Running a small theater company these days (maybe all days since the days of The Globe, if Shakespeare In Love is to be believed, and I believe everything about that film, including the now-quaint notion that Gwyneth Paltrow was once delightful) is akin to wondering why one is at a certain age still single.
Being perpetually without a mate, it's an incessant question-answer session with your therapist brain. You look good. You work out. You have a decent career. You have loads of friends, and interests, and a great dog you walk to the park dutifully every Saturday morning hoping to find yourself in a meet-cute situation that will inevitably lead to rom-com hijinks and a triumphant traipse down the aisle. You are open to encounters with your preferred sex, be it online or on the karaoke circuit or as the obligatory non-plus-une at a wedding or in line at the grocery. You read advice columns in the glossy magazines at the doctor's office, you take advice from well-meaning friends, family, and casual acquaintances, you advise yourself late at night with book and beer in hand--all the while wondering, how is it is that you, whose dance card is always full, whom everyone and their mother insists you are good and smart and funny and handsome and talented and nurturing and just an all-around Goop-style catch sans the snobbery, remain consciously uncoupled?
Being perpetually without full houses during a run, it's an incessant back-and-forth conversation with everyone. You put on a good show. You cast people with talent to light up the stage, and more talented folk to aim those lights. You have 20 years of experience perfecting what makes your productions stand out in a crowd. You have built up an audience, you vary your content to suit all kinds, you tirelessly pursue rights for the next-big regional thing that will catapult your troupe into a happily-ever-after of sold-out houses and supersized donations and a company that isn't just about numbers but about living the good theatrical life. You willingly embrace new works and old chestnuts, deconstructing them to breathe artistic life into great works. You educate yourself on similar models, you study and learn from colleagues and patrons and supporters, you explore at cast parties and in front of the laptop post-run, you post and you hashtag and you chat it up at every opportunity--all the while musing, how is it that your company, which works its collective fanny off to engage, contribute, and discover, which everyone buzzes about season after season as being fun and interesting and hard-working and respected, why is this particular production not being enjoyed by the masses?
You have had good relationships with lovers and audiences alike. Like Gwynnie you have garnered high praise and broken hearts and lost your own, you have put your foot in your mouth and you have staged just the right comeback, you have reinvented yourself to suit yourself and then to suit someone elses, you have come out on top in terms of running the show on your own terms, critics be damned. It feels good to age into yourself, to be good in your own glowing skin, to enjoy your own company and your carefully collected best mates from over the years, to be honest about the work it takes to have this body and this body of work. But the hook is this: that niggling ticking following you everywhere you go in your own home, annoyed and confused and ultimately hapless in your efforts to find that sweet spot of success. The sliding doors of choices made, the what ifs, the unapologetic stance yet behind-the-facade worry over is this the right thing, was that the wrong decision, when can you just sit back for one night (or nine) and exhale in the glee that comes with hard-won success in life and in art?
Maybe it's the vegan-unfriendly references to meatloaf stroganoff. Who the hell knows.
Saturday, May 17, 2014
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Apply Liberally
What does it mean to be an adult of a certain age and to so entirely not have your shit together? And how did we get here from there? And does it matter to anyone, least of all to oneself?
Many of my peers have gone down the path of least resistance. Soul-sucking job in some partitioned room beneath florescent lights. Been there, done that, couldn't do it anymore. So I traded it in for something a little more highbrow. Only to fully realize years later my soul is still being sucked dry by a windowless unpartitioned office beneath the dim and unforgiving buzz of florescent lights. I protect her in the off hours, to be sure. But I think someone else is always getting to Scotland afore me.
Time doesn't fly in the workaday world I inhabit. It crawls like a lazy tick. And I am conscious almost every second of every day of the life force being leached out of me. I feel it in my marrow bones. I know it is a rotten situation for me. I know it's time to hit the road, Jack. But the road less traveled is still the one I set my sights on. And this is where time starts playing tricks. Because this is the part where I start to feel conscious of it running out. That the road is too tough to hoe.
I push colored pins into the map of my existence, tracking my journey throughout this mortal coil. I know where I've been. I know why I am here now. But what I cannot do is plan my trip to get to the next destination, anywhere.
I imagine my peers aren't aware of their lost souls. Or they are better at compensating for the damage done by the peeling of the ozone layer that once protected it, by the rip in the fabric of their time. They own homes and have the latest in babies, cars, vacations, kitchenware. They have a plan for what happens when they pack a box of office detritus and slap on their gold watch and head out into the golden light. I have never been one of them and it's obvious I am unlikely to ever be. I am glad I don't live on that street.
I am less glad that I am not one of their higher-minded kin, the do-gooders on the avenue, the ones that managed to cocoon their souls by studying and learning and working in careers that offer a sky-high SPF and a circle to travel in that nurtures rather than destroys, and eventually they too have their families, and their lives, and their sense of satisfaction in themselves.
I live somewhere on a boulevard all to myself. Mostly I took the road less traveled by and the difference has been--that I am crippled by fear and anxiety about this business of being--for it is a business. The sun shines on the art of the soul, not the commerce. But here the bank account is low, a girl's gotta grift as good as she gets, she better know how to poor. And sometimes the UV rays punch through to remind me that I want the other things too. But it's too hot to go look for them now.
It's tiresome to feel one is doing more wrong than right. It's tiresome to know one's wiring is faulty in the grid of the way it's supposed to be. And it's tiresome that at this age, responsibilities and dreams come crashing through at the speed of light, scorching up everything in their path on the way in for a landing, and leaving behind burns that scar even as they heal.
And that's how I feel about this fixed point in time.
Many of my peers have gone down the path of least resistance. Soul-sucking job in some partitioned room beneath florescent lights. Been there, done that, couldn't do it anymore. So I traded it in for something a little more highbrow. Only to fully realize years later my soul is still being sucked dry by a windowless unpartitioned office beneath the dim and unforgiving buzz of florescent lights. I protect her in the off hours, to be sure. But I think someone else is always getting to Scotland afore me.
Time doesn't fly in the workaday world I inhabit. It crawls like a lazy tick. And I am conscious almost every second of every day of the life force being leached out of me. I feel it in my marrow bones. I know it is a rotten situation for me. I know it's time to hit the road, Jack. But the road less traveled is still the one I set my sights on. And this is where time starts playing tricks. Because this is the part where I start to feel conscious of it running out. That the road is too tough to hoe.
I push colored pins into the map of my existence, tracking my journey throughout this mortal coil. I know where I've been. I know why I am here now. But what I cannot do is plan my trip to get to the next destination, anywhere.
I imagine my peers aren't aware of their lost souls. Or they are better at compensating for the damage done by the peeling of the ozone layer that once protected it, by the rip in the fabric of their time. They own homes and have the latest in babies, cars, vacations, kitchenware. They have a plan for what happens when they pack a box of office detritus and slap on their gold watch and head out into the golden light. I have never been one of them and it's obvious I am unlikely to ever be. I am glad I don't live on that street.
I am less glad that I am not one of their higher-minded kin, the do-gooders on the avenue, the ones that managed to cocoon their souls by studying and learning and working in careers that offer a sky-high SPF and a circle to travel in that nurtures rather than destroys, and eventually they too have their families, and their lives, and their sense of satisfaction in themselves.
I live somewhere on a boulevard all to myself. Mostly I took the road less traveled by and the difference has been--that I am crippled by fear and anxiety about this business of being--for it is a business. The sun shines on the art of the soul, not the commerce. But here the bank account is low, a girl's gotta grift as good as she gets, she better know how to poor. And sometimes the UV rays punch through to remind me that I want the other things too. But it's too hot to go look for them now.
It's tiresome to feel one is doing more wrong than right. It's tiresome to know one's wiring is faulty in the grid of the way it's supposed to be. And it's tiresome that at this age, responsibilities and dreams come crashing through at the speed of light, scorching up everything in their path on the way in for a landing, and leaving behind burns that scar even as they heal.
And that's how I feel about this fixed point in time.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
The Unpretty
It starts out small--a niggling sensation at the back of your throat, a word you can't quite grasp on the tip of your tongue, a not entirely unpleasant prickling feeling where a blister is forming at the back of your heel. It grows to a monstrous size in no time to speak of--the gross and lingering sinus infection, the crazy-Internet stalking for that damn bit of vocabulary lost, the skin erupted and blood staining your shoe.
It's the curse of The Unpretty.
I have noticed that The Unpretty generally follows a bout of Extreme Prettiness, the latter defined best as the bloom upon the rose, the glowing reviews, the picture-perfect self. These periods are also rare, but oh so divine. The same cannot be said for its rival.
Extreme Prettiness is when all your clothes hang just right on your neatly proportioned frame (and match, and are clean, and fit, and were purchased in this decade, and came off hangers in the closet rather than from the unfolded pile from the floor of freshly laundered fashions from ten years ago.) Extreme Prettiness is when you expertly line your lids and subtly paint your mouth and dust on some shimmer in thirty seconds flat and the result is a dewy, doe-eyed, sweet bird of youth (not a splotchy, shiny, haggard hot mess whose heretofore minimalist hippie-chick routine appears to be no longer an option.) Extreme Prettiness is when you are so in love that everyone knows it at a glance from the after-glow look permanently emanating from your every word, gesture, and smile (instead of the good people of the world recoiling at your clearly woman-scorned-and-soured-on-the-male-race-screaming-drunk-karaoke-anthems-like-Bobby-McGee-at-your-horrified-friends.)
Extreme Prettiness is when you can stay out all night and party like it's 1999 and at dawn still look like you did when it was actually 1999. The Unpretty is when you wake up with your split ends floating in the toilet and a purple rim around your chapped lips.
The Unpretty is like The Mean Reds in the sense that suddenly you are ugly and you don't know what is causing it. Sure there are signs. The jeans that now come with a side of the dread muffin top. The zit that won't quit now spawning a little family of cysts on your cheek. The haircut that acquaintances comment on having happened without the requisite complimentary follow-up. The lipstick that looked lovely at cocktail hour now half-gone and what's left is spitting little flecks into your coffee cup at dessert. These little vanities taken one at a time are conquerable. But sometimes they wreak havoc on your physical being all at once and you join the ranks of The Unpretty.
Equal to the physical confusion that wrecks my concept of my looks when I find myself one of The Unpretty is the lightening-quick paranoia that sets in and consumes my every waking hour. I imagine everyone I know is secretly commenting on my appearance and what they are saying ain't good. I feel as though I have overnight gone from having a healthy sense of self to having no sense of self at all, if said self is now a hideous fat and wrinkled Jabba woman-monster formerly known as me. There is no perspective to be had.
Dressing whilst mired in The Unpretty becomes a tactical nightmare best left to donning a Snuggie 24-7 and completely giving up on all matters sartorial as well as social, as leaving the house and unleashing one's Gummo-ness upon the unsuspecting populace will not make one feel better. Unfortunately one can't call in sick indefinitely, so one assembles an outfit after several tries that manages to be as universally unflattering as it is constricting and possibly a little smelly. Mirrors are best avoided during The Unpretty but in the vain hope that things have significantly improved as quickly as they deteriorated one must go through the looking glass as often as possible, which leads to the discovery of new and devastating flaws (Is that a hair growing out of my forehead? Has that tooth always been a different shade than the rest? Did this shirt have a big hole under the arm this morning?)
The Unpretty leads to tears and recriminations and great wailing and gnashing of teeth, which as you might imagine does not go far in making the situation any better and in fact adds puffy eyes and a cherry red nose and another soupcon of crazy to the mix. Like Miss Havisham before her, in the throes of The Unpretty one retreats to the dusty corners of one's mind while sporting a moldy dress, recalling the good old days of one's great expectations [last week], when one was a sparkling dynamo of It Girl fascination invited to all the best places and breaking all the best hearts with wanton adorableness.
The Unpretty strikes us all, yet there is no warning bell. Suddenly you are ugly and you don't know why. In the past I have noticed it stealthily creeps away only a trifle less insidiously as it crept in, and this gives me hope for the future (i.e., summer.) Although I do sometimes fear that someday it may become a permanent state. In which case I will need a Snuggie and a lot of wine. But until that day, dear goddess, deliver me from the vain pomp and glory of my self-absorption but let me look Pretty while doing it. Because I am nothing if not shallow (except right now, when I am mostly just The Unpretty.)
It's the curse of The Unpretty.
I have noticed that The Unpretty generally follows a bout of Extreme Prettiness, the latter defined best as the bloom upon the rose, the glowing reviews, the picture-perfect self. These periods are also rare, but oh so divine. The same cannot be said for its rival.
Extreme Prettiness is when all your clothes hang just right on your neatly proportioned frame (and match, and are clean, and fit, and were purchased in this decade, and came off hangers in the closet rather than from the unfolded pile from the floor of freshly laundered fashions from ten years ago.) Extreme Prettiness is when you expertly line your lids and subtly paint your mouth and dust on some shimmer in thirty seconds flat and the result is a dewy, doe-eyed, sweet bird of youth (not a splotchy, shiny, haggard hot mess whose heretofore minimalist hippie-chick routine appears to be no longer an option.) Extreme Prettiness is when you are so in love that everyone knows it at a glance from the after-glow look permanently emanating from your every word, gesture, and smile (instead of the good people of the world recoiling at your clearly woman-scorned-and-soured-on-the-male-race-screaming-drunk-karaoke-anthems-like-Bobby-McGee-at-your-horrified-friends.)
Extreme Prettiness is when you can stay out all night and party like it's 1999 and at dawn still look like you did when it was actually 1999. The Unpretty is when you wake up with your split ends floating in the toilet and a purple rim around your chapped lips.
The Unpretty is like The Mean Reds in the sense that suddenly you are ugly and you don't know what is causing it. Sure there are signs. The jeans that now come with a side of the dread muffin top. The zit that won't quit now spawning a little family of cysts on your cheek. The haircut that acquaintances comment on having happened without the requisite complimentary follow-up. The lipstick that looked lovely at cocktail hour now half-gone and what's left is spitting little flecks into your coffee cup at dessert. These little vanities taken one at a time are conquerable. But sometimes they wreak havoc on your physical being all at once and you join the ranks of The Unpretty.
Equal to the physical confusion that wrecks my concept of my looks when I find myself one of The Unpretty is the lightening-quick paranoia that sets in and consumes my every waking hour. I imagine everyone I know is secretly commenting on my appearance and what they are saying ain't good. I feel as though I have overnight gone from having a healthy sense of self to having no sense of self at all, if said self is now a hideous fat and wrinkled Jabba woman-monster formerly known as me. There is no perspective to be had.
Dressing whilst mired in The Unpretty becomes a tactical nightmare best left to donning a Snuggie 24-7 and completely giving up on all matters sartorial as well as social, as leaving the house and unleashing one's Gummo-ness upon the unsuspecting populace will not make one feel better. Unfortunately one can't call in sick indefinitely, so one assembles an outfit after several tries that manages to be as universally unflattering as it is constricting and possibly a little smelly. Mirrors are best avoided during The Unpretty but in the vain hope that things have significantly improved as quickly as they deteriorated one must go through the looking glass as often as possible, which leads to the discovery of new and devastating flaws (Is that a hair growing out of my forehead? Has that tooth always been a different shade than the rest? Did this shirt have a big hole under the arm this morning?)
The Unpretty leads to tears and recriminations and great wailing and gnashing of teeth, which as you might imagine does not go far in making the situation any better and in fact adds puffy eyes and a cherry red nose and another soupcon of crazy to the mix. Like Miss Havisham before her, in the throes of The Unpretty one retreats to the dusty corners of one's mind while sporting a moldy dress, recalling the good old days of one's great expectations [last week], when one was a sparkling dynamo of It Girl fascination invited to all the best places and breaking all the best hearts with wanton adorableness.
The Unpretty strikes us all, yet there is no warning bell. Suddenly you are ugly and you don't know why. In the past I have noticed it stealthily creeps away only a trifle less insidiously as it crept in, and this gives me hope for the future (i.e., summer.) Although I do sometimes fear that someday it may become a permanent state. In which case I will need a Snuggie and a lot of wine. But until that day, dear goddess, deliver me from the vain pomp and glory of my self-absorption but let me look Pretty while doing it. Because I am nothing if not shallow (except right now, when I am mostly just The Unpretty.)
Friday, July 29, 2011
Alfred J Prufucked
Ah, the siren song of the non-job-job. Its melodious notes waft over the office drone at inopportune times, lulling one into a dangerous dream of all that could be if only she could follow that haunting harmony into the deep waters off career satisfaction coast.
I hold a job-job wherein I have been asked to write up a so-called "informal evaluation" of life on the island of misfit academics. In particular I have been asked to list my accomplishments from the past year and my goals for the coming one. As I am bored silly by the slow pace of said job-job in the summer months, I started to work on this ignoble assignment only to discover that I have accomplished very little and hope to accomplish even less. It isn't that I am unhappy here--far from it. I enjoy most of what I do. I am a bit burnt out by it even as I am not overly stimulated by it, but that is the main reason I took this job. My life outside of here is stimulant enough to cure a coke fiend. So no, I don't wish to overextend myself in pursuit of reaching lofty goals so I can look down from the heavens of serious scholarship. I don't wish to travel far afield for meetings or seminars at my own expense, which is less than money issues than life issues (see aforementioned coke fiend cure.) All I really want to do (and my desire to do this wanes evermore) is come in, do a good job at my actual job-job, and go home and do my life-life. And as it is, and certainly if I am asked to do more, then I need my palms crossed with far more silver than they are currently.
These facts do not a good self-evaluation add up. Also, said s.e. has no connection whatsoever with a raise of any sort. It's more like, let's talk about our feelings.
Here are my feelings. I think, no, I FEEL, why am I doing this? I feel now why, but really, why am I doing this? I have been working since I was 13 years old. I don't want to anymore. But I want stuff, and stuff costs money, so I have to exchange services for goods somehow. Fine. But I know that unless I get really really lucky with some windfall of fame and fortune sometime soon (or ever) I will always be poor as a churchmouse, so why aren't I doing something that makes me all the things a career should make one, and not worry about the financial gain?
Kids who come from money tend to beget more money in life. And presumably doing what they want to do. Not always true, but it's a lot easier to pursue certain careers like music or art or even do-goodering type of employment when you have the money to have hit the right schools and made the right friends and continue to have that bubble bankrolled while you intern at the Kennedy Center or traipse through Nepal or lived somewhere sans rats for grad school. When you just gotta pay the bills, it's tough to do whatcha wanna. But it gets harder, I think, to keep doing what you decidedly do not want to.
Two sides, one coin, really. Everybody's gotta make a living. I could make a way worse one, I could probably make a way better one. But therein lies the problem--I don't feel like doing any of it right now. I want to enjoy life, and have enough money to do things, and not feel like I am crawling out of my own skin as I sit behind a desk every day for not enough pay to do anything "extra" and even not enough to do everything "necessary." And I see so many around me struggling with the same thing. Being besties with mainly artists does that to a girl. But while we are no longer in the first flush of youth, but we are in many ways younger than our parents were at our ages. And we don't want to sell our souls to the company store, hold out for that gold watch, leave our big dreams and delusions of grandeur in the dust and replace them with prosaic realities and two-car garages. We want to enjoy our cake--the cake we baked and iced and served. And we should be able to. But the rich get richer and the poor get children--twins called debt and drudgery.
Where's the poetry in that?
I hold a job-job wherein I have been asked to write up a so-called "informal evaluation" of life on the island of misfit academics. In particular I have been asked to list my accomplishments from the past year and my goals for the coming one. As I am bored silly by the slow pace of said job-job in the summer months, I started to work on this ignoble assignment only to discover that I have accomplished very little and hope to accomplish even less. It isn't that I am unhappy here--far from it. I enjoy most of what I do. I am a bit burnt out by it even as I am not overly stimulated by it, but that is the main reason I took this job. My life outside of here is stimulant enough to cure a coke fiend. So no, I don't wish to overextend myself in pursuit of reaching lofty goals so I can look down from the heavens of serious scholarship. I don't wish to travel far afield for meetings or seminars at my own expense, which is less than money issues than life issues (see aforementioned coke fiend cure.) All I really want to do (and my desire to do this wanes evermore) is come in, do a good job at my actual job-job, and go home and do my life-life. And as it is, and certainly if I am asked to do more, then I need my palms crossed with far more silver than they are currently.
These facts do not a good self-evaluation add up. Also, said s.e. has no connection whatsoever with a raise of any sort. It's more like, let's talk about our feelings.
Here are my feelings. I think, no, I FEEL, why am I doing this? I feel now why, but really, why am I doing this? I have been working since I was 13 years old. I don't want to anymore. But I want stuff, and stuff costs money, so I have to exchange services for goods somehow. Fine. But I know that unless I get really really lucky with some windfall of fame and fortune sometime soon (or ever) I will always be poor as a churchmouse, so why aren't I doing something that makes me all the things a career should make one, and not worry about the financial gain?
Kids who come from money tend to beget more money in life. And presumably doing what they want to do. Not always true, but it's a lot easier to pursue certain careers like music or art or even do-goodering type of employment when you have the money to have hit the right schools and made the right friends and continue to have that bubble bankrolled while you intern at the Kennedy Center or traipse through Nepal or lived somewhere sans rats for grad school. When you just gotta pay the bills, it's tough to do whatcha wanna. But it gets harder, I think, to keep doing what you decidedly do not want to.
Two sides, one coin, really. Everybody's gotta make a living. I could make a way worse one, I could probably make a way better one. But therein lies the problem--I don't feel like doing any of it right now. I want to enjoy life, and have enough money to do things, and not feel like I am crawling out of my own skin as I sit behind a desk every day for not enough pay to do anything "extra" and even not enough to do everything "necessary." And I see so many around me struggling with the same thing. Being besties with mainly artists does that to a girl. But while we are no longer in the first flush of youth, but we are in many ways younger than our parents were at our ages. And we don't want to sell our souls to the company store, hold out for that gold watch, leave our big dreams and delusions of grandeur in the dust and replace them with prosaic realities and two-car garages. We want to enjoy our cake--the cake we baked and iced and served. And we should be able to. But the rich get richer and the poor get children--twins called debt and drudgery.
Where's the poetry in that?
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Ruby Red
I have been slacking on the blogging. Clearly this was bound to happen as I am une slackere in many areas of my life. Reasons for not writing would include, I have not much to say. Just been doing the summertime and the livin's easy thing. So far it's been a pretty swell summer. But a pretty hot one too. I have discovered that I can grow vegetables and eat them! I have been cast in a play that scares the shit out of me! I am getting to do three concert shows this summer including the terrifying debut of JT2! And I am in the love with the nicest boy! These are the things that July has brought, along with a nice beach weekend courtesy of my two mums, a miniversary tour of our nation's capital, lots of frustrations at work, and an adult swim night. I plan to wrap it up with a wedding (not mine) and some craft beers (all mine.) Not too shabby, to be honest. But also to be honest, not much to write home about here.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Crazy As A Junebug
I am very, very, very, very neurotic. I have always been as such, doubtless a product of growing up in an atmosphere wherein vigilance was tantamount to survival. I know the difference between six ice cubes being cracked and three; the exact second one's breathing turns from shallow to deep, the exact number of steps it takes to get from one room to another. It may be a kind of OCD but it started out being less about me and more about others. Maybe now it has turned in on itself?
I worry so much about so many things that I have become adept at a practiced nonchalance to counterbalance my especial brand of nuts. So when this pretty insouciance is thwarted, I seem to go extra cuckoo for cocoa puffs in my own head.
I am rawther an old-fashioned girl. I depend on traditions and rituals, many of my own making, created as a defense against the dark art of singlehood. Christmas Eve. Quiet time. Bistroing, porch parties. Quiet late nights in my little outdoor kingdom. Festivals.
I like to entertain, not because it forces me to clean up the digs (though added bonus), but because I love being able to provide even a small bit of succor and sustenance for travellers. Having grown up in a home where the latchkey wasn't always on the lookout for the race that knows Joseph, I prefer that my home is one that graciously welcomes guests. I also prefer that it graciously welcomes me, which I have distinctively fallen down on over the past few months, thus making the former impossible to fathom at this time.
I am sometimes a modern girl. I like to take care of myself. I have been doing it long enough, lord knows, and lord knows how often I do it poorly. But I get by, I get back, I get up again--it is all I know to do. And even when the current dissatisfactions at the forefront of my addled mind--lack of funds, lack of motivation to procure funds, lack of understanding how one finds oneself in this curious abyss of the college-educated working poor--I am usually pretty good at grifting my way around them. But sometimes spells are cast and sometimes they are deflected. And right now they are not working at all.
The happiness of my friends is of huge importance to me. I like to feed people, to water them, to give them a place to grow and thrive and be tended as I do my garden (which is to say, I do all the above when I am not in a dangerous mood that is more pesticide than domicile.) I try to be supportive of the many endeavors their personalities lead them to undertake, as they are supportive of me and mine. And I try to understand that these same people are ever-changing and growing, as am I, and that we may not always be able to bloom in the same year. Some of us don't come back at all, bright though we may have burned the seasons prior. Some are there but not budding and some grow so tall they threaten to choke out everyone else. Some are newly planted. Some bloom up unexpectedly amidst what looked to be a mass of weeds. And I seem to love them all too much.
I worry so much about so many things that I have become adept at a practiced nonchalance to counterbalance my especial brand of nuts. So when this pretty insouciance is thwarted, I seem to go extra cuckoo for cocoa puffs in my own head.
I am rawther an old-fashioned girl. I depend on traditions and rituals, many of my own making, created as a defense against the dark art of singlehood. Christmas Eve. Quiet time. Bistroing, porch parties. Quiet late nights in my little outdoor kingdom. Festivals.
I like to entertain, not because it forces me to clean up the digs (though added bonus), but because I love being able to provide even a small bit of succor and sustenance for travellers. Having grown up in a home where the latchkey wasn't always on the lookout for the race that knows Joseph, I prefer that my home is one that graciously welcomes guests. I also prefer that it graciously welcomes me, which I have distinctively fallen down on over the past few months, thus making the former impossible to fathom at this time.
I am sometimes a modern girl. I like to take care of myself. I have been doing it long enough, lord knows, and lord knows how often I do it poorly. But I get by, I get back, I get up again--it is all I know to do. And even when the current dissatisfactions at the forefront of my addled mind--lack of funds, lack of motivation to procure funds, lack of understanding how one finds oneself in this curious abyss of the college-educated working poor--I am usually pretty good at grifting my way around them. But sometimes spells are cast and sometimes they are deflected. And right now they are not working at all.
The happiness of my friends is of huge importance to me. I like to feed people, to water them, to give them a place to grow and thrive and be tended as I do my garden (which is to say, I do all the above when I am not in a dangerous mood that is more pesticide than domicile.) I try to be supportive of the many endeavors their personalities lead them to undertake, as they are supportive of me and mine. And I try to understand that these same people are ever-changing and growing, as am I, and that we may not always be able to bloom in the same year. Some of us don't come back at all, bright though we may have burned the seasons prior. Some are there but not budding and some grow so tall they threaten to choke out everyone else. Some are newly planted. Some bloom up unexpectedly amidst what looked to be a mass of weeds. And I seem to love them all too much.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Pressure
I started attending kindergarten at age four, having already learned to read and thus ready per my parents for higher education. My report cards for that year showed a fairly happy child with a streak of stubborn, occasional marks for misconduct, and a warning that perhaps I was an overly confident child.
It occurs to me over 20 years later that this last is a pretty horrendous comment to make about a four-year old kid. And I wonder if such dire warnings came to us all at a tender age, and started us down the thorny path of "never good enough." While this road less taken can produce great art, it can also produce at-times deplorable living conditions within the house that is you. Think Hoarders, blood-and-guts style. You hold on to all this useless bric-a-brac--empty cardboard boxes of numbing effects; gaudy decorations purchased in the emotional outburst of an off-season sale; candy wrappers from when life was sweet--because some day you may need it for your art.
But what if you are not using your art all the time? What if you are undergoing a lack of art imitating life, so all you are holding on to is a body of life work that is ultimately useless in its ephemerality, and ultimately destroys you as it crowds you out of house and home, cuts off access to your heating and cooling systems, rusts out the well so it's run dry? Suddenly what is eccentric, quirky, unique, awe-inspiring, is now a problem of such magnitude that you must be dug out from under the avalanche of tchotchkes you have managed to collect over your years.
They are unconscious, these early acquisitions; they show up in your head before you even begin to call yourself a collector. It begins so idly that you haven't even a notion of what use any of it will have to you now or later. Perhaps you even inherit a cache of treasures, or receive some as gifts, and so it starts with innocent insouciance. You come into the game with confidence. Someone else determines it is too much confidence. You are asked to hold back, to hide your love away, to keep secret the knowledge that you are happy to be who you are, to let your freak flag fly proud over your head. You comply, because how else will you survive in the world at large? You store up barrels of provisions to see you through the long hard winters of their discontent, and you consider yourself lucky that they cannot starve you out. You hunker down in your fortress of solitude and dream of what may come as soon as you escape the ties that bind, never imagining that the damage may have been done and that everything that comes to you in lilac time will be a pale imitation of the life you were actually born to lead.
Do you spend a lifetime charging at windmills to win back that sweet far thing, not caring what anyone thinks or says is the proper way of going on, insisting that you are winning? Or do you accept the help being offered to you today, to clean up your act and shine up the surface, because conventional wisdom promises you will be more comfortable to live in, to live with, to live on the same planet as everyone else?
Which choice lets you reclaim that free girl smile, the one you started to lose that first time someone told you to go way back and sit down?
It occurs to me over 20 years later that this last is a pretty horrendous comment to make about a four-year old kid. And I wonder if such dire warnings came to us all at a tender age, and started us down the thorny path of "never good enough." While this road less taken can produce great art, it can also produce at-times deplorable living conditions within the house that is you. Think Hoarders, blood-and-guts style. You hold on to all this useless bric-a-brac--empty cardboard boxes of numbing effects; gaudy decorations purchased in the emotional outburst of an off-season sale; candy wrappers from when life was sweet--because some day you may need it for your art.
But what if you are not using your art all the time? What if you are undergoing a lack of art imitating life, so all you are holding on to is a body of life work that is ultimately useless in its ephemerality, and ultimately destroys you as it crowds you out of house and home, cuts off access to your heating and cooling systems, rusts out the well so it's run dry? Suddenly what is eccentric, quirky, unique, awe-inspiring, is now a problem of such magnitude that you must be dug out from under the avalanche of tchotchkes you have managed to collect over your years.
They are unconscious, these early acquisitions; they show up in your head before you even begin to call yourself a collector. It begins so idly that you haven't even a notion of what use any of it will have to you now or later. Perhaps you even inherit a cache of treasures, or receive some as gifts, and so it starts with innocent insouciance. You come into the game with confidence. Someone else determines it is too much confidence. You are asked to hold back, to hide your love away, to keep secret the knowledge that you are happy to be who you are, to let your freak flag fly proud over your head. You comply, because how else will you survive in the world at large? You store up barrels of provisions to see you through the long hard winters of their discontent, and you consider yourself lucky that they cannot starve you out. You hunker down in your fortress of solitude and dream of what may come as soon as you escape the ties that bind, never imagining that the damage may have been done and that everything that comes to you in lilac time will be a pale imitation of the life you were actually born to lead.
Do you spend a lifetime charging at windmills to win back that sweet far thing, not caring what anyone thinks or says is the proper way of going on, insisting that you are winning? Or do you accept the help being offered to you today, to clean up your act and shine up the surface, because conventional wisdom promises you will be more comfortable to live in, to live with, to live on the same planet as everyone else?
Which choice lets you reclaim that free girl smile, the one you started to lose that first time someone told you to go way back and sit down?
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