kerouac says

again.

it's always sort of odd; i can't pretend i feel a strong attachment to this place, but anywhere you spend this much time for this long eventually puts some tendrils out and starts climbing on you. there are some kind, funny, smart people here, and i've seen them more, and more consistently, than i've seen most of my friends over the last two years. that's just always how it is.

so it's always a little weird to leave. and funny-feeling to care even that little bit, given that minimizing or leaving dayjobs behind altogether has been a major goal of the last eight or so years. maybe it's a little like new york. even something you don't like gets hard to leave eventually. hard in spots, at least.

this last day has the potential to be my last day at a real day job, ever. i kind of don't think we're there yet--there are summers to get through, and god knows what happens after graduation. but as the monkey said this morning, the next one will be a career. i kind of hate that word, but he's right. the gulf between what i do to buy the groceries and what i do to be me is about to close significantly.

bye, m1cr0s0ft. somehow, you made me not hate you. stay sweet and have a great summer, but don't keep in touch. i'll be okay.

i am particularly bad at wanting the life i have. and i say that knowing how ridiculous and ungrateful it must sound right now, when what i'm tempted to call "blessings" are positively raining down, but maybe putting it out there makes it a little better. it's a good life. i don't know what my issue is. i don't know why you'd go through life convinced that you're doing it wrong, or how you go about knocking that off once you've noticed.

there's been some wedding apathy going on. and some grad school indifference. these are great things, and suddenly i'm sort of tired of them, and feeling like they don't actually count for much. i'm not always sure, all in all, that the life i'm aiming for is the one i want, and all this grabbing at accomplishment sometimes feels like an attempt to distract myself from this fundamental miscue. i mean, maybe no one's sure, but i get this sinking feeling that there's always going to be something wrong and i'll never get to the point where i can stop sprinting to fix things and just enjoy it. or, worse: all of this fixing will never actually alter the fact that i'm just bad at being happy.

i'm concerned about this (the lack of facility with wanting what's at hand more than the dispassionate attitude towards particular events on the horizon), because i think it is probably key important, as paula abdul would say, when it comes to being happy. i have a lot of very very capable friends, and they do a lot of things, and sometimes i get so ashamed of my own stuckitude, my ability to let years and years go by without accomplishing the things i say i want, that i blush and stammer when i see what they're doing.

i bet it really isn't their clean apartments and their financial independence and their apparently effortless social lives, that induces the little shames and envies, though. i bet it's that they're doing a little better job at wanting and enjoying the good things they have instead of stabbing themselves in the thigh with what they don't.

i was waiting for it, and it is here. please repair immediately to the blog of the gallivanting monkey.


do it.

1. we are in the space, and the pre-event milling around melts into a party and we just have a big party until the lady tells me it's almost time for us to get out. i'm still in my street clothes, and i'm sort of peri-aware that we did not actually have a wedding, but it seems to be okay, like, well, it was a good party, and i'm sure that "marriage" thing will happen later. i herd everyone off the boat only to realize that we had twenty more minutes on our contract, and the lady was assuming it would take me longer to get the people off the boat than it did. i am incensed at being cheated of twenty minutes of party, and the evening is ruined. it does not occur to me until i wake up that the monkey apparently did not show up, and more troubling, i did not notice.

2. it is the day of the wedding and i decide it will be fun and romantic to take off by myself for some quiet time before everything speeds up. i decide the place to do this is discovery park, but i get lost getting there. i am lost and lost and lost, and there is all this traffic--i appear to be in some other city than seattle at one point--and i realize the the hour of my wedding is going to come and go and i will be stuck in the bucket seat of my white honda accord. i have no cell phone. i am the worst bride ever.

3. it is the weekend of the wedding and i am wrong about it happening on a sunday; it happens on a friday. because i have the day wrong, nothing is ready. i don't have my dress, i look gross, there's no booze, i am mentally unprepared. my mom gets this serious look on her face and i realize that the flavor of this moment is the story you hear about How Things Don't Go As Planned and you just have to suck it up and get married anyway because it's not about the stupid details. and i get very self-pitying about how i know i have to go ahead and get married cheerfully anyway, but i won't get to wear my dress or look pretty or do any of the stuff i planned.

4. we get married, and then afterwards realize we didn't exchange rings. i talked to kaufmann about this, and he promises to cue me if it looks like i'm going to drop that part of the ceremony.

5. we get married and it is the best day ever. i dance with my small friend bianca, i hold babies, i get hugged by my favorite people. it is one long chain of beautiful moments with people. then, suddenly, magically, everyone is gone and chris and i are walking off the boat to the parking lot in the very very quiet, still in our wedding duds. we take a detour into gasworks park and i realize that the entire city is still, that we're the only people moving. there are no cars, no birds, no wind; everything has stopped but us. i start to wonder what kind of alternate reality we're in, and then i notice that the lack of sound and movement is making me see things differently. all the trees are a different color than they were before, and things that are light are kind of glowy. my dress looks amazing, like i'm wearing a fairy. i turn to the monkey to ask him if he sees this, too, and there is light shooting out of him. all over. and suddenly i cannot believe that i have forgotten this about him, that he shoots light out of his body, that he is, literally, radiant. how odd, i think, that i could forget something like that, when it looks so familiar now that i notice it. and then i wake up.

married married married married married married married.

fucking married.

me.

married.



watch for it, world.

starting school again ushered in a new day: for the first time, i am not (however slightly) younger than the majority of my friends. in fact, a lot of the school chums are significantly younger--at least it seems to me; the monkey pointed out that the age gaps i find significant in this case are roughly the same as the gap between the two of us. then again, we didn't meet when we were twenty-three and thirty, respectively. plus, even then i was kind of a crone in twentysomething clothing. then i moved to new york and got much older much faster!

but anyway, what's great about the young friends is that they want to go out all the time. there are multiple parties being planned around the advent of the wedding, and the twenty-three year olds will go to all of them! they'll go to brooklyn, they'll trek up to washington heights, they'll come out on a tuesday night. they are so untired. what else is great? they are easily impressed by feats of grownupness. and moxie, even in its most conventional flavors. i played them the first draft of the wedding reception playlist, and one of them said, open-jawed, "you're going to have a song about rehab at your wedding?" yes, virginia; thanks to the one who's least afraid, that is.

me? not so untired, but not so bad, honestly. last day at this particular day job is mid-next-week, and it is occurring to me that this might be my last one. that would take considerable good fortune; most likely there are summer jobs ahead, and who knows what happens four years from now. i may end up as Dr. Waitress. but this is the last soul-sucking semi-permanent arrangement for a while, and that feels pretty good. it feels good not to care how well i do this bullshit. plus, no one has given me a task for seven days. it's been internet city and ninety minute lunches over here. you'd think with all that free time i'd update the blog a little more often, but i'm too busy trying to find tasteful yet sparkly earrings.

quick survey of my co-workers yesterday yields the following advice:

no need to dispose of the bread. general consensus is that a three-slice margin is sufficient to avoid any contagion and provide peace of mind. in a brilliant footnote, one person added: if you find you're still uneasy, just toast it.

xoxoxox.

l.

things i am looking forward to about LA include:

• camping. we've already made a pact to go before school starts. one of nastiest things about new york is how you just can't get out, for the most part, for under a few hundred bucks. it's car rental, it's train fare, it's motel sixes in the catskills. you can't just motor yourself to a state park and pitch a tent in car you already have. it puts the kibosh on spontaneity. maybe i'm overestimating how much spontaneity i'll be able to handle while Ph.D.ing, but any camping at all is better than the status quo.
  
• the ocean. the one i remember.
  
• burritos.
• seeing the sky.
  
• trees. even palms, which i never really considered trees until i moved somewhere where there aren't any.
  
• grilling food outside.
• shoe diversity. in manhattan, the only shoes i can wear out of the house are ones i know i can walk a mile in, which means i wear the same shoes every day. literally. all those nice shoes that are not ouchy but also not built for heavy walking? they've been sitting in my closet lo these four years. i know, congested city may mean the parking-to-destination distances may be greater than i anticipate. still.
• a change in commute frustration. right now, while rush hour is no picnic, the getting-home that really makes me want to stab myself is waiting twenty minutes on a platform at 1:30 for a train that will go local all the way to the heights. i'm sure there will be more than plenty of times traffic will induce psychosis in LA, but that lonely early morning platform wait will not be one of them. in fact, if we can work the housing right, i'm willing to be there will be at least some times that getting home takes less than 45 minutes.
  
• granted, i have only been there once, but on that trip i encountered no part of los angeles that smelled like pee. i'm sure those parts exist, but they will almost certainly be more avoidable. i know i sound like a prig. whatever: less pee.
  
• no more time zone follies between me and the loved ones on the west coast. somehow i think it's easier when you're the earlier party.
  
• more vegetarian food.
• fat fricking tire.
• wineries you can drive to. (please do not evoke long island. the last bottle of long island wine i tried i couldn't finish, and that is truly saying something. plus: see above, re: driving.)
• pas de humidity. at least, not like here.
• space. i'm used to not being able to walk on the sidewalk without being touched by other people. frankly, i am ready to go back to expecting my bubble to be respected.
  

the moral dilemma is that a lot of the things that bug me about new york are representative of the way we should be living. we should not have cars. those of us who aren't farmers probably should live in pockets of dense population where services can be provided to a concentrated audience. we should have to pay attention to the homeless rather than isolate ourselves from the moral discomfort that confronting the issue provokes.

i still want to do a happy dance. LA may not have been exactly what i had in mind in all my pining for the west coast, but i'll take it.

i don't know what to say that won't be percieved as protesting too much, but for the record? i have done some questionable things in my life, but mucking around with someone's marriage--with the spirit or letter of those promises--has not been one of them.

i understand that doesn't mean that no one got hurt by the sheer proximity of the monkey's and my relationship starting so soon after the decision to end his marriage was made, but it does mean that the hurt wasn't malicious. i would like people who know us to believe we acted like the honorable people they know us to be. the advent of us was not a causal factor; that decision got made before we were a we. neither was there any plotting, or scheming, or chomping at the bit. beginnings that blossom into great things can happen at weird times, and we tried very hard to do the right thing, and looking back, while nothing was easy, i don't think we mis-stepped.

someone who's close to someone the monkey used to be married to isn't coming to the wedding. in general, this is the kind of thing that just has to be okay; everyone makes their call, and that call isn't necessarily about me, or even us. i really do get that, and i have sympathy for what might be an awkward social situation. however, if it's not about disapproval, or punishment, or finding fault, some reassurance would be really welcome. i love you, but i feel a need to be somewhere else that night. i support you, but someone else needs my support, too. or even just: i'm sorry i can't come. having someone else tell us via email that you refuse the invitation, with only veiled reasons as to why, makes me feel like you might think we're dirtbags.

i guess that's what makes it an invitation rather than a summons: we ask you if you'll bear witness on the momentous day, and you can say no. i might regret posting any of this. i know some of you are part of these circles, and i don't mean for a second to create an uncomfortable situation, or to spread bile around, or to make feel that you have to weigh in in the comments with reassurance that you still love me. it isn't that. it just made me sad, and vaguely ashamed, which isn't really how you want the whole wedding thing to proceed. it's just a vent.

i know this isn't teevee, and we can't just all go out for waffles together and roll the credits. i'd be the last person to suggest i have any idea how badly a divorce hurts. maybe everyone just feels the way they feel, and i need to grow some tougher hide.

that the graduate program did: it widened the lens. maybe i was never really a regional theatre girl. i'm not saying i don't love it, but maybe the ambition associated with moving to new york i sort of lost touch with the weirdos. and, in truth, the weirdos are my life. taylor mac, you are it. kate valk, you are it.

when we get to LA, i hope someone immediately points me towards some drag, some cabaret with drinking contests, and some weird fucking bunraku chekhov. universities are good for that, right?

i feel a little ambition coming on. this might just work out: being a happy person, doing a little art, having a couple of babies. it could work.