kerouac says

go buy a tiara from a random shopfront in the garment district. even if you are pretty sure you won't wear it, and are extraordinarily discomfited admitting publicly that a tiara is something you desire in any sense of the word.

this one time, i saw an actress wearing a sparkly thing in her hair--it might have been audrey hepburn, but it may also, similarly embarrassingly, have been alexis bledel of gilmore girls fame--and it looked classy, not like an overblown princess issue. i keep thinking there's a way to re-create this, even as tiara selection fails to impress, even as i grow a little shorter every time i say "tiara" in public.

i remember telling sus that i wanted to wear one someday, for something (i was thinking more like Ridiculous Party Dress night, not a wedding--although RPDN is a pretty good wedding code name), and she gave me this little card that had one made of tiny bugle beads on it. i remember telling my friend bug, and she made me one out of her old prom jewelry, aluminum foil and a headband (i kept it for years, until we moved to new york). so maybe i'll just keep the (small, tasteful?) one i just bought in my desk drawer, and put it on every once in a while.

PS: only in manhattan can you be on your way to a tiara store that came recommended, and pass by another tiara store, stroll inside and find out it's the place that supplies the miss universe contest with their tiaras, and find yourself referred to as "my nice lady" for fifteen minutes while you try on a bunch of modified fairy crowns. i'd have bought a lifesize plastic pony from those guys.

i think i have been waiting for someone to do this to me all my life: to roast me in a sauna, beat me with an oak-leaf broom, throw buckets of cold water on me, repeat, dunk me in a cold plunge and wrap me in a terry cloth bundle in a reclining chair. when it was over, i felt like i was about nine years old. thanks, the best one.

and it was sorely needed. the wedding stuff agitates between happy-excited and sort of glum and grumpy. what seems like it should be joyful opportunity for Satisfying Projects in Self-Fulfillment often ends up swimming around in my blood stream as Pressure To Create Meaningful Moments. i don't know why i feel a certain dread that the wedding will be ordinary, or fail to impress, or that i'll get there and think, eh.

it still feels good when something good is getting accomplished. there's so much right now with the move and arranging the sublet and the constant figuring. i need some worry beads, some fidget thingies. or maybe i need not to be in charge of all three of these major endeavors--the disposition of our manhattan apartment, the exodus from new york, the joining of our eternal souls in what people are insisting on calling matrimony, even though i think that sounds like a bacterial infection.

how did that happen? how am i the point person on all this stuff? i wish i could tell you someone was shirking, and maybe someone is, but my kishkes tell me this is a result of my being grabby with responsibility, of thinking no one else is going to do it right. which would be easier to let go of if other people got it right more often. no, i'm kidding. kind of.

i'll see what i can do to lighten the load. maybe the platza will put in another appearance. in the meantime, probably time to try to get over the terrible, terrible imposition foisted on me by the Happiest Day of My Life. lord.

i'm not one of those bride-os who care a whole lot about the fricking postage stamp on the invitations (no offense if you are one yourself), but a certain sense of aesthetics led me to cringe when my square, delicately green envelopes required this this stamp (in addition to the unremarkable, neutral-colored liberty bell):



nothing says classy wedding like a big blue mountain goat.

to top it off, after taking the invitations to the (giant, 24/7, palace-looking) post office on 8th avenue(remember the crying?) to have them weighed and assessed, the post office in st. louis gave the monkey a different number for the amount of postage required for the envelopes when he went to mail a few hand-addressed stragglers himself. the postage they quoted him was what i was afraid it would be after the postage hike/restructuring; the one given me was twenty cents less and i stamped the bulk of them accordingly last week. i don't know who was right, but:

nothings says classy wedding like sending sixty invitations postage due.

is that no one seems to have made any accomodation for what happens when you say "super duty" in a ford-voice:

i had a meltdown about the wedding this morning, the morning he leaves for his summer stock job. it wasn't great timing. neither of us reacted well. the parting was awkward--besides from the awkward fact that there's a parting at all right now, when there's so much to do and so much of each other we need. just due to humanity and the law of averages, we seem sort of destined to disappoint each other a certain percentage of the time, and take a breath, and then keep going. and when leave-takings have proven exceptionally difficult for us in the past, maybe it isn't so surprising that this morning was a rough time.

the bad i felt this morning, saying the bad good by on thirty-third street in front of the post office, was the bad that you feel when you finally lay it out for the boyfriend who doesn't get it and he sees what you mean but can't fulfill, and so you break up. part of you is proud for saying, and the other is wildly flailing at having caused your own destruction, ready to cop to anything just to get the other person to turn back around and walk toward you. destruction is hyperbolic; no one is destroyed. but we are both unsure exactly whose lights we want to punch out in re: the frustration of this morning, when no one got what they needed then someone got on an airplane and the other one got on the A train. i said, i want to throw a temper tantrum. he said, please don't. i said, i'm not going to, i just want to.

you leaving-for-the-midwest, job-having, imperfect smartmouth. i am making a mean face on the inside, and my outsides are doing the kind of crying that's inappriopriate in public and waving at you as you take off for la guardia.

i'll skip the tantrum now for a blanket fort and some chocolate pudding. and maybe a nap. my eyes hurt.

i turned in my thesis this morning. after some ridiculous and, frankly, probably predictable hi-jinks (i don't really want to tell the story, just: i can't believe i thought i could make it through without exposing myself as peculiarly unsuited towards life as an adult) most of the graduating and all of the schoolwork is over. on thursday, the real graduation day, i'm going to c0ney island with a bunch of classmates and their families to get high and ride the cyclone. i think i already told you that. but anyway, thesis: out of my hands.

just like that. yesterday i was working on it, and today it's over.

i have a problem with the ontology of endings. i don't like that they happen. i could have guessed that maybe this would be a tough go.

really, though. on the day we finished our symposium presentations (the closest thing to a mini-defense in this program), i was class A number one poster girl for the clinical-D. weeping for no cause; felt like i wasn't even inside the room, just watching everyone else celebrate. as if my meds had never been invented. like i told the best one last night, after the real graduation, it felt like what was culminating at this culminating event wasn't achievement but the assorted scars and shames and anxieties of this whole last year, which--don't get me wrong, i had an okay time--i can't help but thinking of as the most exhausting year of my life. just . . . oh.

there is a way for school not to be about paralyzing anxiety and paranoid shame. i need to find it. maybe it won't be the same issue next year, what with all this under my belt. really, it can't be, because i won't make it through.

there also won't be a wedding to plan. that'll help.

just a few days ago i had this epiphany at the staten island ferry terminal. i was so glad, i realized, not to be in the thrall of theatre business, for the first time as an adult. it felt so good not to need it. it made me feel like i could go back, from a (forgive the deep@k ch0pra, here) place of power and have a good time performing, if i wanted. it felt good not to feel so owned by something that steadfastly refused to love me back.

that's a little melodramatic. what i was thinking, though, is how important it is that academia doesn't turn into the next Bad Boyfriend Career. if it's about holding my breath and flailing until i believe i'm good enough, i don't want to do it. the next four years can't be like the last one, as useful and revelatory as the accomplished work has been. you must chill. you must do some art projects. you must eat actual dinner.

and for the love of whatever, you have to stop wanting to hurt yourself everytime someone says something smarter than you. i mean, really. are you fourteen years old or what? get. over it.


all right. let's get married, people.