kerouac says

i remember getting sad before the monkey was around, and how it was fundamentally different from getting sad while he is around.

i boo-hooed a little last night, for no apparent reason (i've always been heartened by this profile of frances macdormand i read in the new yorker years ago in which she matter-of-factly stated that she cried, on average, at least twice a week, and considered it a perfectly natural practice, not representative of any pathology that needed to be 'healed'). i read a sad story in a magazine. the eight hour banality of a regular workday is having its usual effect. my skin's been bad and i need a real haircut and my clothes and my wearings of them are revealing themselves to be incredibly boring. i feel ploddy and light-years away from the big life change that's rolling down the pike. it's hard to imagine that it's even coming, as i sit here with my dean and deluca cafe au lait surfing the interwebs and living for the weekend.

the good part in all of this--and i'm sorry; i know the blog occasionally becomes a bugle that plays a repetitive song about how great he is--is the monkey smoothing a piece of hair out of my face while he says with incredible tenderness, there is nothing i wouldn't do for you. and i'm not even tempted to say, does that include moving to the west coast? because i know the answer is yes. we're over the bad business. it ended up the way everyone hopes and prays that their rough bumps will resolve: we are even better than we were before.

this morning? still under the blue cloud. but i'm printing out pictures of st. remy to put on the walls of my office corner, and taking daily walks three blocks north past tisch to look in the window at all the students. i'm surely not so much of an extreme weenie that i can't get through the next seventeen--no! sixteen!--days, spend a couple weeks travelling with my family and then radically re-orient towards something more fulfilling.

i'm gradually re-coaxing my optimism into the light. i don't know where it got away to, but if i leave a cupcake out for it, it will probably return to the room.

so, yeah. i occasionally have a fit of the weepies about not being free to audition for stuff for a year due to upcoming school. especially when the monkey gets a lot of really good calls in the same week and i feel that the trembly-lower-lip alert level has gone into Orange or Magenta.

i'm being patient with this. but recently a friend put it so well that i had that funny! scary! vomit! reaction you sometimes do when someone else puts your dilemma in better words than you can. on giving up gainful employment to go shoot a movie:

Here's my image:
A 53 year old man is alone on a beach at low tide with a metal detector. Up
above the shore is a small cabin with the light of a small fire emanating
from it. Inside stand a mother and two children looking out at the man.
Stores are low. A fence is in need of repair. When asked by a child what
Daddy's been doing out on the beach these many days, the mother replies,
"He¹s trying to locate remnants of a dream he purposefully threw overboard a few years ago.

ha! aaaa! roark!

anyway. then he went on to say something else really good:

A year (at my age anyway) isn't long. I encourage
you to relish everyday that working on your acting career isn't an option.
How freeing! We need to really quit every now and then, I think, to see it
from the outside, and figure out what we want and don't want about it, and
create boundaries that keep us safe from humiliation and poverty. We CAN do it our own way, we just usually don't.

something about "safe from humiliation and poverty" reminds me just how good i have it. in a pleasing way.

he's flying to new york to be a tiny part in a gigantic movie in june. i can't wait to talk to him. and if giving up acting gets you cast in blockbuster sam raimi movies, perhaps going back to school is the smartest career move i've ever made.

singing: "i know what girls like! i know what boys want . . ."

"it's 'guys.'"

" . . . really?"

"'i know what guys like, i know what boys want.' that's cute, though, how you've coerced popular culture into affirming your worldview."

"i thought that was the point of the song. that she was, you know, ready for anything."

"how old were you when that song came out? seven?"

"i dunno. i figured out my worldview early."

"hey, did you know you're the same age as the roosevelt island tram?"

"is this apropos because the tram is also bi?"

"well, it definitely goes both ways."

seattle, i am missing you so bad, girl. in that sloppy, sentimental, boyz II men kind of way.

i think it's because the sun is coming out, and back home that's such a happening, when the sun starts to reliably come out once in a while. here it is, too, except it's already starting to get humid and i can't help but be apprehensive about the Great Urine Festival that july and august bring (june is not completely innocent on that one, either). where at home spring is the relief of long term greyness, here it's a warning shot across the bow.

i've been thinking about how i really have something to do here, now. there's school, and there's my great apartment that we're still fixing up, there's the stuff on my new york list i'm committed to getting done so that when i do leave here, it's without regrets. and school is big. and necessary. i am definitely glad about school.

still, though. part of me is just realizing that you can't always get what you want, and later this will be the decade when i didn't get to live in seattle, no matter how many other good things happen, no matter how many excellent reasons there were for me to move away, figure shit out, go back to school and forcibly left-turn things.

part of me doesn't want a left turn. most of me does, including at least 50% of the heart and most of the mind. the brain stem, however, wants to be on the deck at linda's having a beer and learning some lines. maybe with my old haircut and the white honda i drove back then. part of me wants the life i'd have had if i hadn't left. whatever that is.

one of my biggest fears is that i'll end up someone without a real home. sometimes i think about what would happen if we got married. would we get married here? this place feels too contentious for that to seem right. and i still feel like my people are back home. but however i feel, we don't live there. if we got married in some backyard in seattle, i'm sure the five friends i've kept up with would come, but that's not the community i remember having when i was there. there is no giant party, anymore. there is no deep circle. and if i move somewhere else for a Ph.D. next year, it's just going to be more like that: a dozen excellent friends sprinkled across the country, and no one place that feels like home.

whatever. i guess it's fine. i'm reading this over, sort of ashamed at whining when i have so much more than most. every other time in my life i was homesick, i went home. this time appears to be different. and i'm excited about what's coming up . . . just, it still aches a bit. maybe if it's always like this, i'll just have to come back some day after having been gone, and think of the gap as what it took for me to come back as a grown up. a grown up with hearing damage and a master's degree who drinks seltzer and saw blossom dearie live at danny's deep sea lounge. i guess there are worse things.

i'm trying to think of something short to say in the ten minutes i'll remain at this desk.

tech? it's gross. how anyone can be so unaware that their cast thinks they are a total cornflake is beyond me. or maybe she knows and doesn't care, which is a level of nonchalance i could never muster. this piece opens tomorrow. i got my costume last night. we've never done a run. it's a site specific installation with five trillion cues.

and it's my first show under the equity banner, and i was led to believe there would be mandatory breaks. and certain small courtesies. and a small amount of beaurocratic protocol. there are none of these things. the showcase code has gone out the window and flown uptown to 49th and 7th to get a hotdog and watch the giant cup of noodles sign give off steam. i am the only one who cares. i am heart-broken. not only do i love rules, i love the respectful gesture of rules being followed even when they don't seem hugely important. i also love getting to pee and/or go get some caramel corn every couple of hours. i am constantly talking myself down from calling the union police because: no one likes a tattler. and i like being liked.

so, anyway. back to the salt mines. i haven't said much about this piece because it was sort of a non-event for a while, before tech ate my life and i realized exactly how batshit this piece of theatre has turned. so far, the only things making it worth sticking around for are a connection to a good director, wearing my tutu in public, and getting to use an MF bullhorn.

i am having a hard time letting go of past events.

i've been poring over old emails and journals (back when i had a journal, before the blog ate it). i've been obsessing.

there was this guy i thought i was going to marry. we always assumed we'd get together some day, when we lived on the same coast, and it would be big. but then we put it off too long, and things got not good, and then one day we had a conversation and it was over. he said he'd write to me, and he never did. that conversation was the last time we spoke to each other. it's been five years. what happened?

there was this one time i fell in love and it was completely awesome and then it stopped on a dime. it seemed probable that i had either been wrong about the mutuality of the complete awesomeness or wrong about it really being over, but upon reflection, it honestly seemed that both were real. how did that happen?

when we were getting together, the monkey was going through a divorce. looking back, i'm surprised at how blissful we were, because some very difficult stuff was going down. it was the very beginning of love, and there were all these crannies (and not just crannies; entire cul-de-sacs, big unexplored neighborhoods) of each other we didn't know yet. who was he right then? how much of him did i know? when did we decide? how did that happen?

and i don't know why the objects of all this obsession are men who dumped me or were dealing with attachments to other women. apparently i am brewing some potent insecurity in here. there have been some other doo-dads, too, unrelated to romance: an argument with a boss that didn't go my way, a time i was embarrassed at a party. in third grade.

this is what i'm figuring out, though: the low-grade sad that feels so familiar has a lot to do with this. with not letting what's done have its proper place. when i'm happiest, these things don't seem any bigger than the average piece of life history. they seem pebble-sized. and when i am saddish, suddenly they are the riddles of the sphinx.

the past isn't dead, no question, and maybe it isn't really past, either, but it does step out of the foreground and fade a little. and this is me, pulling it out of syndication, puppeting it back to life, poking at it until its brittle limbs start falling off.

when we were trying to train my last puppy, my mom kept yelling, "leave it! leave it!" when he would take your cuff in his teeth and refuse to give it up, or take off running with a sneaker, or sniff obsessively around the trash can. it never worked on the puppy; he grew into a dog who chewed things and stalked garbage.

i really loved that dog, but he probably could have benefitted from some meditation.