Clearing

You know what I like?  Books. 

You know what else I like?  Being in plays.

You know what I'm doing for the next eight or nine days?  Reading books and being in plays. 

So, it turns out I can enjoy myself after all. No, I don't have big parts and that's still hard to deal with, but I'm still having fun and there are fun people around.  It is really beautiful to have my whole job be just being in plays, though.  I'd forgotten how much I like that.

In other news, I am both happy and frustrated to report I got a request to audition for one of the theatres I did a general audition for back a few weeks ago.  I'm absolutely thrilled to get the request - I feel like I must be doing something right, finally, or the company would never bother.  Sadly, I am still here in Michigan when the audition takes place, dammit.  So I can't currently go.  Grrr.  It's so irritating to find my timing is so off.  But on the whole, the request still makes me feel much more positive.  And there's always a chance that I'll be able to make an audition on another day - I'm not sure what their schedule is.

I would love for everything to turn around for me...would LOVE to get back to being permanently gleeful.  Or at least getting to do what I love and feeling like the path to making money at doing what I love is open, not closed.

In the meantime, I went to the farmer's market today and had a wonderful time chatting with my friend.  One of the stands had breakfast for sale, actual farm eggs and farm bacon cooked to order and it was delicious.  Then I bought raspberries and blueberries and beans and black cherries.  And I came back to the tiny little place I am staying and made myself a cup of tea.  The next time I'm required to do something will be tonight at 5 pm.  Right now, in this moment, life is utterly blissful: I'm going to go sit on the porch, eat cherries and read silly books.  Then, tonight, I'll strap on a broadsword and run around the woods pretending stuff.  It's great!

Not bad

"I demand that you put that book down, turn off the lights in there, and come out here to look at the stars with me!"

You know, there are a lot of things that ease when someone is kind to you.  To one.  To me.  And a sky full of stars doubles as a net to hold in camaraderie.  I still feel old and mostly untalented, and I still feel on the fringe of this experience because I just don't do quite enough in these plays to take hold somehow, but on the whole, doing something artistic always feels better than doing nothing, and if I don't get to do much acting, at least the people around me are worth watching.

I might find a door back into my life in the next ten days.  The sun shines across the harbour as I ride my bike to rehearsals in the morning, and wildflowers splash over the paths.  I think life is rough sometimes, and saying goodbye to people permanently is hard, and I want to think about it and don't want to think about it in equal meaures.  At least, as I run on the hamster wheel that is my brain and my heart trying to process loss, I can get off long enough to look out over the lake.  There are blessings.  There are joys.  And kindness is being offered to me from many different sources right now.

Thanks, kind people.

Now, give me the blessing of a nap, and I might start acting human again.

Change of Scene

So, we've arrived in Michigan, me amongst this merry band of Shakespeare players, and I'm happy to report that at least the change of scene is a great benefit.  I'm shaking off some of the worst of the hopelessness and trying to get on with enjoying what I can.  After all, it's beautiful up here, and every one is pretty nice, and no matter what, it's fun to perform here. 

We're in the midst of tech, which can be a hassle but usually runs more smoothly than we expect.  I'm installed in a corner of a tiny room on a bed that's not even an actual bed (it's a sofa over which a small mattress has been laid), in a room with two other women, and it is cramped, definitely, but at least both women are nice and we're all working to make it as comfortable as possible for each other. 

I've been to the grocery store, so I finally have fruits and vegetables to eat instead of just endless burgers and sandwiches from the diner-like place next door (it's got great food but not the kind that will make your body feel better), and I may even have time for a short nap. 

While I'm still pretty removed from the vacationy, life-is-good mentality I often get up here, I am glad for some small mercies and I know I'll enjoy slinging on a sword tonight and tromping around the woods in my army boots.  And there's no one up here I can't stand - or rather, I can find a way to enjoy some part of every person who surrounds me.  That's a relief.

Now, if I can keep away from the Crescent Bakery and stay focused on the tasks at hand, or at the very least focus on reading all the novels I brought (and not on my continuing failure as a human being), I'll get a real vacation from myself.

That would be nice. Ahh.

Low

I'm balanced right in between losing it and keeping it together.  I'm not sure which one I want more.  Of course, yes, I'd like to be strong and fierce and fight off despair in some heroic way, but there's something to be said for just plain losing your mind - when you're done you're exhausted and low and you collapse.  You can expend all your grief and fury all at once, a typhoon, whirling dervish, tasmanian devil.  Then you sleep, empty of everything, and start climbing back from the lowest point.

I'm tired of bad news, and being graceful and accepting in defeat.  Well, attempting to be graceful in defeat.  (I think I tend towards bitterness and whininess and miss graceful entirely, but I do try.)

 I'm really tired of being last choice for all the things I want.  Even if I could keep my mind off of past and future and fix it firmly to the moment, I'm tired of being useless in this moment.  I just realized I am supposed to be in the scene that went by - turns out, I've missed it the last few times, and no one has noticed.  That's how much I'm getting done onstage this summer.

I'm tired of feeling like I've failed at every career goal I've ever had.

I'm tired of being underemployed. I don't mind working hard for my money, and I don't mind not having piles of it, but not being able to earn enough to keep ahead of the rent is starting to make me panic.

I'm tired of being a disappointment to my family.

I'm especially tired of being a disappointment to myself.

And of course, you gracious four, somedays five, people who occasionally stop by to read this, I'm tired of not having better news for you.  Trust me, no one misses me being joyful more than I do, and I hate that shame and disappointment is all I have to offer.

Come on, wheel of fortune, turn.  TURN.

A Three Legged Dog

I saw a three legged dog today.  A three legged golden retriever.  This may sound odd, but I bet if you think of the phrase "three-legged dog" the image that leaps to mind is either some sort of Jack Russell terrier or a mutt so ugly its momma had trouble loving it.

Though maybe that's just me with that set of associations.

So this particular dog was not tiny, or a mutt.  It was a beautiful purebred golden, the head cheerleader of dog breeds, only with three legs.  And damn it, that dog looked happy.  Gleeful.  Like it had caught a squirrel.  Or outstriped a dalmation in a race.  Or found a particularly amazing stick.  ("Look, I have a stick!" dogs always seem to say when they have a stick, so proud of themselves.)

Three legs, no problems.  Love it.  Now, if only I could have given that dog a stick...

Change of pace

So much death talk around here!  Let's change it up. 

Today, an open letter to the many Matts in my life.

Dear Matts I-III, which in my own parlance I'd label Earth Angel, Jug Ears, and Floppy Hair:

You know, thanks.  All three of you tried to be my friend, in different ways, and though I was really lobbying for you to love me (or in a few cases, just care enough to snog me on sight), all three of you tried to let me down as easily as possible.  And I was a mess with all three of you - I took it personally, I whined, I made accusations, I acted childishly.  All of which behavior I'M CERTAIN confirmed that you were absolutely right to move ahead and find someone more sane to date, or kiss, or romance.

Dear Matt IV (we'll call you "Steve"):

Thanks for teaching me what true disinterest looks like.  Wow, that sounds really snarky but I'm actually grateful.  I have run into disinterest again recently, and I can recognize it (I think) for what it is.  And look!  I didn't take it personally!  Mostly.

Lesson: Just because someone loses interest doesn't mean you aren't interesting.  However, it still stings.

Unfair

So, it turns out I am being very very unfair (see below and below). Here's what can be said about a woman who tried her hardest to give her community what was expected of her:

"She was a lady who who excelled at maintaining grace and dignity at all times and in all circumstances."

And that is something to strive for, definitely.  She liked birds, and dancing, and playing the piano, and she loved her garden, which was lush and beautiful and full of flowers, not practical vegetables but flowers.  She read incessantly.  She kept her spine straight and her pride in place while living through some very hard times, and she always did what she thought was right, even if it was hard. 

Goodbye, Miss Myra.  I hope you're with your son and your husband and your own mom and dad, and that you are transformed into your best self, and are laughing and dancing and gardening.  Or maybe all of that has fallen away and your best self has transcended all of that to be at peace.

Help me maintain my own grace and dignity throughout my own hard times.

Crazy Town

I am acting like a crazy woman.  My exterior and interior life doesn't match at all.  I'd like them to match even less, actually, would like it in a way if no one knew that my grandma had died.  Everyone is so solicitous, and sympathetic.  I'd like it if instead they would ignore me completely, if I could simply melt into the furniture.  I'd like to be completely absent.

I'd like to erase myself for a while.

Curious, I was truly affronted when I was accused by my cousin this week of being a dramatic child.  That's what it felt like, an accusation.  It certainly wasn't a compliment, it was something very much "other" that she claimed not to understand, something distasteful that she was having trouble grappling with in her own daughter.  Maybe I'm being unfair to my cousin.  It's my mother who is so against any attention-drawing behavior - my mother who shushes me when I laugh at a play, my mother who says "no one wants to hear what you say", my mother who finds being dramatic in bad taste.

And right now, even though we're a thousand miles apart, I would do anything at all to make my mother happy.  To take away her pain.  I would like to remake myself into a sober, serene school teacher who lives about two hours from her and is creative in mild, sanctioned bursts in classrooms but not in public.  Who married a nice dentist.  Someone my mother could be proud of, someone whose accomplishments could be listed easily to folks passing by in a receiving line.  Someone who had the requisite number of children she could instruct and spoil. 

Someone whose mere presence would ease her suffering. 

Of course I'm none of that. 

It doesn't help to reflect that my mother, if she admitted it to herself, probably feels the same way about her own mother.  Nothing my mother did could ever truly please my grandmother - or rather, any choice my mother made for herself was sure to be in conflict with what her own mother wanted for her, expected from her.  And now, it's too late.  Well, it was always too late, because of who my grandmother was. 

I'm not sure any of the girls in that family, my mother and her sisters, ever felt really loved by their mother.  Yet I myself heard my grandmother tell them she loved them.  One day it occurred to me that I wasn't around for a lot of years.  What sort of upbringing did my mother have that she can't really believe it when her mother says I love you? 

This is all supposition, of course.  I'm so dramatic, I probably have the wrong idea entirely.

Sigh.  I wish I could disappear, take myself off like a dress and wander unthinking through the next few days like a shadow.

Gathering

You know, there's nothing like family to make you realize you are an abject failure.

Alternately, I went to a funeral of a woman who was always very intent on what people thought of her, on keeping her good name in her community.  She spent so much time being blameless that in a way, there wasn't a lot you could say about her in her eulogy.

I suppose I could link these ideas and say, well, if I'm a failure, at least I give the family something to talk about. 

That logic seems faulty, though.

Don't listen to me.  The veneer of sociability has worn down.  And I hate that I cannot convince my family that just because I don't live in the South doesn't mean I don't love it.  Or that I don't miss it.  Or that I feel in any way superior to it.

Flight 4144

I'm on my way to a funeral.  Time seems to have slowed down. 

I don't quite know how to feel.  When someone is 94 and in poor health, and they shuffle off this mortal coil, do you really have the right to feel sad?  Conversely, do you have the right to feel relieved?  Both seem inappropriate. 

Because no matter what, no one gets out of this life alive.  Why do we as a culture never seem to have a way to deal with the fact that we all die eventually?  A faith helps, and the Southern instinct to ply grief with food, but our rituals do seems to fail us in a cosmic sense. 

Maybe I'll find I'm wrong.  Whatever we do as a family for the next three days, I hope it helps my Mom.  Her mother died.  I am not looking forward to having such a thing happen to me someday.

Sometimes books find you

From "Immortalizing John Parker" by Robin Black, in a short story collection titled, "If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This":

"She stands still in her doorway for a few moments -- as though there's an obvious next move to make and she just can't remember what it is.  This is a familiar sensation, since George's death.  She waits and nothing comes to mind.  Nothing ever comes to mind.  It is the sensation of absence, she knows, disguised as an impulse to act.  There isn't a damned thing to do, except see it for the trick it is."

and later:

"Time makes fools of us all,"  Clara says.  "Every single one of us.  It's possible we need to ignore that fact.  And get on with our lives."

Nope

It's not the vitamins.  I took some this morning and I'm equally crabby.  It might be the hayfever.

Here's the thing.  I grew up without allergies.  On a recent trip to New Orleans, I was without allergies.  Back in SC on vacation, I was without allergies.  While, yes, I may have a cold, the symptoms I'm experiencing seem much more like allergies.

WHAT THE HELL AM I ALLERGIC TO IN THE MIDWEST?

Could it be...failure?

Oh, wait, that's boring, I can come up with much more entertaining things for me to be allergic to in the Midwest:

• Blue-collar-esque clock-punching
• A tendency for the visceral over the verbal (sounds like a complicated math equation, yes?)
• Blocky, featureless office buildings (Damn you and your functionality, Mies van der Rohe!!)
• Flatness - and I mean figuratively as well as literally.  Yeah, yeah, the grid means you planned your city, it's easy to navigate, and you have a place to hide your trash (because there are alleys).  But personally, I prefer complexity to boredom.

If I say sooth (working on Macbeth lines, can you tell?), it has to be some plant that's making me sneeze, but those others contribute to my general irritability.

Drained away

Maybe I just forgot to take my vitamins today...

Sometimes, I read something so well written and moving that it throws all my pitiful, paltry efforts into the harsh light of reality.  As if I'm coming home from my stained glass training all proud of the bird on a branch I made, and I walk under a Tiffany dome.  When faced with artistry and talent, it is clear what I do is dabble and posture.  Poorly!  And irritate the sweet people who put up with me.

Then I go to rehearsal, and lucky me!  I'm playing a character who isn't a good actor, and it doesn't seem like I'm even doing a very good job at that.  And all the fun stuff I was doing is getting cut because my character is so unimportant that she shouldn't be doing anything that would steal the focus from the rest of the play.  I kind of want to go hide in a corner until we open - it seems like it would make the play better.

And I sent a stupid email today that I regret highly.  But the worst thing you can do in such a situation is write AGAIN and say, uh, sorry I said that, I really feel like an idiot now. 

But maybe I should just take my vitamins when I get up at 4:30 am tomorrow.

Vanity

It should be no surprise to my two whole readers (hi, Michael and Becky!) that despite my claim a few weeks ago to Really, I Mean It, Go on a Diet, I have not particularly.  The irritating thing is that I'd like to shift 10, maybe 15 pounds, and that's not a lot, but I like eating, and this is prime holiday season, and there have been and will be things to celebrate.  The problem comes in that I find it hard to care enough to not eat when there is tasty food.  I mean, we made Ginger Lemon Sorbet!  It was awesome!

Drat.

But I still prefer the self that has dropped these 10 pounds - and for sheer vanity.  Gracious, I am finding these past few months that vanity is a bigger motivator for me than almost anything else.  It may be why I'm not as successful an actor as I'd like to be.  There are lots of parts you can't play well once your vanity is compromised.  Note to self: give up on vanity, it's not helping you.
 
So, I'm going to redouble my efforts to lose some weight, and start today, and go running in the bargain.  I won't be defeated by my own vanity!  At least, not permanently.

Of course, my vanity is also appeased by all this time spent thinking back into the past, because I have shifted a good deal of weight I used to carry around (physical and otherwise).  It's nice to think I have conquered a few things over time.  It makes my eventual success provable.

A Completely Successful Evening

We had a friend over for dinner last night, and it was outrageously fun.  I spent the entire day, really two days, cooking and cleaning and singing along to music while I cooked and cleaned.  And every single part of it was so satisfying. 

First, cleaning this apartment was beyond necessary.  We like to keep the windows open and the air conditioning off when possible, which is lovely but lets in a lot of dust and dirt, and we end up ignoring the layers of dirt and dust for a long time.  This time, cleaning, I moved furtniture around and cleaned the baseboards and picture frames and, instead of mopping, got on my hands and knees and wiped the floors down.  (My mother's stance:  Mopping just moves the dirt around, if you want to get it clean you have to get down on the floor and wipe it up, and I am definitely her acolyte in that regard.)  There are some rooms I didn't get to at all, but the rooms that are clean are CLEAN. 

Side note:  I wish I had a really great vacuum cleaner.  I can't decide if it is wonderful or sad that I dream about getting a Dyson, for instance, the way other people might long for jewelry or a fur coat.

So I like cleaning and find cleaning incredibly satisfying.  Hooray.

Second, I like cooking.  If I say so myself, I made some amazing stuff for dinner last night.  My friend is a habitual late-comer, and it was forecasted to be 90 degrees, so I decided to make things that could be served cold.  Well, I did make a blueberry crumble for dessert, which could have been hot, but I made it the day before and warmed it up a bit.  The main course was a harvest grain mix (it has stuff like orzo and couscous and red quinoa all mixed in) and I made a an orange sherry vinegarette and chopped up a bunch of stuff into it - artichokes and grape tomatoes and chicken and mushrooms and feta cheese.  It's pretty good.  And it seemed to impress my friend, which was definitely the crowning glory.

Third, I love singing. Especially singing along to the radio or my itunes while I'm driving or doing something else.  Thoughtless singing, the kind that doesn't have to sound pretty, singing that's just you carving sound out of yourself, finding resonances in yourself you didn't know you had.

So it was already a great day.  Then my friend came over and we had a fantastic time!  I hadn't seen him properly in ages, and had been saying I would invite him over for dinner for about a year, and it was so wonderful to sit down in my nice clean house and eat incredibly tasty food and catch up with someone who talks about the things I care about - books and jazz and plays and food.  He's a Brit, as well, and spends a lot of his time bouncing between London and Chicago, so it was wonderful to vicariously be reminded of my other home. 

Now, the one down side is I drank too much wine and went to bed at 2 am for the second night in a row, and had to get up to go to rehearsal this morning.  Oog.  But it was a small price to pay for having such a damn fine time!  Glorious!

Now, if I can just get myself back over to the UK, it seems my friend's new girlfriend is buddies with Benedict Cumberbatch.  Really.