kerouac says

via supah:

robots.

come on, park slope. big money.

it has become impossible to focus on anything but sleeping (or trying to; i'm still wakeful from about four a.m. on and the monkey said i ground my teeth so hard last night it woke up up), the show, and the unreal thrill park that is the NYC housing market.

we're actually still in the running for this incredible park slope apartment that i am not actually sure we can afford, but it has been pointed out to me that i am really being conservative and i would be willing to break out of my shell if toeing the line or stepping slightly over it meant we could live somewhere un-shitting-believeably awesome. (it has a deck.)

last night at rehearsal, even though i *quite* like the cast as a group and find them to be unique and intriguing people, i had the unshakeable feeling that i was in stepford. i was talking about the possibility of proposing small changes in the way we propose and rehearse new work, and . . . i swear people looked at me as if i had proposed the possibility of setting fire to the theatre. someone literally compared finding the best way to make art to finding the best way to make a macdonald's hamburger. suffice it to say, the rules are paramount.

this is hard for me to stomach. it is hard for me to hear the leader say that the only way this company can survive is to keep from "challenging history." i feel sort of patriot-acted. and shut down. and that innovative, cooperative collaboration is a wondrous goal that this company and i will not ever really share, no matter how much i like the people involved.

on the other hand, while i was typing that, the broker called to tell me we're still in the running for amazing apartment number 2. so. roll on, big river. lift my boat.

we did not get the apartment.

and i had already fallen in love with it.

or, more precisely, with that part of brooklyn heights, which is possibly even lovelier than the place i miss, and full of beautiful buildings and families with dogs and babies, and not one single corner that smells like urine.

and perhaps i should be relieved, because it was possibly almost too much money, and the place needed a little work, but after we looked at it for the last time this morning i walked to work, past coffeehouses and brick buildings and a tiny cinema and under the bridge and at no time spent an hour on the F-train not sitting down.

maybe it wouldn't have worked out anyway. i sure liked seeing charm on the horizon, though. it made me feel like this place won't give me the blues forever.

there are things i want in this world, and one of them is an apartment in brooklyn heights.

please think good thoughts.

i am suprised that crash-test dummies are marketed for some situations that are both dangerous and potentially too damaging for actual people to undergo, like simulated automobile accidents, but not for others, like Heart To Heart Conversations.

her: i guess what i mean is that i love you, and i mean never to leave you, and if what i thought was my first choice happiness doesn't work for both of us together, i promise to try to figure out a compromise that does, and i would love it if you could say the same.

him: . . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
wow. i feel like a jerk.


the twitchy vein above his eyebrow: NO.

the cartoon bubble i have painted over his head for when he doesn't speak: i will stay here in new york even if it makes you get sick and sad and childless so neener and you can't stop me.

sigh.

not surprisingly, i'm on night five of the craptastic nighttime wakies. and it's a long day. i will, however, be on joey reynold's radio show tonight, with other members of my company. we're taping at 11:45 pee em--i assume it's live, but i don't really know.

i ran into this completely by random while paging through the public theatre's website after my audition today. it won't mean much to some of you, but some of you were also around while this play was being written. it's a stupendous play, so i'm glad it's happening here, and i made sure i got some free tickets to it, but i'm a little dorkily scared that it will be bittersweet to see the play done without me. self-centered, but. that play was the beginning of good stuff for me, the exact kind of good stuff i miss out here where the three a.m. car alarms and public pee sightings grossly outnumber meaningful theatre experiences, and the memory makes me a little nostalgic.

not a full night's sleep in a week, but last night included a special anxiety seizure at no extra charge.

part of it had to do with this terribly disturbing dream i had, in which i was a guest somewhere, and my host had a pet ladybug, roughly the size of a hockey puck. the ladybug was actually a crab, and hated me, with a personal and vitriolic hatred. and while i bore no pre-existing animosity towards the bug, i jumped into return hatred with gusto. i went out of my way to the cruelest, most horrible things to it. and it licked me in this terrible, suggestive, abusive way. and i wanted to kill it. in a natural-born, joy-of-killing way. totally unlike me, and so scary i wanted to take my skin off.

i woke up feeling awful, mind racing, suddenly terribly sure that the monkey and i had had a couple of good years but that the rash of intemperate arguments since he left for st. louis was the first sign of our doom, that our roman empire was falling. a couple of good years. if i thought that were true in the cold light of day, i'd be in a room alone doing some terrible, terrible drugs.

so i picked up my tutu at the tutu place this morning, and it made me feel a little better. the world outside was full of human things, and i don't think ladybugcrabs really exist.

that said, he was so scrumptious to me last night when i was poorly. it's the world to have him back around, turning our home back into a new-york-safe zone.

last night, i had an oddly persistent, evening-ruining backache. it reprised itself today after i got to work. i thought i was going to pass out. an hour later--gone. i don't know what is up, but gone is good.

i love the monkey, and he gets to complain as much as i would, were i in similar shoes, about coming back to new york and waiting tables after a month or two as king arthur. but so help me, when i alert him to the upcoming required auditions for the incomparable shockheaded peter and he thanks me and then chirps, "i'll ask my agent to submit me! and if she won't, then i'll go to the open call,"

i want to say, hey, man, nothing wrong with thinking it--it's the truth, and a perfectly logical plan--but what would it have cost you to keep that one to yourself, mr. success? given that we just ten minutes ago had a conversation about the heartbreak of the unrepresented and how you've never offered to introduce me to this fabulous agent of yours?

. . . garbledina . . .

first, i was going mention that i ran into this guy for the first time since our fateful first meeting. i stared at him as he approached, trying to figure out where i knew him from. we were walking down our street on the way to the one nice restaurant in the neighborhood for some sushi. i punched the monkey and said, that's the guy who shoved me into the train, and the monkey turned around and yelled viciously, "it's a pleasure to meet you!" and the guy cluelessly smiled and said thank you. i think he is a crazy man.

and then this friend of mine from high school died. we weren't close--we weren't really friends so much as people who knew each other, but he was my nominal first high school boyfriend, from those very early ninth grade days when "going out" means saying you're going out rather than actually going anywhere. it lasted five days. he's dead now, and he was a really smart guy, and crazy funny, and he had a hard, hard time of it. i'm a lot sadder than i would have thought. i think he shouldn't be dead, and certainly not at twenty seven, and definitely not because he jumped off a bridge, and you can say whatever you want about all the drugs he took, but i don't really think that was the root of the problem.

the thing of it is, back then, when we were all in the same place, i don't think many of us realized how densely complicated it was all going to get, how difficult, and how tired we would get sometimes, and colin sort of figured it out first. and now that it *is* more complicated . . . i don't know. i feel like he went before us. scout. pioneer. and that makes me scared about where the rest of us are off to, and what will happen to us if it all lands like a load of bricks on us. and this is all very melodramatic, but. poor, sweet boyo. i wish you still lived here, but i hope your heart feels better.

it's pretty normal to be normal again. i suppose what's strangest, and we'll see if it lasts, is to be back on an even keel just because he's in the house. i feel all *normal* again, where i used to be scared/crappy/nervous/naseous/etc.

i'll tell you one thing i don't like, though. i don't like it when people say, "as a child, that really impacted me." unless you are a molar, things do not impact you.

tonight we're meeting for a post-work beer, something i've wanted for a long time. we were going to spend the day together, but the monkey, right now, is at an audition. for a job in chicago. man, it never stops. i'm trying to ride easy.

he comes home tomorrow, and i'm feeling a little stiff about it, but that's okay, because i have cultivated a small exhaustion about worrying for the time being and will not do it tonight. we will probably have some hot sex and some arguments and take-out dinners. there will probably be time for me to talk about what the summer has been like, and this stiffness will probably melt away once i'm an hour away from laguardia. i feel a little like i'm bald, and don't know what i'm going to look like when my hair grows in, although i know that, generally, i miss it and would rather it came back.

my mom left, and for the last days she was here i managed not to think constantly of death and dying. it was a large success. i think we had a pretty good time. i think i was better at being a pal with her than i've ever been. she is ridiculous, and fascinating, and bizarre, and inappropriate and not a good role model, and she is wonderful, and i love her, and i didn't cry when the shuttle man picked her up to take her away from here. it was all pretty supremely okay. it was actually as simple as a mom coming to visit a kid who lived away, and it was surprising to find it didn't have to be any more Wagnerian than that.

i have one more night to eat cookies in bed. i have one more night to pretend like i own the place. i have one more night to cry into my beer. and then it will be back to everything my old life is, the one i tried to do a good job picking out, and i will really not be sorry.