kerouac says

the rejection from UC Berkeley came over the weekend. large bummer. larger bummer: my immediate sensory recall of getting rejected from some of the country's top MFA programs, repeatedly; and subsequent gut-level feeling that i knew how this whole thing was going to go down, that once again the gamble was going to leave me face-down in a puddle, and it was going to feel very familiar.

not necessarily true. but: scary, and . . . i really wanted to go live on the west coast. boo. this also provoked a very interesting and non-pissy conversation with the monkey about how much fear of rejection is okay and how much is self-indulgent pessimism.

good thing 1, though: we talked about how the bay area was a legitmate option. i have previously gone on record about hating SF, but i know have a dear friend living there and i am older and wiser and not living with an asshole. i am no fan of california, but NoCal/BayArea sounds remarkably preferable to urinetown. i could get behind it.

and good thing 2: we held a paper tech at a diner this morning, using a lap top and two pairs of headphones, and sitting close to the monkey and doing theatre stuff i immediately realized that if we were not already shacked up, i would have the Biggest Crush Ever on him, which makes me intensely glad that we *are* shacked up.

there's this gross duel going on between my boss, who's currently in spain, and the project manager at dayjobinc., who's a bigoted brit. neither of them are good bosses, but one is a marginally nicer person and doesn't say stupid things about gay people, so i marginally prefer her.

since she's gone, the brit PM has scaled back his civility and is sort of ragging on her publicly. i try not to respond. but the tech VP called me into his office this week saying he'd heard a rumor that i was considering leaving, and i think that rumor came from brit boss trying to imply to the higher ups that my immediate boss was so poor that i was going to quit. i'm feeling a little bit manipulated.

this is all backstory to yesterday afternoon, when he had a meeting and i stayed after to explain some bugs. he noted that i have a lot of time off. this is true; i work 25 hours a week or so, and i had just taken a week off to go to seattle. i think he said: "you get more time off than the king and his dog!"

and my first thought was, i do get a lot of time off. jeez, have i been insensitive to the needs of this company? to my fellow workers, who do *not* get this much time off?

except that's backwards. it's not time "off," and i don't "get" it. that time is my real life; time at work feels like time "off" from everything important. and the fact that i work part time is a contract, not a privilege. when did we all tacitly agree that work is the most important thing, and that the basic adult committment is 40 hours a week--more than we spend with friends, families, spouses, or sleeping? part if it is that i've got this other unpaying vocation going on, but honestly, even if that weren't so: more than 30 hours a week sitting at a desk making money for other people just makes me Very Sad and Sort of Angry. this part-time stuff is how i've figured out how to make the world liveable.

so, brit boss, screw you. yeah, i take a lot of time away. it's the best time i have. and, frankly, i think i'm managing my world a lot better than those of you who stay here ten hours a day. pah.

not that you care, but i just figured out how my amex number got got: i was phished! yes, i, the internet-savvy. the email was a *really* good fake, and had a link in it next to a reminder that my bill was due that week. totally fell for it. the bastahds.

also potentially interesting only to me: last night the monkey told me that, no promises, but he was starting to come around about having the babies. said that it used to seem impossible, and now it seemed pretty possible. (not having them now, of course, just possible in general.)

and now i'm thinking: this blog is no longer really ano-/pseudo-nymous. a lot of you know who we are. and maybe i shouldn't be blabbing around about the monkey's private baby thoughts. maybe those are, you know, private.

but i'm not going to erase it. it made me Team Uterus feel good. just don't be all, hey! louella said you're down with offspring! way to go! next time you see him.

rehearsals for my solo show are now hot and heavy. and i'm trying to keep in mind this epiphany i had last week about how so many things are not worth doing if i'm going to turn them into worryfests instead of fun. so, trying to allow the show to be fun, admist the pressure of producing and publicizing and re-learning 60 minutes of lines. fun, i said! fun or die!

(because, seriously, call it reductive, but those may be the choices for now.)

babies. seatle is full of babies.






(not pictured: lun@, and man was i sorry i left my camera home, because when we showed up she was in a goodwill undershirt and black tutu, and it wasn't five minutes before she had changed into a tiger costume, and then went pantsless and added a pair of mary janes. i love that kid. i love all those kids up there.)

she reports:

home is just as nice as i think it is.

we watched this anthony hopkins movie that is ostensibly about motorcycles but is really about Getting Old, and it made me cry. i want to slap stickers on them that say Please Do Not Age These Parents.

also, i just spent quality time with two people i adore, whose children are equally adorable. it made me want that life pretty bad.

i'll be at johnny kaufmann's show on friday night. if any of you are there, dear readers, i'll see youse.

i got the camera this morning. i may have to change my underpants.

i'm touching it right now.

the camera, i mean. not anything contiguous with underpants.

i had a fantasy on the train ride to my day job. i don't get into school, and instead of it being a horror, i move back to seattle and start my actors theatre (i have this completely awesome idea, by the way, way better than most bad ideas for new no-budget theatre companies) and become a photographer. i do well enough to operate out of a small studio in my home with copious natural light, and the monkey gives up bartending in order to run the web-basedness of the business with me and there's always one of us home to take care of the amazingly well-adjusted child we have created together and we always have enough money to go to the doctor.

it's totally a fantasy; i am the worst-suited person ever towards running my own business. i would not like it if it were a dry-cleaning concern, so it's ridiculous to think that because it involves something arty it would automatically come as second nature.

still, though. it was a nice day dream.

i've been crafting this long post about Magic Bean Pills for awhile, but it's not ready. i did want to say, though, that i had a realization the other day:

i'm not afraid of being a depressed parent.

i grew up with one depressed parent and one whose emotional status was sort of terminally unknown. when there aren't any other siblings around, that makes the ratio of depressed people to children uncomfortably high, especially when you don't count the dog, who unquestionably had the best mental health of anyone in the house.

my mom never found her way into effective therapeutic intervention for her depression. she's continued to live a sometimes-more, sometimes-less hampered life, and while at times it exasperates me to no end, she really does seem to be at peace with the level of functioning she's got going on. and who am i to say it's absolutely necessary to plumb the depths? what's necessary is to cope, and she's doing it. she's mostly satisfied with the status quo. i look at her, though, and i think: not me. i do not want ever to think that sort of life is good enough.

i got help earlier than my mother did. i had the blessed convenience of better drugs. and i didn't endure any of the catastrophic loss that's marked her life. also, signs point to my being a little bit crazier than her, which i think makes said crazy harder to hide and more imperative to treat, resulting in a quality of life that is actually potentially better.

i've always been afraid that my eventual kid would start life out with the burden of a depressed parent, and all the concomitant debilitating responsibility. i'm not worried about that right now. the worry might come back, but i have to say: every sign points to yes right now, in the big Louella Vs. The Crazy battle. i'm seriously winning. and i'm starting to feel hard core healthy, like i'm gaining the mental health equivalent of bone mass and long muscle fibre.

i know people who've reached this sort of contentment, and then something happened and their meds stopped working. i am still a little bit afraid of that, but. what you gonna do?

i mention this all because, as the couples therapy continues to work wonders in the magnificent stretchy goodness that binds me to the monkey, we find that the monkey is compaining of an inexplicable sadness, a desire not to leave the house, a difficulty sleeping, a general wash of grey.

uh-oh.

i haven't freaked out. and having had a ringside seat for the most recent bout of LvsTC, the monkey has dutifully taken action to combat the blue that's washing over his chin. but it turns out--irony!--i am not that good at being a depressed person's partner. i am oddly impatient. i want him to, you know, stop it. i miss the happy guy i moved in with, and am absurdly tempted to take the loss out on him. he gets drippy and clingy, and i get . . . vaguely pissed. even though he's doing all the right things.

i know this is retarded. i'm busily slapping some sense into myself. the whole thing just surprised me. who knew i was such a bad husband?

we're dealing. nothing too major is going down. but i see him doing this dance i know all the steps to--this morning, he stood with his hand on the doorknob for a full minute before he left, screwing up his courage to leave the apartment. oh, heartbreak. i know this feeling. and i wish i could clip it right off his back.

time. time, time, time.

and sometimes, magic bean pills.

i wrote a sort of two-by-fourey short political play for my show last year that included the line, "betty friedan is still alive, and we're spending public classroom time instructing girls to shut up or no one will love them?"

(it was about some ridiculous--yet federally funded!--abstinence-only educational materials that harper's excerpted in their readings section . . . an allegorical story about a princess who got mouthy and ended up losing her prince.)

i guess we can't say that anymore.

good work, betty.

i already asked my other blog, but:

did any of you charge four hundred dollars worth of tivo equipment to my amex card?

because you should really ask me first.

there's a big unauthorized charge on my account. which freaks me out, given that this credit card is used solely for paying my phone bills (online), and then gets paid off every month (online) from my checking account (online). i don't carry the card in my wallet, i don't get paper statments . . . if someone intercepted my credit card number, they pretty much had to do it online. unless the monkey has some other apartment with a television that gets cable and tivo, where he never hangs out because he is here or at work ALL THE TIME.

(mostly at work. i have not seen the monkey in daylight hours for about a week. it is getting old. remember sex? that was fun. he's getting the money made, which is important, but . . . groan. i'm ready to pay him twenty bucks an hour to play some scrabble with me.)

anyway. if anyone you know suddenly, suspiciously shows up with a crapload of whatever tivo sells, give me the wink.

i'm smart and careful. how is my credit card number on the interwebs?

i'm on day two of not talking. my cold took a laryngitic turn, and i have no voice. i'm not one of those hypochondriac voice people who think they'll get nodes if they yell at a football game, but i've known enough people with serious vocal trouble to keep silent when all is not well in the throat region.

which is to say, i'm not worried, but i'm not talking. to anyone.

and i'm amazed at how peaceful it is. it's like i can hear my own voice inside my head. and every time i get worried about how i'm going to communicate something, i can just think: not talking. everything will have to work itself out, because i'm not talking.

news flash, i know, but: i don't really need to talk much at all.

this happened a little bit when i was travelling alone in europe. i remember thinking if i ever had a novel to finish, i'd go back to granada because i know enough spanish to rent an apartment but not enough to go to the movies or discuss politics.

i should do this more often.

i'm looking forward to being able to talk--i missed my first planned rehearsal for my solo show yesterday, because of my mutedness--but this has been . . .

educational.

i must shut up.

more often.