What's the What?

I spent a chunk of time today writing an email to a friend in which I alternately whined and tried to take responsibility for my whining.

Driving home from an audition, I tried to square two different truths with each other.

The first is that I've always been irritated by people who are unhappy but make no effort to extricate themselves from that unhappiness.  Some unhappinesses are inescapable, of course, grief from a death, job changes, breakups, adjustments from a move, chemical imbalances.  But if you are in a situation that you dislike but make no effort to change that situation, I start to lose patience with you.  I will grant dispensation to those who are unhappy in one situation but find outlets elsewhere - if you have a job you hate, for instance, but you do it to feed your family or fund your travel bug or buy equipment for your photography hobby you love.  I will absolutely buy in to the unhappiness "deal", where unhappiness in one place earns you happiness elsewhere.

I'll also listen with sympathy to the person who is unhappy but is trying different tactics to fix the problem, even if those tactics don't work and the unhappiness persists.

Again, my beef is with the perennially unhappy who make NO CHANGES.  Say you're a stay at home dad but you never ever shut up about feeling emasculated by it.  This is your life and you need to find a way to be ok with it.  Say you're in the corporate rat race and you don't have any time for the things you wish you were doing.  Find a way to love the race or get out.  Say you've always wanted to go to India but your new hi-def tv just absorbed all your disposable income - I have absolutely zero patience for you, sell the damned thing and go do something.

Ah, but today I thought about how, fittingly, I am hoist by my own petard.  My second truth is that I am unhappy that I have absolutely no disposable income because I am an actor and a teaching artist in a rough economy, and there's not a lot of work to be had.  Alternately, I'm unhappy when I'm not spending my time on the acting, I can forgo disposable income when all my free time is occupied with a show.  It's worse than just unhappiness, too - I feel in danger of becoming permanently disappointed, because all the promise I felt I had ten years ago is draining away under the hostile consistency of rejection that being an actor delivers.

(Side note - if you happen to be reading this and you have ever once wished anything bad to happen to me, you have had your wish, time and time again.  There have been so many times I wasn't chosen for something and was left only with the mantra of "what was wrong with me" to pass the time until the next turn on the chopping block - there have been so many times that I truly have no idea what that number is.  I can tell you I did at least 14 commercial auditions this month and booked none of them.  That's a rejection every other day all month.  If you think all actors are self-absorbed twats, we may be, but on the other hand, you try keeping your shit together when you get judged and found wanting nearly every day.  Also, if for any reason you've ever hated me, there is no way you could ever hate me as much as I hate myself some moments. So, if something I wrote here pissed you off, or if I was ever condescending or rude or overly needy or mean or sarcastic or boring, don't worry - I have been repaid in full, and there will always be more coming.)

Back to the point...by my own stricture, the long slow slide into permanent disappointment means it might be time to give it up, to find something else, hell, to just go get a damn job and make money and have this be a fun hobby.

But here's the kicker, for me.  If I give up, actually start spending my time doing something else, I will unequivocally be disappointed.  I might as well tattoo it on my forehead then: THIS PERSON HAS FAILED.  I'm sad a lot now, I have trouble staving off the demons, I sink into a world of self-doubt and inaction, BUT BUT BUT...when the yes comes, when someone casts me in something, or I sing a really perfect line, or I make someone laugh, or someone asks me to be in a workshop of a play, or I have an audition that feels like finally telling a story...it's magic.  It's validation.  It's joy on a scale I can't imagine in any other form.

It's delight.  And delight is transforming.  I can shift and melt and reform into the person I am actually supposed to be, one that has enough personhood to listen to someone else, play with others, love and be happy.

I hate the disappointment.  I hate it.  I don't want to be that, I don't want to feel it, I want to be able to transcend it and I hate myself even more every time it catches me, but if I give up, it wins.  Instead I try to fight it, and when I lose the strength to fight it, I try to live through it and keep it mind that, just like winter, or an evil spell, or a rain cloud, it will lift.  It will lift and it will be spring, or restoration, or sunshine.

So I had two auditions today and someone asked me to be in a workshop, and I have to stop writing to go be in a show.  It's still raining, but I see the horizon lit up over in the distance, and it is beautiful.

Absent

A friend is in London on a training course.  She posts beautiful pictures that affect me physically.  I can see one of those images - the view from Primrose Hill, for instance, and the sight of it blooms in my gut like an ache, a physical loss.

I hate that I feel as if I'm in exile from London, because I know, I just know it sounds absurd and pretentious.  It's not my country.  I don't know it or understand it as a local, because I was always and ever just a visitor.  I cringe when non-Southerners claim to luuuv gumbo and wisteria and I know in my soul they don't have a clue what they are talking about, so I'm painfully aware I'm on non-native ground.

But, in the past, when I go to London, something fits.  The air smells right, my skin does well in the climate, the sound of the traffic, the accents, the echo of thousands of years of literature soothes.  Some unhappiness that sits in my chest eases in London, in church pews and museums and pubs and wine shops and car boot sales and underground stations and Marks & Spencers.  I have at least lived there, alongside natives.  I can identify a Bramley apple and pronounce both Greenwich and Ipswich correctly and really, it's a Marathon bar and Smarties, not Snickers and M&Ms.  I have some minimal street cred, some time on the ground.

Habermas Girl is in Italy.  She posts pictures that make me madly jealous.  I would LOVE to go to Italy, I would hock my last pearl, and maybe someday I will own enough pearls that hocking them would mass enough coin for a trip.  I have memories of lying in a churchyard in Florence in the spring, picking tiny white flowers and soaking up sunshine and feeling as if no one could ever be discontent in Italy.  I long to go.

But I don't think it would ease me the way London could.  There's something about the character of London that appeals, the humor and the reserve and the oldness and the oddness of things.

A friend came to dinner two weeks ago and was flying out to London the next day.  I must have gotten that wistful look on my face as we talked about it, and my husband knows what it is to me, and how long it has been since I've been there, felt that ease, and he very sweetly said he'd give up the new tires we need if it meant I could go to London.  Awww.  Ludicrous, of course,  because we absolutely have to have new tires, we won't survive the winter without them, and of course the money for tires would never cover an entire trip to London.  It was like saying, I'll go without dinner so you can buy a new car.

Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing the country's effect on me.  That's likely, given my penchant for romanticizing.  Eleven years ago, I came back from the UK and moved to Chicago.  It was hard.  I'd left all my friends behind and shown up in a town where I knew no one and it was just going to get colder.  I worked as a temp in an investment firm, I got cast in a campy, silly sketch show.  I thought dispassionately about how much easier being magically dead would be to having to re-create myself piece by piece.  Not that I wanted to harm myself, but "not being" at the time sounded better than "being", which felt messy and sad and painful and lonely.

For Christmas I asked my parents for money to go to the UK at New Year's.  They were very sweet, and smiled, and said no.

And I went anyway.  It was the best decision I could possibly have made. (I charged it, and worked 7 days a week for 8 weeks when I got back to pay for it.)  I was serenely, blissfully, magnificently happy for about 9 days.  Coming back again was dreadful, of course, but I had managed to prove to myself that being that horribly unhappy was temporary.  No, more than that, I could lift that veil any time I wanted to, with just a plane ticket.

Time has passed, and the scales are much more even now.  I can't say for sure where my happiness lives anymore.  Is it somewhere in London?  Or are the relationships I made there less important now than the ones I have here?

Or is there some secret harmonic at work there, some resonance fills me up no matter who is there?  And if there is, how long will it be until I can go relax into it, lie back and let myself be finally at ease?

Words

I just used the word "louche" properly in a sentence.  (Not here - I was writing emails, of course.  To people who respond.)

Here's what happens to me, and forgive me if this is too self-congratulatory - I'm writing along, and a word will come to me, a complex, juicy, enjoyable word, like "louche"* or "inimitable", and it feels fantastic, it feels like exactly the right word, but an unusual word, there's special thrill in it, like having a sandwich with grainy artisan-y bread instead of just slabs of generic wheat.  But then I can never trust the word initially, I nearly always think, hang on, you don't use that word a lot, you'd better check to see if it means what you think it means (and if you are spelling it correctly). You'd better mean what you think you mean.

And here's the best part, the self-congratulatory part: it nearly always does.  The word aligns.  Every time I can remember, I look that word up and think, yep, that is exactly what I wanted to say.  And that, that is...delightful.

Now, I don't go looking for wildly unique words.  I don't try to shoehorn them into conversation (ok, I rarely try to shoehorn them into conversation, mostly because in conversation I can't look the word up and make sure it's really saying what I want to say, and I am guaranteed to mispronounce it).  But when one comes to me and means what I thought it meant, it feels...it feels like having a wild bird eat from your hand.  Like finding the perfect fitting coat in a resale shop for $10.  Like getting a really excellent haircut.

(*I just went looking for something else and found the OED's word of the day for Oct 21 was louche!! Word of honor, I don't follow the OED WOD; the word louche came to me unbidden, out of the mists of memory, probably memory of descriptions of Byron, not from that source.  I've no way to prove it, but it's so.)

For this

I get bogged down in my own shortcomings.  Sink into them like a morass, my negativity never escaping the quicksand of my own judgment.

Then I go see a play.  It takes a really good play, a really blissful, exciting, transformative, imaginative sort of play, one that makes you see the things that aren't there, whether it's a cold winter's night or the inside of your own heart.

And when I see a play like this, everything falls into place again for a few hours.  The world makes sense when we can tell each other stories like this.  We might let the devil capture us for millennium, but one day we will find a way back out of the trap, and when we do we will have landed right back where we were taken, armed with a new knowledge of ourselves.

And if I can do this for people, if I can spend even a fraction of my life making up stories for people to discover themselves inside, I will be happy.  Not every second, and not always as deeply as I wish, but happy, and that happiness will be a thing that the joys of others will only increase, not threaten.

Inside a story, I may yet find the person it is I want to be.

Can't stop

I'm on a destructive path, though I shouldn't say "I can't stop" because I suspect I could stop given the right circumstances.  However, I do not seem to be stopping.

There are a lot of people better than me at a lot of things.  Truth be told, there's probably someone better than me at all things, taken one at a time.  I am not a superlative sort of person - nice enough, good enough, but not someone who ranks high in lists, or wins things, or, truth be told, even gets picked in her chosen profession all that often.  Sometimes I do, yes, and when I do, it feels terrific.  Outstanding.  Those are the good days, the ones that keep me going forward instead of just leaping down a well.

But often in life, a situation comes up where someone is better than I am...usually at one thing, though often at multiple things.

Now I'm in a situation where someone got picked for something and I did not.  To be fair - I was never actually in the running AT ALL.  As in, the person making the decision was not thinking, hmmm, should I take elsbeth for this purpose, or this trulyfantasticamazingperfectthrilling bag of awesome instead??  No, it's just the alternate person was always and ever the right person for the job.

Ok.  Ok.  Fair enough.  Happens to us all.  Best and smartest thing to do (you know this, right??) is just put it behind me and get on with whatever's next.

Except I don't.  I keep checking back in on this situation ALL THE TIME and every time I do I feel like throwing up, but I just don't seem to stop.  I can't seem to look away.  Even though (I think?) I truly could forget about it if I just stopped reminding myself every two seconds.

Which is the point in question.  I'm not enjoying feeling permanently, intrinsically inferior.  So why can't I stop?  Am I desperately looking for evidence that this person made the wrong choice and that The Perfect One is not, in actual fact, perfect?  Do I feel the need to punish myself in some way I'm not currently conscious of?  Do I alternately look for proof that the job itself was not worth having by checking in on TPO?

I remember this sensation from the past - I was cast in a musical in college as an old woman (I wasn't one at the time) and a beautiful, sweet blonde was cast to sing all the really pretty songs.  In keeping with this post, she was an amazing singer and absolutely blew me out of the water - I was jealous but even then I would never ever have expected to be cast in that role instead of her, she was incredible and perfect for it.  To add insult to injury, however, her costume was a dress that had been specially made for me the year before, for a different play.  And they had to take it in to fit the gorgeous blonde.  Which meant I could never wear it again (I'd rented it the year before for Halloween, to be Jane Eyre).

I loved that costume.  It was Victorian, black, off the shoulder, the neckline trimmed with jet beads.  I LOVED that dress.  And every night I would make a special trip during the prettiest song of the show (which of course she was singing), and watch how beautiful this blonde girl sounded and looked in a way I would never be able to match, wearing a dress that even though it had been made for me, looked way better on her.

It made me feel like shit, naturally.  I teared up most nights, more from jealousy than being moved by the singing (though it truly was lovely).  But every night I was in the wings, watching it.  And I didn't have to be there - I could have sat in the green room or stayed in a dressing room cracking jokes with fellow cast members.

So, thinking of that, the only explanation is I must like feeling inferior?  But I don't!

So confusing.  Ok, off to cyberstalk someone who is better than I am in every imaginable way.

Addendum:  someone recently mentioned the blonde to me, and then waxed poetic about the very scene I just described and how absolutely beautiful she was and how every man wanted that girl, and even with a headstart of about 17 years to get over it, I still felt like shit.

Man, I wish I'd go ahead and grow up, certain things would be so much easier.

A Good Choking

It is very tiring to get choked to death on stage.  Very.

And a little creepy.

Turns out, I've never been choked to death on stage before - I've had my throat slit, and I've been stabbed to death in a swordfight, but this is the first time I've gotten to act out being throttled.  It's interesting, because it starts to feel like I am actually being strangled, and I have to go out of my way to breathe in and out to remind myself I can.  Even though I shouldn't because the audience is about three feet away and might spot me breathing while I'm being choked.

On a side note, it's actually waaaaay creepier to then die into a pool of blood on the floor that gradually seeps into my clothes as I lie there "dead".

This is all fiction, of course,  but if you have a secret distaste for me, you might want to catch this show.  I can actually think of a few people who might really enjoy watching me get choked to death - after all, since I can't breathe, I can't talk, so it effectively silences me, and that's something I know certain people have wanted to see happen.

Commercial

I filmed a commercial last Friday and it's left me a bit shaken.  Because it turned out to be wickedly difficult, and although every person involved was overwhelmingly nice to me, I left feeling inept.  Inept at the thing I do to earn money.

Now, I'm trying to give myself a break.  I'm still fairly new at the commercial world, and there were some mitigating factors that made it harder than it had to be.  The text I had to say was pretty long for the 8 seconds they wanted me to say it in, and although they were very very specific about the words, they'd waited on purpose to give me the script about an hour, maybe two hours earlier.  They do this on purpose, because they don't want you to memorize it in a certain way and be unable to change, but sadly, I sort of did get stuck saying it a certain way because my brain was always scrambling frantically to remember what came next so emphasizing certain words gave my poor brain catch-up time.

All of the above are excuses.  My job was to say a string of words in the right order in 8 seconds however these people wanted them said.  And I found that very very difficult, and it's possible I did not succeed, that they just gave up and took "good enough" because it was clear I wasn't capable of anything else.  Not that I'm sure that's true, I just know that is a possibility.

BUT I'm still trying to give myself a break.  The poise and concentration you need to execute these scripts are learned skills, and they are hard to attain when you're also just frightened to death, when the pressure and lights and attention are all on.  I didn't have them last Friday, and I suspect the resulting ad will be hard to watch, to say the least.  But maybe next time I'll feel more confident?  I can hope so.

"A pupil in the art of walking a tightrope, fearing every moment he will fall, cannot be expected to achieve the easy smile of the adept."

I can hope for the easy smile, but I'll have to earn it the hard way.

Filling Blank Pages

On the way to work today, the bus was so slow, I called to tell them I'd be late. "Oh, no, you're not scheduled for another hour," was the reply.  By then I was three minutes from downtown, from a busy rainsoaked street full of shops and businessmen and tourists.  

I scampered off to Starbucks - it's close and has cushy chairs.  I sat down in the very cushiest, leather and air shifting at the weight of me, and took out my poetry notebook. It's been neglected, rather, though that's not entirely an accurate representation of how I treat poetry.  "Neglect" implies some sort of discipline, some sort of regular attack.  Instead, what poetry I write is intermittent and usually the result of a certain kind of down time.  I have a kaleidoscopic relationship to my own poetry (it's painful even to write the word, it feels exactly like last night when I ripped my own skin off near the cuticle of my index finger just because I'd been biting my thumbnail all night and it was sharp - unexpected damage coming from your own hands).  Kaleidoscopic in the sense that how I feel about it shifts every moment, depending on what kind of light is thrown across the page and how I'm turning.

There are days I read through this book and feel, if not wildly talented with words, a certain satisfaction in the stories my words have built.  Not that I think they are good, but that I find myself enjoying them.  The trap here is always that it seems like an easy leap to assume others would enjoy them, but there's no proof to that theory.

Anyway, when I allow and/or force myself to write poetry I use my fountain pen, and it's probably not an accident that today I had a lot of trouble getting it to write.  First it was out of ink, then it just wouldn't behave - I have to lick it to get it started, which feels like some sort of Victorian affectation.  Then it only wrote gunk for a while, things I had to scratch out so that when I double back and read them, I don't mistake them for anything I actually meant at the time.  

I intended to type one out here, but they don't hold up to that kind of scrutiny.  Perhaps I'll go get drunk at an open mic night someday, and spill them out into the air like smoke rings. 

The point

I just looked out the window and saw the leaves of the tree on the right have flushed a brilliant yellow, and it's glowing beautifully out there in the sunny autumn day.  The shadow of the leaves is glittering on the floor of my apartment, giving it a gleeful party atmosphere tempered with the lingering awareness that this is the party we throw before winter, before death creeps over all these plants and the air and the sky.

Then I came to attempt to describe it and for several minutes, I was unable to convince myself I had anything interesting to say about it.  It's a just a tree whose leaves have turned.  Outside my window.  Who cares?  I skittered back away from writing it down and went hunting for funny pictures of cats to amuse my brain, to fill the impulse I have to write something down.

Clearly, I eventually vaulted over such reservations, but it took a battle, and it took reminding myself that by writing this here, I'm not bothering anyone.  No one is required to read this blog - hell, for the most part, no one does read it.  Why not leave myself a marker for my day, a reminder that today I noticed something outside my very own window and it was beautiful?

Well, no reason, obviously.  But it's not exactly enough.  I want to write something I would share with others, want this to be a place someone would happen upon and stick around because they found it charming, or entertaining or informative.

But either I end up judging attempts so harshly that I stall every attempt to write a line or I let myself freewheel into eddies I cringe to read later.

So that's the fight going on over here.  It's a hundred years war, absolutely.  Luck to you all on yours.

Ourselves as others see us

You know that moment when everything turns inside out and suddenly you see yourself from the outside and you realize how fucking stupid you are?  I can't guarantee you've had one of these moments but I'll go out on a limb and guess yes.

Anyway, I've had them, frequently (and recently), and here's another now.  I'm genuinely horrified by myself.

I'm going to attempt to give up blogging.  I can't guarantee I will, because I may decide that since no one ever reads this, it doesn't matter if it's poorly written and merely chronicles my total failure as a human being.  

I know it sounds weak to say I'll try harder not to be a repetitive idiot.  However, I will try harder.

Also, I will get some sleep.  And possibly delete this in the morning.  Things look better in the morning, sometimes.

Just giving in

I had the misfortune of actually listening to myself in the past week.  It's horrifying.

I am going to try to take a break from "blogging", which in my case is hardly blogging at all, it's just keeping an online diary that can't be truly honest because people might see it and be offended, while ironically being something no one ever sees.

Except, apparently, a whole bunch of people in Russia.  Dobryj Dyen'!  I know none of you can possibly have an interest in any of this, so, my apologies that my ridiculous Byron quote of a title somehow shows up when you search "torture."

Thanks to anyone who stopped by.

YAY!!!

I'm going west to see habermasgirl!!!

Also, I had six people over to my house last night and we all drank a ton, so that was also fun.

So...lesson learned, when you're feeling blue, invite people over or leave town.  Done.

(UPDATE:  IT'S SUPER FUN TO VISIT HABERMAS GIRL!!!)

OOOOOOOHHHHHHH

I forgot about McHenry.

I have a bunch of people coming to my house to drink shortly, which never ever happens, so I can't elaborate, but I'm just going to make that little note to myself and say once more:  I forgot about McHenry.

Who is Milne.

In Tom Stoppard's Night and Day.

Sort of.

To me.  In college.  When I was madly in love with 4 people at the same time, none of whom I could even think about having.

Now if I can just remember the other three....I know one was the classical guitar player...one was Quirky Boy.....who was four??

Sorry - no one's reading these, it's just for me.  Hi, person in Russia who looks at my blog!  I'll explain later.

The Mexican Restaurant

When I was living in London in the summer of 1996, it started off a little lonely.  I had the city to keep me company, and I loved the city, loved to trot out to museums or parks or the theatre.  I loved riding the 168 bus back home from the National Theatre, past Euston Station, up Haverstock Hill and off right at the end of the road I needed.

A Mexican restaurant sat at that juncture, on the corner, and it was oddly in the basement section of a commercial building, so you'd check in on the ground floor in a hallway, then duck down a flight of narrow stairs to the restaurant.  The hallway doors opened out onto my street, not onto Haverstock Hill, so I passed those doors to walk home, or walking out to the bus or tube, of course.  The man who ran the restaurant sat up there on a stool - it was the same man every single time I passed, dark-haired and swarthy, possibly Mexican himself, but more likely Middle Eastern or Eastern European.

One night I talked a friend into going to eat there, and we discovered it had none of the virtues of a Mexican restaurant in America: it was neither cheap, nor plentiful, nor satisfyingly tasty.  However, as we came up out of the dark basement, I stopped and spoke to the gentleman I had passed nearly every night for a month.

"Hi, I pass here all the time, and I see you every night sitting here.  Now, we're more or less neighbors, so I'd like to be friendly and say hello when I go by.  What's your name?"

He told me it was Tony, I told him my name, and I made him practice with me.  "All right, when I walk by, I'm going to say, 'Hey, Tony!!'  and you will say...'Hey, Elsbeth!'  Try it with me....Hey, Tony!"  He smiled and gamely gave it a try.  I had him say it a few more times.

He never did remember my name after that night, but for weeks afterward, when I passed I would catch his eye and say, Hey, Tony!  And he'd wave and smile and at least yell hey back.  There was recognition there, even if there wasn't a name in his memory.

Where was I?

I was disgruntled and grumpy.  I'm working hard at chilling out now, because I just don't have any interest in being pissy all the time.  I don't want to be that person.  So, deep breath, and I'm looking for the positive.

There is positive.  I got a wad of checks today for past acting work - that's always gratifying.  I'm working this week but gonna take a quick journey next week to see a favorite person (yeah, that's you, hg!), and then maybe a longer journey to see more family and the ocean.

The ocean.  I think it might just be time to go sit at the ocean with a book and my dad and do some nothing. Want to come?  There's extra room.

I don't know why these past few weeks have been so disgruntling - I mean, I had an entire week with my mom, so that was a test of endurance that I basically failed, but hey, it's my mom.  If there were a way to get it right, I might have some clue what it is by now, but then again, I might not.

I'll tell you - I got close to booking a life-changing commercial.  Not as life changing as some, but it would have been a 2 week shoot, and I got all the way to getting put on first refusal for it, which is like being pre-booked, except you don't know how many people they've pre-booked and if you are first choice or sixth.  So technically, I might not have been close at all - that's a legitimate possibility.

But if felt close - it felt like it could actually happen, and then it didn't, and I was so sad.

I keep trying to tell myself that if I'm getting close more often, I can't be that far from booking one.  That if I get put on enough first refusals, ONE of them will turn out to be for real.  But right now it just feels so damn disappointing.  Like going on 9996 miles of a 1000 mile journey and getting stopped and told I can't go any farther.

Also, as I'm sure any regular reader will know, I had mentally spent the money.  Only mentally, of course.

Wright or Wrong

I went to Taliesin today.  It's a house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for himself.  You might find it beautiful, you might find it strange, but it's absolutely unique, a new way of thinking about buildings that uses styles and references that are familiar in completely unexpected ways.

But, with hardly any evidence at all, I know the prevailing opinion is that Frank Lloyd Wright was an ass.  He was egotistical, rude, presumptuous, spoiled, self-centered.  He ran through three wives and at least one mistress, he was involved repeatedly in scandal, and there are plenty of reports of his mistreatment of staff.

So...how great does his work have to be to justify the fact that he was a shit?  Can it?  Or does his personality not effect the greatness of his vision?

I can look at his cantilevered shelves, their surfaces drifting along the side of the wall, and think, how beautiful, how magical.  Does my respect fade if I know the person who made them was cruel to his subordinates?  Or does his art earn something beyond approval of morals?

I don't know the answer to this question.  I do not think art gives one a right for bad behavior.  But I know a lot of great art that has been produced by jerks.  Does that lessen its effectiveness?  Or is there something about the uncompromising, self-centered nature of certain people that allows them to ignore the approval of the entire world in order to follow their own artistic path?  After all, doesn't niceness just produce "nice" art?

I think for me, I'm willing to put up with some bad behavior in the pursuit of art that can move me.  But I don't know if I can bring myself to perpetrate the necessary bad behavior to open up my own art.  Too much of my programming is about making other people happy.  But I dream of it, sometimes, the idea of shaking off everyone's expectations, even my own, and doing something extraordinary.  Something unexpected.

It's not an accident that the only "art" I'll let myself stand behind is one where I use the words of others.

Parents

I love my parents.  So much.  They are both completely terrific people and I am so lucky that they brought me up and made me who I am.

That said, I am hitting saturation point with my mother.  I kind of want to...no, I don't want to hit her, I just want to start screaming.

It started early.  When they arrived a whole day early.  ON my doorstep.  While I was still three hours away by car.  That's right, waiting on my doorstep a whole day early which meant all those last minute cleaning projects couldn't get done, none of the grocery shopping prep got done, none of the hey-let's-have-sex-before-your-parents-get-here got done, none of the final clean up/get organized/prepare oneself stuff GOT DONE.

So it should be no surprise that three days in, I'm near to breaking.

Oh, this weekend's trip ought to be fun.

But the hard thing is that I still adore them and want to make them happy every second.

Like I said, this will be fun.

Noticing

Life must be improving, because today I started noticing things outside myself.  The pristine beauty of fish fillets laid out along pebbled ice, a road works man checking out a pretty girl walking by, bright green socks on a hipster with black frames to his glasses and a sweep of hair falling over his forehead.

There's so much light and glory out there - people talking on street corners, children playing on the beach.  Last night as I was unlocking my bike I overheard this teenaged Asian girl tell someone, "That's why vacation has gotten so boring for me...."  It made me laugh, but of course in context I'm sure it was legitimate.  She was sitting on top of a traffic barrier and chatting with a man who looked to be three times her age, and the body language didn't read "flirt" but I couldn't pick up what relationship they had to one another.  It didn't sound like he was family.

I get bogged down in my actual life and miss the transitory and thrilling detail of the tunes of others.  I like stories so much.  Maybe it's time to pay attention to everyone else's story for a while.

Real People

I went to see a show the other night with my friend W and it restored a lot of the goodness to my life.

The show, Eastland, was absolutely fantastic.  It will sound as if I am exaggerating to say I wept for the last twenty minutes of it, but I did, big, uncontrollable shoulder-heaving sobbing right there in the second row.  I couldn't hide and I couldn't stop.  It's a folk musical, the music is unbearably lovely, and the story is about a 1915 tragedy that killed upwards of 800 people in a day.  A boat turned over on its side in a river within a few feet of shore, and before everything got sorted out 800+ were dead.  It's horrifying, to say the least.  So I knew going in that I might end up weeping.  After an hour or so of just holding my mouth shut the way you do when you're choked up, I thought, ok, this is sad, but I can keep it together.  Then something happened in the show that completely broke me open, and I was a weeping mess for the rest of it.

Which I don't mind, really.  Yes, I am relatively embarrassed to be seen in semi-public crying, but it was a terrifically moving show, and I enjoy that I can allow myself to be moved by what I experience.

Then I sat around for three hours and chatted about everything and nothing with a friend I adore.  It was surprisingly easy to forget about all the things that make me feel discontented.  It was surprisingly easy to be happy that my friend had been called back for a play I'd hoped to be called back for as well.  I wasn't called back, but again, I adore my friend, she's funny and genuine and a kick-ass actress that I love seeing in shows.

Maybe I'm not a completely contemptible human being.  Though I must say others might disagree.  Another day I'll write about my recurring dream of running into a woman who asks me to stay away from her husband but I don't know who her husband is.  Heh.  Someone in my psyche clearly has a distaste for me.  Wonder who it is.

Addendum

This really goes with the last post, but I didn't have the heart to make it longer.

On the train home from work at 11 pm tonight, I had what might be the breakthrough, the return back to being able to live with myself:

I looked down and saw a pair of really beautiful shoes, and as I scanned up I saw they were on a beautifully dressed girl - adorable dress, very glamorous, short and colorful.  She looked effortlessly fantastic.  And my actual knee-jerk thought was - wow, I bet her feet hurt in those by 11 pm at night.

Not, oh, she's so much prettier than I am (she was).

Not, oh, I wish I owned anything as pretty as that dress (I do).

Not, oh, the sight of someone attractive has made me want to crawl under a rock and hide (though of course now I totally feel that way).

Just a fleeting thought for her humanity and the idea that the perfect-looking sometimes pay in ways you don't see.