kerouac says

summer stock camp was lovely.  while i'm appreciatively envious of the monkey's green, non-pee-filled surroundings, i don't for a second envy him the experience of the show.  it's funny; the last time we were doing a piece he believed in, in an exotic location, but the overall professionalism of the show let him down, he was really irascible.  there, in the catskills, he seems able to put up with community theatre actors and general low-calibre art.  it's sort of an curious lesson in what affects him most.  granted, he's got a clean and charming place to eat, sleep and shower, which we never had in scotland.  in the end, i suppose it matters to him that he's treated like a professional, even if the work isn't what he'd hoped.  i'd probably be the same way, but no matter how charming the bunkhouse, the crappy acting *would* bother me.

i saw eight deer.  i swam in the swimming hole.  we went to a county fair, complete with prize goats, sheep, cows and ponies.  there was a pig race.  we drank big plastic tumblers of budweiser.  we went on some mouse-themed rollercoaster (the monkey got so scared he had to stop holding my hand and hold on to the safety bar).

the next day i holed up and worked on the movie i'm making for the pretty princess, who is getting married on friday.  it is an assload of work.  i better get a prize.  if i can figure it out, i'll post clips here.

her dress cost seventeen hundred dollars.  i have no idea what would make that sound worth it, unless you were wealthy enough that it didn't matter.  jeez.  seventeen hundred bucks.  that's quite a week in paris.

being back home alone is sort of daunting, although i'm off tomorrow for seattle.   going back to seattle is always bittersweet; i hate feeling that the place has moved on without me, although i guess it would be weirder if everything were the same.   every time i return, i guess, i'll "belong" less and less.  i hope it's mostly lovely and only a small, complementary amount sad/nostalgic.  if you know of something happening going on that i shouldn't miss, you'd be doing me a favor by posting a comment.

today's check of google news finds this july 16 article about the sodomizings at abu ghraib.

more here, including a mention of a criminal complaint filed by the world organization for human rights.

i know no one's reading this blog to keep abreast of world news, but i can't get past this very large anger about the lack of media attention this issue is receiving.  hersh says he's not done reporting on the issue; i hope so, for everyone's sake.

if you're eligible but not registered to vote, step up. 

"Stop all this Bush shit.
It's Louie that's the real problem."

i would like to be more satisfied.  it occurs to me more often recently that finding more satisfaction may have much more to do with cultivating some sort of contentness than with railing at a world which won't yield up her treasure.  i really want to do what i want to do, but i'm frightened of the prospect of a plan where Someone Else holds all the cards.   i don't think casting directors are gods who kill us for sport, but i'm uneasy waiting for those types to make the decisions that will make me happy.  and,  increasingly, i'm wondering if there isn't some worm in my apple that will make me unsatisfied with what i have then, just as i am now.

i get freaky everytime a conversation with myself seems like it might veer into advice towards settling.    there's probably a spot on the continuum between settling and railing, though.  i occasionally felt truly wretched when i looked at my own policy of only falling for those who had other plans, and having only wimpy feelings at best for those who fell for me.  that one turned out okay, which i guess is a good object lesson for the current conundrum, but the immense satisfaction i felt upon the finding of the monkey hasn't done much to dull the failure chant that goes on in my head.

i lived in a place once where some people knew who i was and what i did, and i liked that.  i also made enough money to buy the occasional pair of green suede boots.  here, in this harder place, even with the incredible buffering effect of the monkey, i have neither work nor buying power, and it really smarts. 

the dayjob guys, bless them, are considering offering me a spot on their health plan.  if they pick up half the tab, i still can't really afford it, but maybe i can figure it out.  therapy:  it's the new green suede boot.

lady who was assholicious on the phone to me just now, you have no cause.  i'm sure it's VERY hard to sell stuff at gift shows.  i'm sure you're VERY TIRED from all the good you're doing for the world.  i'm sure SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA is a really trying place to live.  do you know that when you talk that loud, that obnoxiously, that condescendingly, your manicure comes right through the phone?  you are the kind of person that dogs turn their noses up at, and dogs are my favorite people so SCREW.  YOU.  i may be folding cardboard boxes right now, but i bet my sweet, sweet cupcake parabola-shaped new-york toned ass that i could beat you at jeapordy.  in fact, i'm not at all sure that the fact that i can't intuit your sales guy's moronic handwriting and improperly formatted mathematics doesn't mean that i am, in fact, A GENIUS.
 
oh, screw you.  there is no call.   go take a flying leap, lady.

11:20.  on the train.  i read a new yorker review of denis leary's new show on UPN.
 
11: 35.  on the train.  found out we were skipping 34th street because of a bomb scare.  i had just the night before begun to admit that i am actually a tiny bit scared about what's going to happen during the convention. 
 
2:37.  folding together cardboard boxes and stuffing them with finger puppets. maybe it's because there's been a marked lack of good music in my cool office--no NPR, even--but increasingly, i begin to feel like being a labourer at a cool place only makes so much difference.  i still fold cardboard boxes for a living, and i don't really like it.
 
3:41.  on the phone.  my weird almost-agent calls to see if i want to work on denis leary's new show on UPN tomorrow.  i'll be a greiving 9/11 widow at a memorial service, and a hottie at a cocktail party.   it's just background.  the pay is actually fourteen dollars less than i'd make here, for what i'm sure is a longer day's work, but i said yes.  it's not folding boxes.
 
5:18.  i hate being predictable.  it makes me feel stupid.  i always knew i'd be proud of myself for Moving To New York and Following My Dream, but i didn't think it would make me think so often about how nice it would be if a good family and a stable life and a barbecue was enough.  because those are things i want right now this minute at 5:18.  i'd rather have a film career, and all, but.

there were thunderstorms over the last few days. i missed my dinner date with miss pia, and as i ran for the train in my short pants and hiking sandals, i stomped through one of DUMBO's bad-paving puddles. the first one was an accident, but i aimed for all the rest because the puddles were warm. this place is so weird.

i remember liking living alone. i remember liking it a lot. i do not recall it being this depressing.

we saw farenheit 9/11 this week. i guess i thought i didn't need to rush out to see it, being part of the already-converted choir. i was wrong. i did need to see it. i also need to do some volunteer work.

sort of unrelated, and impossible to segue to: i got an email from moveon.org this week noting that seymour hersh had addressed the ACLU and broke news that among the unreleased evidence regarding the prison abuses in iraq is tape of american soldiers sodomizing iraqi children. i can't quite formulate anything to say, other than: i've been googling appropriate terms and have come up with a remarkable lack of coverage in the mainstream media, and it seems appalling on top of heinous that no one is talking about it.

was i just complaining about new york?

saturday was a beautiful, inimitable day--and best, the kind that can only happen here.

wait. back up. saturday morning was nasty, but only because of the back-and-forth tensions of us both feeling bad about the upcoming absence and our respective reactions to it. it boiled and bubbled until i ended up crying until my nose ran, and admitting ashamedly that i felt, um, abandoned. and that even though i knew what was going down was not abandonment, my inner three year old needed some calming anyway and could i please just get extra unreasonable attention and petting during the next few days?

what followed was miraculous. the perfect day in central park, with turtles and a string trio and good walks, brunch at amy's and then a glass of cold white wine in a french restaurant we couldn't have afforded to order lunch in. best, it was quietly understood, after my non-quiet tantrum, that for the entire day, i got extra cheese and the last word and treated to coffee and could do no wrong. and the day was so lovely, as if someone had sculpted it in advance for me.

and then i had another recurring dream in the monkey series, in which i dream i have a pet monkey who somehow escapes me, leading to dire consequences, and i don't realize the monkey=monkey connection until i think about mentioning the dream in the blog. in this one, the monkey was larger, and we were visiting a state park, and after he got away from me i got him back and put him in his monkey carrier (i lured him with squares of brown toast with peanut butter). soon, though, a federal ranger came to tell me that video surveillance cameras revealed a monkey had "gone to the bathroom" on abraham lincoln's burial site, which was nearby, and i was in deep yogurt. dum-dum-DUM.

oh, lordy. i don't normally post these small idiocies, but: someone found my blog by googling

"neurosis tumor."

i can't stop laughing. it's post-show and i'm having a little mint julep and a few triscuits, but still. my. wherever you are, i hope you're walking for the cure.

the monkey had been feeling clingy about his upcoming significant absence. i sort of suggested--kindly, i thought--that he buck up.

here's the thing: i had completely forgotten when he was due to leave. it's an almost laughable example of denial: i've asked him dozens of times what day he buses out but can never recall the date, when i did write it down it was on a calendar that i know i never see. and so when he dropped the bomb on wednesday that he was leaving in a week (for what is, essentially, a twelve-week absence, an entire semester), it hit me like the news was brand new and out of the blue.

and to top it off, once i was blasted with the info that i'd so successfully kept from myself, he sort of . . . cooled. turns out it wasn't really spending time with me that he craved so much, but rather attention to the fact that he was leaving. in other words, it's not the separation, so much; it's that i wasn't concerned about it.

except now i am. and now that i am, and he's not so much, i feel dreadfully unwanted. last night, one of the few nights left, i came home after only a few hours with the best one in order to soak him up a bit more, and he went a-customizeable card game playing online rather than a-cuddling in our sweet, large bed. i left the decision up to him, so i should have been prepared for him to choose other than me, but it stung. especially since i had, ahem, mentioned the possibility of sweet loving, something we will not be doing a great deal of in the next semester. it reminded me of this terrible moment with my loser live-in boyfriend in san francisco when he chose the playstation 2 over my earlobe nibbles.

anyway. he's leaving. and i hurt about it. partially because this place in the summer is even more of not what i want than it is in more temperate weather, and partially because making a life with him is by far the best thing about new york and now that'll be on hold for just long enough for me possibly to lose momentum and hate this place, and partially because his long absence is due to the thing that's missing the most from my own life here: being in plays.

with that missing, and him missing, too, the dog days may turn out to be a real bitch.

if i were still comparatively rolling in it, like i was in seattle (o, hindsight! how often did i shop luxuriously at the queen anne thriftway?), i wouldn't ask the monkey to help out with birth control pill costs. not that there's anything wrong with expecting a partner to contribute, i just . . . you know, what happens in my body is my choice, my responsibility, yadda yadda. but i'm poor, so . . .

it turns out the pills and the netflix cost roughly the same per month. i'll pay for one; he'll pay for the other. entertainment budget? handled.

i'm sad tonight. it hasn't happened in a while, although i've been pining for the easier life of my past. right now it feels like i moved away from some good stuff to spend some time poor, stinky, tired and unsatisfied. not that i was never those things back home. on certain nights, the stretch of time ahead of me before any fulfilling work arrives is a scary prospect. and also, i'm home alone and watching star trek.

i was just proudly announcing to someone that i would be just fine during the monkey's twelve-week absence. i have things to do, projects i've neglected! tonight, though, i remember what it is to be a barnacle.