kerouac says

at a bash for a theatre here, last night, a very nice playwright was talking about how good it made one look to have good actors on hand for the first readings of one's script. after all, she said, good casting is, like, ninety per cent of it.

or if you're an actor, i noted, it's, like, a hundred percent.

i have not been the biggest fan of myself recently. but this is something i am entirely in agreement with: it would be totally uncool to ditch on your bar tab, but entirely understandable to pee in a sink if the toilet is clogged. i mean, if you ran the water and rinsed it with cleanser afterwards and everything.

dude. it's just pee. no one got hurt.

blossom dearie is still singing, and she's still playing her own piano. i got to talk to her last night after listening to a couple sets in danny's skylight room. the monkey and i had two manhattans a piece, and only had to send one back because it had a fly in it. it was a perfect, perfect evening, from the giant fruit fly to the dress-up dress to the faces the side-men wore to the surrey with the fringe on top. before we left the apartment, the monkey danced me around the living room with his mouth pressed against my temple. he'd just brushed, and i told him he smelled like a mint julep. he told me i smelled like the love of his life.

this is all not even counting the fact that we went to the mermaid parade on saturday, which was sort of perfectly new york and what i miss about home, altogether. it was like seattle's solstice parade during my hometown's lakefair except also with shoot the freak and nathan's famous and a lot more garbage. i baked myself on the beach with some number-one-for-good-fun people and there was even a robot.

i may be coming out of the thicket i've been in. maybe less worry is on the horizon. just maybe.

i only wish someone had told me about the mermaid parade in enough time to get a costume together. actually, i could probably slap a couple of scallops on my bra and just go, but i think the best one and i have a date to stand at an appointed spot along the route and hoot at one of her dressed-up friends, which is fine by me and makes it easier to drink beer. this year, moby is king neptune.

in my heart, though, i really want to make a costume.

i used to make jokes about keys to the executive washroom when i was talking about how i was likely never to have an important corporate job. there is a pretty cool bathroom here, though. it turns out one of the guys used to live in the office (but this isn't gross like the intern couch at my last job. it's a pretty cool loft space that would be great to live in). he lived here with his girlfriend, and to make it habitable, he constructed an illegal bathroom. the illegal bathroom has a jacuzzi tub in it. i've been told that i may use the jacuzzi, but if i do so to make sure to take out the tiffany lamp currently stored inside it.

the bathroom is a little odd, like secret illegal not-up-to-code bathrooms sound like they'd be, but the oddest part is that it's full of personal bathroom items, like prescription acne creams and mustache bleach. also, as those examoples might suggest, the bathroom items are distictly feminine. there's even some monistat anti-yeast medication.

who's stuff is this? does the girl who comes in to do shipping not have a bathroom in her squalid apartment in greenpoint, and does all her ablutions here at the office before i get in? it's possible. at this point, though, i'm working with the idea that the personal possessions of this girlfriend for whom boss guy lovingly constructed this bathroom, including the jacuzzi, have been left as they lay, shrine-like, from the day she moved out. boss guy seems a little lonely. maybe he's waiting for her to come back.

i came in yesterday really digging my new puppet job. the neighborhood rubs me the right way, and i think it's because there's no one out here. it's a pretty easy commute, but still: when i exit the train, there's old brick industrial buildings, funny old cafes with outdoor seating that looks like old automobile bench seats, and a river. there's also a park without a million people in it. there's a neighborhood without a million people in it, or a handful of crappy pizza joints or eleven 99 cent stores. i was ten minutes early yesterday and walked by the one (only one! not eleven!) deli, where there was an ad for a yoga and dance studio that turns out to be across the street.

i also love doing work with people who crack up a lot, even when it's pretty mindless office crapola. mindless office crapola lets me save my brain for other stuff. these guys are extremely okay with my weird schedule needs. and they make anti-george w. bush puppets. it's not enough money to get by on, but it is pretty great.

i was thinking all this yesterday morning, and loving it, and then the theatre/play development center where i fantasized about working since i first got into new york called to say there was an opening and did i want to work for them. sigh. drama job/job drama, redux. less whining this time, i swear. i'm conflicted, but i think as far as Employment Decision June 2004, i am a one-issue voter: health insurance, here, possibly, i come.

times square is a freaking mess, and i would never go there if i didn't have to. but i think if every tourist would just take a piece of trash with them as a remembrance, rather than take badly posed photos in front of the sony television billboard, that we could really make a difference.

my own houseguest not included. i'm not one of those people who has high school friends, but i do have kim. she's pretty awesome. i'm constantly amazed that in the inhuman maze of adolescence i had the wherewithal to pick her out--not because she wasn't awesome back then, too, but no one knew their ass from their elbow. there are still things i can tell her easier than anyone else, even though we missed a few years of each other's lives recently. she makes me not worry about how i sound. and that's funny, because an hour after she got here the monkey said that he had never heard anyone else i sounded so much like. he said if he got one of us on the phone out of context, he wouldn't know who it was. we're a funny kind of twins.

i'm feeling oddly apathetic about things that used to excite me. i used to write in this blog every day. i used to make mental notes during the day about what i'd jabber down here . . . now, it's getting harder. i often just don't wanna.

for another thing, the show. i was pretty excited to be cast, but it's wearing oddly thin. it must be a combo plate of it not being my favorite format, the long nights and the ceaseless three-night-a-week routine--all spiced by my poverty, and how i'm willing, possibly to have two jobs but not three. especially when one doesn't pay.

if we were making what the chicago cast makes, i'd stick it out. although if that were true, we'd also have some administrative support and a good relationship with the keepers of our performance space, all of which is sadly lacking in brooklyn. but i'm sitting here wondering where my hard-earned cash escapes to around this time every month, trying to visualize getting another part time job while essentially donating three nights a week to an sort of unfulfilling theatre experience.

maybe what i need is a long break. i'm still shy of actually saying i want to quit. it's not like other performance opportunities are waiting in the wings, although i hope some'll crop up. and i like the people, and they're my first new york friends who aren't actually from somewhere else i lived. sigh.

three jobs. lots of heat. not so much sleep.

can't post, but i felt weird letting more than a week go by, so:

i'm not gone, just borrowed for a while. i'll get back. soon.

i saw a baby gorilla. and some peacocks. and the ridiculousness of underfunded, poorly staffed public schools in action.

the latter bit resulted in us getting a very late start. but the zoo was fun, and an unparalleled opportunity to observe my students in a habitat other than the freaky loud random building where they go to "school."

it was a long walk to the train to the bronx. around block number six i smelled something funny. it smelled vaguely sewer-like. what is that smell, i asked. three of the four girls i was walking with (two black, two dominican, if you're counting) said simultaneously, without pausing to think, "africans."

it was heartbreaking to watch these kids in the millieu of calm, polite, respectful families and other, better behaved school groups. i've come to adore their spunk, but i still cringe inside when they catcall the eight-minute rainforest film and bang on the plexiglass of the python's cage and run screaming obscenities through the cafeteria. "the rainforest is endangered," one zoo employee intoned gravely. other school kids looked wide-eyed, respectful--and, true, some goofed off, some picked noses. my kids? one said, "so? repeatedly, with all her decibels, while another pointed towards the video screen, showing two gorillas peacefully eating leaves, and shouted repeatedly, "you're gonna get raped! you're gonna get raped!" two of my favorite boys never took their earphones off the entire time, and one insisted on rapping along with tupac while the rest of us tried to enjoy the peaceful sanctuary of the gazelle exhibit. i love them, but seeing them in the context of all the kids and families i grew up considering "normal" breaks my heart. maybe that's elitist, but it's not bad of me to wish they had more of the things whose benefit make a child tend towards . . . i dunno, general respect, or a desire to learn or listen, or a certain kind of discipline. i don't speak for all of seventh grade harlem, but a lot of these kids haven't had much, and their reaction is to yell at the world to get off their tail and step back, even if the world is just trying to show them how cool flamingoes are.