more left over for you! You should be trying to help the cyclists, make their journeys more efficient, so that they never want to get in a car again.

I'd like to appeal to your sense of fairness as well. It's raining, it's windy, it's cold out. You are huddled into your nice warm SUV with the seatwarmers cranked up. A cyclist, cold, soaked, and struggling against that wind creeps by you. Isn't it worth an extra three seconds to let that poor cyclist continue on their way? The three seconds it takes you to give them a break are, for you, warm and dry. Help them get to safety! Get out of the way!

In the end, it comes down to attitude. I rode in London for a year and the only time I got heckled or attacked was for riding my bike inside a park (which is weird to me, since it seems fine for children to ride bikes in parks). Here, people go out of their way to roll down a window and offer loud, unsolicited advice and ridicule. Let your anger for the cyclist go - embrace the cyclist. The more of us there are, the easier your commute would be.

So from the bottom of my heart I repeat my constant cycling mantra:

Please don't kill the cyclist.

Like Byron Himself....

I am lame. There is no other explanation leaping to mind - I have allowed small rodent-like aliens to infest my soul and eat it for a sugary snack. Of course my soul is sugary - excuuuse me, but I am reckoned to be a sweet person. Although I admit to a tangy sarcasm at times - so maybe my soul is more like a Swedish fish or a sweet and sour gummy thing covered in sugar. Preferably in the shape of a big pair of lips.

So why am I so lame? Because I have thoughts, I really do, I think about things and make myself laugh at my own cleverness. Wow, that's really something, I think, ha HA! Am I funny or what! I need to write that down... But when I come to write down anything at all, I stare at the screen or the page with a slack-jawed-ness that is envied by the slack jawed. Sloths feel outdone by my ability to get absolutely nothing done.

Just the other day I was having a thought, and it was amusing, honest. I thought about what a nice change it would make in terms of a weblog entry. And now that I come to make said entry, I have NO IDEA what that thought was. It's gone. Instead my head is filled with muddled verses of the song "We Go Together" from Grease. I mean, come on, the song doesn't even have many real words!?

So the only explanation is massive brain cell loss on an unusual scale. I've led a frighteningly pure life overall and I haven't done too many things that actively kill off brain cells. How did they die? It's like Flowers for Algernon here, people, I have a moment of lucidity with which to lament my oncoming brainlessness.

My vote is for alien invasion. Yeah, that's it. Give me back my brain, aliens!

Song Doors

Some songs are doors you stumble through to a different time. Sometimes the air around you lightens and shifts direction with the notes of a particular tune. And for some reason, hearing songs on the radio gives them a weight and reality that playing them on your own just can't attain.

Fairytale of New York always stills me. American radio stations don't play it around Christmas, so when the season approaches (about October 3), I spend hours online hoping to catch the Pogues and Kirsty McColl warbling away on some UK station. And whole Christmas seasons have gone by without me catching more than the last seconds of the song - I always seem to be too late. But somehow, yesterday, (for St. Patrick's Day?), the station I was tuned into began the opening chords of Fairytale of New York.

Time doubled back on itself.

It's Christmas time in London. I am mashed into a car with four or five other people, all of us dressed outlandishly for the children's pantomime we are on our way to perform. Our drama school books about a weeks worth of performances for free in the area, and though I have never even seen a pantomime before this year, I am entranced by them. I am entranced by most of this experience - a year of school where the only thing I concentrate on is being an actor, a year in which I live in Britain, where the voices make different, beautiful shapes for me, the year of the cuckoo, for I have stolen the nest of the family I live with, a year of beauty and freedom and straining ever closer to becoming something I should be.

However, I am not entranced with this car and being mashed with this group of people. They frighten me, set me on my guard. The slim clear-eyed girl whose every gesture seems to say she is both right and entitled, the short, sharp boy whose affections are like a shaft of light that has yet to fall on me, these people are part of something I am not, and in the car I am acutely aware I do not belong.

On the radio, Fairytale of New York is just beginning.

"Oh, turn that up, turn that up!" the boy is fluttering, and his northern accent inverts the u sounds so that they are eggs and not cups. "This is the best Christmas song ever. It's not smarmy or sentimental at all, that's what makes it so great!" And off the song goes, into the drunk tank with a disappointed couple who listen to the NYPD choir singing Galway Bay, while the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.

And he is right, it is a wonderfully joyful song while being true, and sad and honest, and it is Christmas in a way that Away in a Manger can never be. (The Baby Jesus, no crying he makes? Sure, right....) As I recognize his rightness, a small window opens somewhere in my belonging. I am less isolated, liking this song with its status as an undisputed Christmas classic.

It takes much longer than a ride in the car, but my affection for the same people who previously intimidated me grows, and though I never become a native, a different set of walls opens up and I become part of something else there. And time passes, and though it is too romantic to say I love the song Fairytale of New York as my point of entry into another world, the song itself continues to strike me like a gong. And every time I hear it, I am in that car, and happy, and on my way to make very young children laugh with glee.

Makeover

I got my shoes polished the other day. "Shined" isn't demonstrative enough to describe how beautifully they were cared for, or how much I enjoyed the experience. My shoes themselves, about two years old, have never been shined before, and were looking much the worse for two years of wear. A sturdy, Swedish design, the black leather was worn through at the toes to a dull grey. They looked pitiful, I confess.

I had cash in my pocket, a lunch hour to squander, and the knowledge that in the bowels of this very office building there is a shoeshine setup, a little room, glass-lined on two walls, tv set mounted high in the corner. The two guys shining shoes were a study in contrasts, one an expansive, expanded chatter, the other a quieter, more focused gentleman. They were of that cheerfully intelligent class of people to which builders and house painters belong. I did want to offer them a cup of tea with three sugars, but since they were African-Americans, a Coke might have been more appropriate. Same gesture, different cultures. As I left, they gazed, spell-bound, at the television screen on which an attractive African-American female newscaster was shuffling papers.

"Man, she looks good."

"She's had a makeover, ain't she?"

"Whatever she did, she's looking mighty fine."

But all this distracts me from my point: it was fabulous. A day at the spa, practically. It felt like a massage to the feet, happily once removed due to the leather. (I've ticklish feet. Please do not use this knowledge for evil.) I was sitting high up and my knees blocked my view, so I could concentrate on the easy pressure of polish being applied, brushes shuffling back and forth, soft cloths buffing. It felt fantastic - that tingling feeling in the scalp was rustling around my head. I might have started drooling.

Best of all, when the gentleman (the studious one) was finished, and I moved my knees out of the way, my shoes gleamed like bowling balls. My shoes looked shiner than new, completely liquid black. My shoes were luminous.

As I headed back to work, completely contented, I began mentally counting pairs of shoes...tomorrow I could wear a different pair and get those shined. . . yeah. . . oh, yeah. . .

Time

I worry that my life is flying past me and all I see is this the blur of movement in my periphery as something swift moves the air around me. Events have occurred but I fail to inhabit them, the way you speed-read ahead in impatience but realize later you haven't absorbed anything in the paragraphs you rushed.

A co-worker of mine died about two months ago, and I still look for him on the street on the way to work. When someone passes my desk with a particular footfall, I look for his grin going past. I haven't found a way to accept his absence as permanent. His death was unexpected and at an odd juncture - he was old enough that you can't say he "died young", but young enough, and with enough left to accomplish, that his life was unfinished, a book left open. On the other hand, I perform a show for senior citizens two days a week and often I am dealing with people who are alive long after their lives have been finished - is that any better than dying before every 'i' is dotted and every 't' crossed?

How do you grieve appropriately for someone you weren't that close to, but whose absence makes such a loud noise?

In a separate case but still on the subject of missing what's happening to me, I've been spending a majority of my time with one person in particular but I'm reluctant to admit even to myself that this person becomes increasingly important. A simple pie chart of my week's activities would give me away, but does time equal emotion? Habits don't make feelings. Yet I wouldn't be there if I didn't enjoy it. Actually, the present doesn't worry me, it's the future. It would be far better for me to come to the end of my life and look at the person sitting next to me and say, "Amazing. Honey, look at that, we just spent our whole lives together," than have to make some promise to that effect early on.

Although, truth be told, what worries me is that, as my co-worker's death proves, it's not early any more. Perhaps I should get off the fence and love someone. Which is worse: missing your life as if rushes by you because you're afraid to invest in it, or having to negotiate the failures and successes of your investments as they evolve? Tricky. You only get to choose one course, so it's hard to make an objective comparison.

Waiting

You wait and wait, and just when you decide to do something else, the busy-ness you were so bored in preparation for overtakes you.

Headache

"There's just something about dialogue that really breaks up otherwise endless pages of prose, isn't there?"

"Yeah, I got stuck reading a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel once that barely had paragraph breaks, and my head hurt for weeks. I was praying for dialogue by the end."

"How's your head now?"

"Actually, it feels like a pine tree on fire, all straight lines ablaze with pain."

"You sound like Lorrie Moore."

"What?"

"Lorrie Moore. She does that in all her stories, makes everything into these long, complicated similes. 'Love without intimacy is an unsung tune', blah blah blah. It'll give you a headache if you don't have one already. After a while, you have no interest in her characters unless they all go through a course of Proszac. It's perfectly obvious none of them have ever had a good meatball sub."

"What on earth are you talking about? What's a good meatball sub gotta do with it?"

"Geez, you know those people, life is one big dreadful sadness. They've never had something wonderful break through their self-absorbed malaise. A meatball sub ought to be able to have an impact on you - heck, I don't know, you might not care for meatball subs. But you probably feel like about about some kind of food...chocolate chip cookies, maybe."

"Well, I am partial to a good piece of lemon meringue."

"Exactly. Lemon meringue...exactly. It dissolves into something magical."

"Hey, can we stop and get some lunch?"

"You are so suggestible! I bet if I started talking about bowling you'd wanta go."

"Well, no...it's just, like I said, I have a headache, and so maybe if I eat something...."

"Whatever..."

Charleston

I'm headed to South Carolina next week for a family tradition: my brother's birthday weekend in Charleston. Typically, this involves lots of seafood at GREAT dive restaurants (I'm not telling you where they are, I don't want them crowded next time I go) and lots of alcohol. It's been going on for almost twenty years, and my brother's in his thirties.

It all started because my father made us a deal as kids - he would take us out to dinner wherever we wanted to go, with whomever we wished to invite, on our birthdays. I grew up in SC, and originally in a smallish town, so choices started out fairly limited. In fact, as young children, our favorite place to go was Duff's, a truly horrible buffet restaurant that we loved for its plethora of desserts. The food was terrible, but if you're 6, you don't care about canned butter beans when you know you have a bank of sugar and chocolate to wade through once you've gotten the requisite peas and carrots out of the way. So early on, the parental deal became, "I will take you out anywhere you want to go...except Duff's." This remained part of the sentence long after Duff's closed forever, just in case.

When I was about 9 we moved to Charleston and the culinary world exploded. Not that my brother and I were able to take advantage of that or even understand it at our tender ages, but at least the choices widened. I think one year my brother wanted to eat oysters, and asked to be taken up the coast to a place at Murrell's Inlet. My Dad's response was, if you want oysters, let me take you to a REAL oyster place.

We ended up at our now regular dive haunt. It's made of cinder blocks. The cinder blocks are covered with graffiti. The workers roast great shovelfuls of oysters on a grate over an open fire at the far end of the room, and when the oysters are sufficiently roasted, they carry the shovelful over to your table and dump them on the newspaper-covered table. You get a bucket to put shells in. You get plastic containers of melted butter. You get a dull knife to pry the oysters open. You get a packet of saltines. Go ahead, eat up.

Over the years, not all of the guests have been as excited as my brother about roasted oysters. Frankly, I'm a little shocked that my sister-in-law ended up part of the family while not liking oysters that much. A testament to true love, I think. But there's something so up front about the place you have to love it. It's dirty and old and plain and all of the energy is focused into getting you some good-tasting oysters. The oysters are great, and that's why you're there, and there's no wasted time. Decor? Who needs it? Shucking oysters is dirty work.

I am suddenly entirely homesick. There are things I don't love about South Carolina, but there are a lot more that I do, and I miss it. I miss the cadences of speech, and the bobs and twists of phrase, and I miss the decoding that comes second-hand to a native. The Midwest is a friendly place, but it's flat, and what you see it what you get. With Southerners, you get layers.

It's hard to explain to people who have only seen the South in Hollywood movies, all Spanish moss and people in rocking chairs on decaying porches with their hound dogs. That is, of course, not the South any more than a lone hog butcher is Chicago or a wisecracking, rugged policeman with a heart of gold is New York. A lot of the South is just like everywhere else nowadays, big box stores and chain restaurants and highways.

Maybe I shouldn't even try to explain it. In the end, it's home.

I should be more clever

Every so often, the phone rings at this desk and people ask for Carl Robards. Now, this is a business, and there has never been a Carl Robards working here. His WIFE, Frankie Robards, did indeed work in this office, and at this desk, but she hasn't been here for over three years. I know because I never met her, and I've worked here intermittently for about that.

Now, I'm curious how after three years, I can get a multitude of calls for a man who was, as far as I know, never actually in this office. No, it doesn't happen everyday, but it does happen about once a month.

Has someone finally managed to supply telemarketers or bill collectors with a number that's a true dead end? Why would you give anyone your wife's office number as your own regardless?

Moments ago, I got one of these calls. I take an insufferable pleasure in telling the caller that not only do they have the wrong number, they are so far off as to be incapable of reaching their desired party. I have no forwarding information. The trail goes cold with me.

But I have been exceedingly stupid. My pleasure at telling them how erroneously they dial has been a trap. I need to find out WHY they have this number, I need to ask questions before they know I am a dead end.

A: "Is Carl Robards there?"

B: "Why do you want to know?"

Hmmm....too accusatory. I must ask a question someone would conceivably answer.

B: "May I tell him what this is in regards to?"

No...it will be hard to explain I have no way of reaching him if I lead with that.

B: "May I ask what this is regarding?"

Better. The mystery will be solved....I will lie in wait....the next caller will not slip away with a glib warning from a goody-two-shoes. You have been warned.

Surprise!

So last night the Northern Lights appeared on my horizon, eerie and beautiful. I surprised myself in an audition.

I'm wary of trying to write this down, because such experiences are other-worldly, and often impossible to describe. I read someone else's description of such a moment recently and it just made me roll my eyes. Also, I have noticed recently that sometimes people I think aren't very talented are telling themselves the same things I am about why no one hires them. As you can imagine, this is disconcerting, and calls one's knowledge of one's own talent into doubt.

But any time you are involved in an audition or a play or, I imagine, any kind of creative endeavor, and your thoughts synthesize, leap beyond your conscious mind, and form something you couldn't plan, any time that happens, it feels fantastic. As if you have reached over the garden wall of your consciousness and plucked fruit from the trees that grow in the fertile soil of the unconscious.

Ok, yes, that makes me sound like a wanker. (Begging the question that even using the word wanker as an American makes me sound like a wanker, but let's move on.) Perhaps the sort of lightning flashes that are what we call inspiration are impossible to write about. I don't have them often enough, and after a long spell without them I start to feel drab, because if all I have to approach the world is my conscious mind and what I know, that feels pretty limiting. But we know more than we think we know, and that's very powerful.

It's as if everybody has that magic carpet bag of Mary Poppins, but we don't all have the ability to use its magic all the time, being mere mortals. You reach in at times and all you find is more carpet lint. But sometimes, if you're relaxed and not trying too hard, you reach in and the most astonishing objects come leaping to hand: a lamppost, three figs, a river. The bag is full and endless and entirely fascinating, and you feel so special at being given, however briefly, the chance to explore it. And the figs are especially delicious.

That's what happened to me last night. I often think about things too much, so the experience of creating something without thinking about it is delightful. That I made people laugh is even better.

So, wanker or no, I'm spending the day in small but fervent dances of thanks to the magic of the carpet bag.

The Part I Like

I like going to the gym. Wait, that's a lie. I hate going to the gym, but I like leaving the gym. I like the sensation of having completed my exercise, and the rush of the endorphins. But this is commonplace. What I really like about the gym is looking at other women in the locker room.

Now, I am a woman, and have spent my life as a fairly modest and respectful woman. If I'm around someone else getting dressed, I don't stare. I don't tend to undress in company. But apparently none of the rules of modesty apply in a locker room. I don't remember this from high school locker rooms so it was a surprise. Women walk around stark-naked, stand under hairdryers stark-naked, put their clothing and makeup back on with the greatest nonchalance. And it is all easy viewing.

It's not a sexual thrill - I imagine if I were bisexual or homosexual it would be a thrilling place, however my enjoyment stems from utter fascination. I have never seen so many different women's bodies. The women in my gym come in such a myriad of shapes - tiny, taut women with pure muscle all the way to great, blubbery whales of creatures. Plus, and here's the part I love, everything in between.

It makes me realize how much I've swallowed the magazine myth. Sure, as an educated woman, I "know" women's bodies in magazines are idealized. I know Hollywood films have certain standards of beauty. I know television has a mold from which it rarely strays. But knowing intellectually that media has offered me a template from which all women deviate is different from being able to summon, in my mind's eye, a smorgasboard of different combinations. Tall, slender, with big hips. Large, short, bulbous. There's a woman who looks as if her muscles are steel but somehow she has about a half-inch of gelatinous flesh that covers these steel pistons. Another woman has absolutely no spare tissues between her muscles and skin, a sort of greyhound efficiency in her movement.

I have yet to see anyone in my gym who actually has a perfect body.

Interesting - that's what I mean. I say "perfect body" as if there is indeed one setup that I can refer to, as if anyone reading this would know immediately what I mean. In the dressing room I can hear the myths exploding, over and over, like a fireworks display.

I've never had such access to women's bodies, I find it electrifying. I especially like the large women who stand around naked, in no hurry to clothe themselves. I like the idea that, here it is, here's my body, and I don't have anywhere to be but in it, so don't expect me to cover it up like I'm supposed to be ashamed of it.

It is an education for an educated woman.

The Circus

My dreams last night were especially vivid and thought-provoking. I was on a tour package trip with my parents. The first day would be spent with a circus. I knew someone I once thought I could love, someone I haven't seen in a long while, would be on this trip . I felt a mix of dread and excitement and curiosity and indifference. That sounds an impossible combination but sometimes you care so much about something that you also just don't care anymore.

My agitation sent me out to the circus. It wasn't even a proper circus, more like a performance with singers and animals and a dirt floor. The headliner was an overblown, once-famous black woman singer, a woman who had sung the blues with great power and now lived inside them. She took me around backstage and talked to me in sentences that started with phrases like, "Now, I'm gonna be straight with you..." She was philosophical about her deterioration.

I wandered around, fascinated and distracted, until the afternoon performance was about to start, and combed through the crowd to sit with my folks on the lawn in front of the stage.

And there he was, sitting next to them...with what I suddenly knew in the eureka clarity of dreams was his fiance and her parents. And I sat down next to him and asked him how he was, as if we were acquaintances, since this other woman should not be made suspicious. He looked at me with misery in his eyes and said something I can't remember now, something like, I'm so unhappy. Then he leaned his head towards my chest, without actually moving close enough to touch me, as if he wanted to crawl into who I was an escape the people who surrounded us. I kissed him, carefully, on his head, as if to tell him I would let him.

I read over this and I have caught none of the intensity of it, the strange, dirty, road-weary performers, the presence of large bears and perhaps horses, or buffaloes, the self-mocking laughter of the blues singer who so clearly knew things I did not and amused herself with my naivete. I haven't captured how adrift I felt knowing I would see someone whose presence had once sparked such amazement, and whose absence left such a loud silence, like the absence of laughter for a joke you tell that should be riotously funny. And I haven't explained how his leaning and my kiss anchored something in me and in him, as if we both had returned home. Clearly he would marry the other woman, but she would never visit the part of him that rested there, in that moment, with me.

I woke up stunned. I think dreams are the subconscious' way of throwing out the trash, of forcing us to consciously confront the ideas that have been lurking in the shadows. Once exposed, they are destroyed.

I'm happy to dream of those I have lost, as it usually signals that my subconscious feels thoughts of them are taking up space and should be permanently removed.

But it may be a while before I shake that feeling of homecoming with someone I am not likely to see again.

I'm Sailing Away

And then delight flutters in like your own ticker tape parade. After a particularly glum series of weeks, I have regained my fabulousness. More accurately: I have regained my feeling of fabulousness. I may or may not be fabulous, according to the time of day and the odd preferences of the beholder, but I can deflect a lot of external woe with my relish in my own fabulousness. I have to work at it, or I lapse into muttering slumps of bitterness and envy. The fabulousness isn't me feeling "good" about myself - "Who-Hoo! Look at me! I'm so great and wonderful!" Fabulous catches the light when the ability to be yourself packs down so dense and concentrated that you are lofted for a time beyond the judgments of others, and, more rarely, beyond your judgments of yourself.

It's a nice place. There are large windows there.

I love to sing. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes badly. Unfortunately, too often the times I do it badly are in front of people who may or may not hire me based on how well I perform.

But last night I sang for a clutch of people, first to ask for some work, and then just because I love to sing. To warble, to soar. To dance around foolishly. To do a ride-out. I ask you, what more ridiculous movement is there than a ride-out? But as a finish to a song, it is a ride, unmistakably. It only makes sense when the song is a ride.

I have a distinct memory of being a small child in my nightgown in front of the woodstove my my house. The lights were all off, I was meant to be in bed, and I was just sitting by the fire, humming to myself.
"Michael row the boat ashore,
Alleluuuuuuuuuu-ia
Michael row the boat ashore,
Alleluuuuuuu-ia."
I was sitting on the carpet, with my knees tucked up under my chin, pleased with myself for staying up late. I was content.

That kind of content still lives inside the songs. Last night I squeezed some of it out.

One square in the distance

I have been discontented. I keep a fortune cookie fortune in my wallet, grimy now, as such items age badly, that says, "Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation." I hope this is the case, because otherwise, I have been petulant and recalcitrant to no purpose. That would just be a waste of time.

Inside the discontent about one aspect of my life is a careful exhilaration about a different aspect. I am not the person I would like to be. I am not engaged by my work in the way I wish to be. But someone may love the person I am right now, unperfected, in mid-stride. I am agog at such a possibility. Bewildered and doubtful, I nevertheless dream in brighter colours.

The joy inside the discontent is hard to identify, like an iridescent butterfly as the dusk grows deeper. I have taken to recalling good moments in my life, trying to remind myself that they were all bought with work or suffering, or simple patience.

But the boomerang of self-assurance I swing into the world comes back an arrow of defeat. Perhaps I misinterpret. Right now, it feels as if everyone else is winning, everyone else has eased their demons and begun to enjoy their rewards. Meanwhile, I long to go vaulting over the obstacles that taunt me. People wave at me from the far shore. Perhaps my demons, being harder to vanquish, force me to greater lengths, greater feats to defeat them. Perhaps eventually I will emerge stronger than I would have had the battle been swift and easy. Perhaps these arrows of defeat come from many sources, and my boomerang still hasn't arrived.

Perhaps I need some success and not so much philosophy or metaphor.

I watch others philosophize, and I can see they use philosophy to shield themselves from the truth that they will never reach their goals, never succeed. It gives my own philosophy a bitter aftertaste.

In the end, the only absolute path to failure is to stop trying.

Best Behavior

It feels like I'm on a first date, and I'm not entirely sure what I want from the relationship. I'm at the table looking at a stranger, and I'm faced with the task of constructing a self for that person. I'm aware I could lie, that the beauty of the tabula rosa is the ability to redraw, but it's hard enough being truthful with oneself, why waste the effort with extra dishonesty?

So here I am, trying to decide what to tell you. Unlike a first date, I want to tell you whatever amuses me most in the telling. I say unlike -- I'd have much more fun if that were my thought on every date. I have a habit of responding to people in kind: that is, I try to adjust myself according to the company. Faced with the blank screen, all responsive cues are eliminated and I am adrift, briefly. It is not unpleasant.

Cross Words

Today, I did the crossword first, and it was easy. I know it was easy because I zipped through it, and only had to look up one or two words on the internet. (I'm sure someone out there knows the star system Draco is next to the Big Dipper, but it just looked wrong. I agree, it's cheating. I do it anyway.) I want to believe that I am so clever and word-rich that I am capable of ripping my way through any crossword, but last week I made that mistake. Five minutes into the New York Times crossword on the opposite page, I gave it up and went back to reading.

I blame my sister-in-law. She's the crossword demon. She infected my mother and I. Somehow, my brother and father have a deep resistance to crosswords, but send the family off on vacation, and give my sister-in-law the paper, and voila, there we women sit, stumped, for hours, doing the crossword. The three of us have a fairly wide range of knowledge together: My mother retains much of her French and the various details of being well-traveled and well-read throughout her life, I am the theatre and literature contributor (although I fail miserably when movie actors are involved), and my sister-in-law has a lifetime of dealing with crosswords, so she knows all the sneaky crossword tricks. Together, we have enough success to break even the New York Times crossword, but on our own, it's a struggle.

My mother, after a couple of years of only being drawn into the crossword only at holiday time, recently decided she could stave off intellectual flabbiness (and presumably, alzheimer's) by doing the crossword every day. My father initially supported this endeavor by buying books of crosswords as gifts, but soon we all realized what a time-intensive labour the crossword was for my mother alone. My father now refers to himself as a crossword widow.

"It's just that they're so sneaky," my mother frets, drugstore bifocals perched on her nose. She loses glasses at an advanced speed, so we buy her boxes of them from Eckerd or CVS, and never mind the exact prescription. "The crossword will give a clue that makes you think they mean ONE thing, but they really mean something else. I just can't think sneaky like that." She also bemoans the crossword habit of having a clue match the answer - an abbreviated clue means the answer is an abbreviation, a clue in the past tense means the answer ends in 'ed', tricky things like that.

When I call my folks some evenings, my father usually signs off first and my mother has additional gossip or news. In the past few months, that's turned into: "Wait....are you still there? Good...I needed to ask you something. Let's see...I need a five letter word that means 'form a gully'."

In the end, I understand. The crossword never tempted me before those group sessions. But once I'd had a taste of the satisfaction of fully completing a crossword, even as a team, I was hooked. As I filled in the final blanks today, I felt the self-satisfied content of the conqueror. In the back of my head, I am aware that success is often defined by the comparative height of the bar and not your ability to reach it. But completing a crossword, however simple, has within it the seeds of linguistic mastery.

Now, on to the New York Times.

*clears throat*

Well...hey, can I have a glass of water? Thanks. It's been a while since I spoke up, I'm a little rusty.

Introductions? No, I think not. If you're reading this because you already know me, it's pointless, and if you just stumbled upon it, I doubt that I can sum myself up to my own satisfaction.

And get off my back about the title being overly-dramatic. Byron: "There is that within me that shall tire/ Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire."

Maybe it's "which shall tire." Anyway, I like it. I could do worse for a slogan.

Hello, then.