Be vewy, vewy quiet...

I am happy, right now, this moment, this second.

Shhhhh.

I don’t want to frighten it away.

True, honest happiness is so fleeting, so brief, that it’s easy to miss. By the time you realize you have it, it’s gone and something else has taken its place - anger, depression and, in my case, fear.

I don’t want to look too closely at why, at this moment, I am happy. Looking too closely can make it hide, can make me overanalyze it right into oblivion.

I painted and that makes me happy.

I wrote last night and figured out a few things with the feature screenplay for “The Wraith” and woke with some new ideas and that makes me happy.

My cat, Twyla, is curled up on the back of the sofa, her tail covering her face while she sleeps and she is so incredibly adorable and that makes me happy.

I have rehearsal tonight for a show I’m stage managing with people I really enjoy working with because they make me feel like I’m the greatest thing on earth and I really am enjoying this show and rehearsals are fun and that makes me happy.

I picked up an extra day of teaching this week, on Sunday, and it’s a birthday party for kids at Mission Renaissance and it’ll be a blast and it means a bigger paycheck and that makes me happy.

I have a very cool roomie who hugs me when I get home and that makes me happy.

I’m very excited about the next painting I’m going to start and that makes me happy.

We’ve had a breakthrough on the script for the comedian and that makes me REALLY happy.

I don’t feel obligation or guilt or panic about making sure I make everyone else happy and feel that I have to put someone ahead of me and that makes me happy.

I have paint all over both my hands and, weirdly enough, up near my armpit on my left arm and that makes me really, really happy.

So I’m going to live in this moment, this second, this feeling for as long as my crazy life and my crazy brain will let me. And maybe, just maybe, these tiny, simple, unexpected little moments will build into a life made up of mostly those moments and not much else.

Ch…ch…ch…Changes…

Last night, for the first time in almost 20 years, I finally felt like I owned my life. It was a simple night. Made some angel hair pasta with diced tomatoes, garlic, onion, garlic bread. Nothing fancy but really delicious. Then I sat on the couch and ate some ice cream right out of the carton, watching my new big screen TV (actually Dean’s old big screen TV). My roomie was over at her boyfriend’s so it was just me and Twyla. Roomie’s cat was hanging out in her room so not even an extra cat was distracting.

And suddenly, I realized that this is truly the beginning of my life. MY life. I could do whatever I wanted - which turned out to be doing nothing at all, really. No one would yell at me for doing nothing, no one would accuse me of being lazy. It’s all about me, now. Which is kind of scary.

I left my now-ex-husband four years ago to build a life that I wanted. A life that would be fulfilling. A life that would be filled with love and joy and wonder. A full, complete creative life with no limits. Well, I should know that is an impossibility but at least I wanted to get as close as I could.

It’s been a long struggle over these past four years (in June, it’ll be four years). Never quite feeling like my feet are under me as I lived with a temporary roommate and then in a sublet, which I knew was a short-lived adventure, and then with my folks. I’ve never quite felt like I could do what I wanted to do without feeling guilty about ignoring someone or letting someone down. Don’t ask me who I was feeling guilty about or ignoring, but the lingering effects of living with a selfish, controlling, self-absorbed man for almost 20 years don’t go away overnight.

I realize now that I have been scared for the past four years. Scared that I made the wrong decision. After all, why did I think I could build a life without him when I couldn’t build a life with him? Why did I deserve to be happy, to be creative, to live the life I want to? How dare I?! Even all the films and shows I’ve done in the past four years have terrified me. What if I let someone down? What if they’re not really that good? It’s terrifying when you actually start to see your dreams come true.

I have a lot of unfinished things lurking around me. I think it’s because I’m scared to finish them. I feel like I need permission or approval or something before I put the final touches on things. I don’t know whose permission I need. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I know that there is a strong fear of failure, whether I finish these things or not. If I finish and it’s not good, then I’m a failure. If I don’t finish, then I’m a failure. If I do finish… I don’t know how to finish that sentence.

Now, I have a clean palette in front of me. No more responsibility to my parents, which has been hanging over me almost ever since I stepped out on this adventure. I’m the one who’s been here to take care of them and I feel I owe them for what they’ve done for me. Not in a negative way but in the way a child feels obligated to return the love to the parents that they’ve shown her. But with them gone now, there’s this weird void, this emptiness that I didn’t expect. I’m so used to giving to them that now I don’t know what to do now that they’re in Minnesota.

My challenge now is to channel that energy into myself, something I have never been encouraged to do. I have always been taught to focus my energy on someone else, not on me. I don’t deserve to focus on my, that would be selfish. Focus on everyone else, make everyone else happy, and then, maybe there’ll be a little left over for me. And I should be happy if everyone else is happy, right?

So the rest of this year is learning to change the focus to me. To my career. To finishing the ends of things that I’m afraid to finish. To truly finding the life that I left my old one to find. To be selfish, in the best possible way. To fill me and find me and make me happy. And I think that’s scarier than anything I’ve ever done before. But it’ll be worth it.

Dusty bears

In anticipation of my parents moving (Monday, yay!), I’m cleaning out my room so I can migrate 12 feet up the hall to their own room to make way for Monica’s eminent arrival.

Now, I have to preface this with the fact that I collect teddy bears. Not just any teddy bears but North American Bear Company VIB’s (Very Important Bears). They represent either actual historical figures (Beartte Davis and Bearishnikov) or fictional characters (BEary Poppins and Anna Bearanina). They used to be highly collective and very, very expensive. I have 15 of these. If you want to see kind of what they look like, go to Ebay and search for North American Bear Company.

There are a few of these that I don’t really care about. They were bought because my ex was a completionist - you don’t start something and not complete it. So he bought or made me buy four or five that I didn’t really want.

But there are a few that I adore and will never part with.

Bearishnikov - my very first VIB, given to me by my mother and my sister in 1981. He is my favorite. He saw me through my first divorce, my move to LA. He has been loved to pieces, almost literally. I will never part with this bear. (I borrowed this image from an auction site)



Anna Bervlova - you can’t have Bearishnikov without her. Another favorite that I tracked down years later. (borrowed this image, too)




The Snow Queen - she is just beautiful - baby blue and gorgeous. (borrowed image)



Cinbearella - my favorite of all. My ex bought this one for me when I was writing the early drafts of “Cinderella Drives A Pick-Up.” She is one of only 750 made for the Disney Toy Convention in 1991 and extremely rare. She is another one I will never part with because of what she meant to me when she was given to me and the thought my ex put into getting this one for me and the significance of that. Real photo of my real bear.



Twyla explored the bears after I cleaned them. Real photo of my real cat.




Okay, long way around to where I’m going.

These poor bears have been ignored since I moved in with my folks. They’ve sat on the top of my bookshelf, watching, waiting, slowly collecting dust. They’ve faded a bit, they’ve lost a bit of their luster but none of their charm, although 15 of them staring down at me are a bit creepy at times.

What made me stop and think tonight was the fact that I feel like I’ve been gathering dust for the past two years. Waiting, watching, slowly collecting dust. Not moving forward, not moving backward, just sitting on top of something, waiting for someone to take me down and vacuum me so I could mean something again, get some of my luster, my charm back.

The past couple of weeks, I have felt very buried under dust, unable to write, unable to paint, unable to do just about anything. I’ve knit, I’ve watched a shitload of stuff I’ve DVR’d, I’ve packed a lot of boxes (with no thanks or acknowledgement from those I packed them for). But really, for just over two years, I’ve gathered dust.

I’m hoping this move and my ability to actually sit in the living room instead of living in my room with shake the dust off and get me moving again. The universe has taken out the vacuum and is slowly sucking the dust out of me, off my head and, hopefully, off my heart.

And instead of sitting myself back on the shelf, I hope to take the newly cleaned and primped and tidied self out into the world, never to sit on a shelf again.

And now back to my regularly scheduled life...

In just over a week, my parents will be wending their way across the country to their new home in Burnsville, MN. Where it’s cold. Where my sister lives. Where they will spend their rest of their days, hopefully gardening at my sister’s and playing with their grandchildren and maybe having a more full life than they’ve been able to have here.

I’m filled with mixed feelings.

On one hand, I am happy to have them moving somewhere. It’s been a tough two years, sharing this space. My mother is not the most considerate person in the world, to put it nicely. She smokes in the house, despite my asthmatic bronchitis. My lungs will be relieved and happy once that’s gone. Her birds are a sound nightmare, making noise every possible second that they can. The bickering between my parents makes me crazy. My mother sits in the living room and bellows her questions, then yells when she doesn’t get an answer. And on and on.

I’ve reverted to being 13 again while living here. I am apparently incapable of doing anything correctly or doing anything at all. My mother likes to point out when I don’t do something correctly or chastise me for… well… pretty much everything.

Watching my father’s health fail has been the hardest part. This is a man who, until about three years ago, still golfed 9 holes three times a week, despite his heart only functioning at around 15 percent. He loved to go to the casino and sit for hours and play. He loved to go for walks in the neighborhood and hang out at electronics stores.

Now, he can barely manage to get out of the car at the grocery store. Mom usually goes in without him because he’s not strong enough to shop. When the weather’s good, he’ll still shuffle around the block but it takes him about a half an hour to do a 10 minute walk. But he tries to do as much as he can. His newer cardiologist seems to have gotten his medications balanced better so he does have more good days than bad. But now he’s changing doctors and it’ll start all over again.

I have given up a lot these last two years to be here and be available for my parents. Some are tangible - mornings when I’d rather go to a movie than drive Mom to Target, when I’d love to be able to take advantage of free museum days but give them up to help out here, coming home early to see if they need anything. Some are intangible - tolerating my mother’s negativity, giving up a lot of emotional life to be here with them. Maybe even giving up a lot of my life to be here with them.

Yet, I’m very sad that they’re moving across the country. In my entire life, we have only lived that far apart for maybe three years. I moved down to California, they moved shortly thereafter when Dad retired early. They have been a confusing mixture of support and frustration but I know I can always count on them to help me out when I’m in trouble. One phone call and Dad is there. Mom has saved me financially more than I can ever repay.

I’m sad that I won’t be able to just jump in the car and drive down to see them. To take Mom to the mall and hang out. To grab a bite with them at some senior restaurant. I’m sad that we won’t see each other for long stretches at a time. I’m sad they’ll be so far out of my life.

But I am excited at getting my life back.

I feel like the time I’ve had since I left my husband has pretty much been on hold. I knew the roomie situation with the fabulous Tiffany was temporary and then moving into my own sublet for a few months was even more temporary. Moving in with my parents was also temporary. So I’ve been temporary for the past three and a half years. That’s a long time to be temporary. I’m hoping that since I’m staying in the same apartment for the foreseeable future will give me some sense of permanence, some sense of place. Some sense of my own.

The wonder that is Monica is moving in with me, which will only help bring more positivity to my life. I have to be careful not to be so excited about having “my” own place that I don’t forget that Monica needs to have that same sense of place, that sense of her own space as well.

I’m excited at having some peace and quiet in my life. Although I am a social creature and tend to get very depressed when I am not around people, I do need those times of quiet and zen. Haven’t had a lot of that in three and a half years. I’m excited at being able to pick up my guitar and pick up the re-learning curve again. I’m excited most of all about having a space in the living room/dining room where I can paint and not have to move wet paintings into the shower to dry so I don’t knock them over in my bedroom.

And I’ll have a bed. A real bed. Not an Ikea special or a day bed, which is where I’ve been sleeping for two years. But a full queen-sized bed. Where I can spread out and Twyla can again sleep near my feet instead of almost on my head. I can stretch out, not sleep curled up against the bars of the day bed.

And just to finally feel like I’m a grown-up with my own place and my own space and not have to worry about when I have to pack up again or if someone is not going to approve of what I’m doing, even if it means I’m laying in bed all day. My own place.

So I’m sad Mom and Dad will be so far away. But I’ll start saving my pennies for a Christmas visit. And in the meantime, I’m ready to get started on my life -- finally.

Words for those who won’t hear

Many of my friends are experiencing the loss of a dear friend, someone who found himself with no choice but to leave those who love him behind. I don’t know this person, I saw him once in a show and thought he was lovely. But I know those he left behind and I hear their pain and their sorrow and their desire to understand the un-understandable.

I’ve probably stepped on them too often in the last few days, wanting to reach out to them and help them find comfort because I love them and I know their pain. There’s so much I wanted to say to them and maybe I’ve said too much and should have kept my fingers shut and not snet the comments and thoughts I have, but I couldn’t help myself.

So this is for them, those who don’t read my blog, who probably don’t know it exists. This is what I want to say to them.

You couldn’t have stopped him. Even if you’d been in the room, outside the door, on the phone with him, you couldn’t have stopped him.

In that moment, there is nothing. I’ve been there. I’ve counted out the pills, trying to figure out if there were enough to actually do the job. In that moment, I’ve never been clearer about my intention in my life. To make it stop. All of it. The pain, the loneliness, the anger, all of it. I had no hands to dial a phone because they were busy figuring out if a half bottle of Tylenol, four very old Vicodin and a large bottle of vitamin C were enough. I had no mouth to call because it was getting ready to swallow anything I could find. I even debated about the drain cleaner under the cupboard but I knew I wouldn’t be able to swallow that because of the taste.

All I knew in that moment was the pain and the ache and the hurt and the nothingness I felt that my life had become. No one would miss me. No one would mourn me. Why would they? I mattered not at all.

And it wasn’t their fault. They loved me, they treated me with love, they reached out to me in love. But in that moment, on that razor’s edge, that love didn’t reach. That love couldn’t get through and make me stop. That love, though true and real, felt false and empty. Because I felt false and empty.

And what stopped me wasn’t love. It was anger. Anger at my then-husband. Anger at the fact that he probably would be angry that I’d made a mess and that I’d probably fail and then he’d be angry because I’d end up the hospital and he’d have to take care of me and the money and the bills and on and on and on. And I got angier as I thought about it. And what saved me was that anger. Fuck him was the thought that stopped me. I won’t let him take my life away. I won’t let his anger and his controlling and his own fear and pain heaped on me end my life. Fuck him. I wouldn’t let him take away my life.

I was lucky. I chose to stay here and fight for the life that I wanted. The one time in my life that my anger actually worked to keep me focused on moving forward. The one time I didn’t back down from that anger, I just let it rise.

But unfortunately that anger doesn’t save everybody. Not everybody has a clarifying, life-changing, life-affirming moment in the middle of their suicide attempt. Many just let it go, chose to leave the pain behind and not fight anymore.

My friends will never understand why he did it. Just as many of my friends probably don’t understand why I stood over the sink, a glass of whiskey of some sort in one hand, a handful of Tylenol in the other. I was loved. I was wanted. I was doing so well on so many things. But we can’t know what’s in someone’s mind. We can only do the best we can while they’re here to let them know that they are loved. If they choose not to hear that or not to feel that, there is nothing that can be done. Sometimes, the pit is just too deep and the pain is just too hard. And the choice is no longer a choice, it’s just what is there.

I hope my friends find some solace in their company with each other. I hope they remember their friend and the wonders he did bring to their lives. And I hope they can move past his choice and heal their own hurt and pain and just let their love find him, wherever he is, and give him some peace.

I refuse to call it a date.

So I caved to pressure and joined a not-to-be-named online dating website again. I’ve joined this one several times and always got the dregs of society “wooing” me. Let’s call it OKStupid. But I thought I’d give it one more shot. Why? I don’t know. Because I bought the hype of “my friend met her husband on there” or “I know 10 people who’ve met the love of their lives on there.” For free. So I caved.

One of the first profiles caught me immediately, which surprised me. Surely, he can’t be as smart and witty as his profile sounds. Kinda cute in a big guy next door kind of way, apparently my type now. He used full sentences and never used the term “hot” at all. He liked the same books I liked, same kind of movies with just enough difference that it intrigued me. He was a writer, like me.

I screwed up the courage and sent him a hopefully not desperate note saying I liked his profile and invited him to see mine and see if he thought we had anything in common. And he did. We sent notes back and forth a couple of times through the Stupid website. And I was moderately excited. He could spell. He used correct grammar. He was witty without being insulting and I thought, okay, maybe this could be someone I might possibly consider hanging out with.

He broached the idea of getting together almost immediately and I thought, why not? That’s why I signed up for this adventure. After a couple of failed attempts, we figured out a time and date. I liked that he was very prompt at returning emails and apologetic when he dropped the ball at one point due to out of town visitors.

But I refused to approach the coffee meeting as a date, because, to me, it wasn’t. A date is someone picks you up, pays for dinner and a movie, and then politely drops you at the door with perhaps a chaste kiss on the cheek. This was coffee at Starbucks in between meetings and work. Just a test to see if a date was a possibility.

So I sat at Starbucks, trying to pretend that I wasn’t a bit excited at the prospect of meeting someone who seemed to suited to me. I tried to pretend that I wasn’t scared of starting something new. The idea of dating and relating and all that stuff still scares the shit out of me. Learning all the new things about someone, trying, this time, to not be what I think he wants me to be and just be me, building something, yada, yada, yada.

I shouldn’t have worried so much.

He comes in. I look up. Okay, he’s kind of retro cool looking with fuzzy hair and a cap but not in a weird way, in a “wow, that could be kinda hip” way. Nice smile. Good handshake. Polite - waits for me to sit before he does. Hmmmmm….

Then it happened. I, in an effort to break the first meeting tension, said, “What’s this writing project you’re working on?”

Thirty-five minutes later, he stopped talking about himself long enough to ask me, “So, what about you? Where are you from?” I managed to get out, “Well, I was born in New York and raised in Canada, in Winnipeg, just above Fargo.” “Wow, really, my roommate’s wife is from Vancouver” and he was off again. For another 45 minutes. I tried to figure out how I could chew my arm off to get away from him. Not only did he talk, he talked like he’d just consumed about 85 cases of Red Bull. Rapid fire, no breaths, no chance to stick my foot in the conversation.

I did try to insert a comment here and there but after about 30 minutes, I gave up. This man was not interested in hearing about me. He wanted someone to listen to him. Listen to his complete lack of anything. He tried to talk about directing, which he’d only done for one semester in college. But as the conversation progressed, he was deemed more and more brilliant at his modern approach to Shakespeare, which includes cutting the shit out of his plays to make them “work better.” Because, apparently, no one else has been able to update Shakespeare to modern times quite the way he has.

And his exploits as a tour manager were legend, at least in his mind.

Then he started talking about writing but I had stopped listening about 15 minutes earlier. His mouth kept moving and there were a torrent of words spilling out but I just didn’t give a fuck anymore.

On top of that, we walked over to a hot dog place so he could grab a bite before his meeting. What did he order? A kielbasa buried in onions and peppers, onion rings and deep fried jalapeno. Which he ate with open-mouthed enthusiasm across from me, while barely taking a break to bite into the mass of dog and onion. Great first meeting food.

Finally, after the fourth time I checked my phone for the time, he asked what time it was. Oh, damn, he had to get to his meeting. I practically ran out the door.

Then I didn’t know what to say. Lose my email? It was nice listening to you for the last 90 minutes. I said something stupid like I guess we’ll run into each other. But he didn’t say, let’s do this again or anything so I thought maybe he didn’t think we connected either and I’d never hear from him again.

Oh, and I forgot the best part. When we met at Starbucks, he pulled out a bag with cookies in it that he had baked for his office. Yes, he cooks, another reason I thought he might be cool. But then he takes a few of these out and lays them in front of me and says, I brought some extra for you. I kind of smiled but it felt weird. He didn’t know if I had any food issues - which I don’t, but still - and although it should have been sweet, it felt sort of weird and creepy.

I tossed the cookies when I got home.

Just as I figured I’d never hear from him again, I get an email. He had a great time (of course he did) and we should do it again.

I wanted to email back, if I want to listen to a monologue, I’ll rent “Swimming to Cambodia.” I struggled back and forth about how to respond. Don’t email me again because I don’t want that torture again. Gosh, my schedule has gotten very, very busy and I’m not sure I’ll be available but let me know.

I finally thought about what Anna has told me about the guys she’s met on OKStupid. They don’t call or email again and she wastes time wondering if it’s her, if they didn’t connect, what was going on.

So I screwed up my courage and I sent him an email that said, you seem to be a guy who appreciates honesty, I don’t think we had a connection and I’m not interested in having lunch with you again. Best of luck on things.

Cruel, maybe, but at least he won’t wonder why I’m not returning his emails.

I’m waiting for the shoe to drop and a tirade to come back. It hasn’t yet, which may mean he’s accepted my response. Or he’s writing and rewriting the fuck you email he’s going to send. Either way, I don’t care.

I came home and immediately canceled my account on OKStupid. I just don’t have the time or the energy to waste on these kind of meetings. They piss me off, they make me angry and it’s time I can’t get back. I’d rather meet someone in person through friends in a non-expectation-filled event and find out if he’s someone I’d want to date. I can’t sit through coffee after coffee, wondering how to get out, wondering why I did this.

Maybe that means I’ll be alone for a lot longer but, really, for me, I’d rather be alone than be annoyed over and over again.

So save me your stories about finding the love of your life. You lucked out. I’m going to try to make my own luck.

Or I’ll be that crazy artist lady down the street who dressed wacky and everyone calls an eccentric. I think I’d rather do that.

Choosing to fail

There is one thing everyone in my family is good at that I don’t want to be good at. Being angry.

My mother had a Ph.D. in it. My sister has at least a Masters. My dad is the strong, silent type. My brother is somewhere in between.

Anger comes easily to me. It’s the fail-safe. When I don’t know what to be, I get angry. Because I know it. Because it’s familiar. Because it’s always been there, waiting patiently until I found it. Comfortable. Simple.

Anger made it easy for me to blame everyone else. Made it easy for me to say, well, of course I didn’t do my best, I was very angry because -- insert excuse here. Of course I couldn’t finish this, I was very angry because -- insert excuse here. It excused me from accepting responsibility. It excused me from facing the truth in a lot of situations. It excused me from facing the harder emotions - hurt, sadness, fear, among others. Anger felt like power because it’s, well, angry. It felt like motion. It felt like feeling something.

But it was a lie. Anger just made me more angry because I couldn’t get to what was underneath. It made it easy to hide but not easy to really see what was going on.

I spent a lot of time in anger over the past couple of years. Anger at my ex. Anger at my last theater company and a wide variety of people therein. Anger at my parents, at my life, at the world, at the president (well, maybe that was justified). I was getting really good at being angry. After all, I learned from the best.

But in working hard to step away from the anger, starting with making some sort of peace with my ex, I have found joy again. I have found a whole bunch of emotions that have been waiting patiently on the sidelines, waving, hoping I’ll see them and invite them in. Good emotions like joy and pleasure and delight and excitement. Even some scary emotions like vulnerability, fear and uncertainty. Without spending so much energy on being angry, it leaves me free to feel and experience things without dark glasses on, with true, clear eyes.

It was clear tonight when I ran into the brother of a former friend, who was one of the casualties of a catastrophic situation right around this time last year. There was no win. There was no good way for this situation to end. Many people got involved, many people got hurt because there was plenty of anger to go around, me included. No one was able to step back and look at this situation clearly, including me. That doesn’t mean I would change what I did one iota. But I think we were all so lost in anger and lost in pain that we all handled every moment of it badly. Maybe we were all justified in our pain and our anger. But it left everything decimated in its wake, destroying friendships, destroying relationships, and destroying trust.

In talking to this brother tonight, I realized that I am no longer angry. Hopefully, after a year, one can let anger go. I’ve never been very good at that. I like to hang on to anger like an anchor, something to guide me on how to feel in the future about things that have happened in the past.

But I found myself saying, honestly, it was a cluster-fuck and there was no good way out of it. I found myself not wanting to engage in, “oh, yeah, well, they suck” conversation, which I would have relished a year ago. I just said, “too bad, I know they will probably say bad things but whatever. It was ugly and it was messy and it was bad all the way around. I miss your brother, I really liked him a lot and I’m sorry he got lost along the way. I know he has to support his girlfriend and I understand that.” And left it at that. We joked a lot about how this would be our one and only meeting because after he got their side of the story tomorrow, he would never be able to speak to me again. A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to make fun of a situation like this. I would have been devastated and angry and not able to see that the hurt and anger on their side was just as real as mine.

What does this all mean? I don’t know. Maybe it means I’m growing and finally realizing that anger has its place but not in every single moment of my life. Anger doesn’t accomplish much when it’s used pointlessly. Anger just begets anger. And then we all end up standing around, pointing fingers, screaming, instead of trying to really see what’s going on and trying to solve the truth of the moment.

I’m choosing to fail at being angry. I’m choosing to find another way to handle things. I’m choosing to leave my family’s legacy behind and embrace the Eastern part of our heritage and maybe find a more spiritual and Buddha-like way of dealing with hurt and pain and challenges. That doesn’t mean I won’t blow my stack occasionally. After all, I’m not Buddha and it’s hard to change almost 47 years of conditioning. But maybe I can make baby steps this year, choosing to embrace joy and release anger. Choosing to let go and move forward instead of dwell in the nastiness. Choosing to live instead of choosing to let parts of me die.

Choosing to fail at anger. That will be my success this year.

Anger, denial, etc., etc., acceptance.

I spent a good part of last year angry. Very, very angry. I guess it was bound to come.

I was angry at my ex, for reasons I could not even explain. But just his presence made me pissed off and wanting to smash his head in. Not a pleasant feeling.

The theater I was working at was pissing me off - and still pisses me off, if you get me started - but I really let it get under my skin and I made it very, very personal, which made me very, very angry.

Seems that everyone who crossed my path in the last six months of the year made me angry.

And I was angry that it seemed that everyone else could be angry and petty and ridiculous, except me, of course. And that made me even angier.

As 2008 came to a close, I realized I didn’t really like the person I was becoming. And that’s because I was becoming my mother. Everything was everybody else’s fault. No one understood me or cared about me. Everyone was against me. No one listened to me. No one cared.

I could see myself sitting alone in my living room, lights off, on my third glass of wine (which I will only count as my second and deny anything after that), flipping endless through the channels, looking for something to distract me from my lethargy and pathetic, empty, soulless life.

Now, I love my mom but she’s just one glass of wine from an alcoholic and probably should be on at least two different antidepressants. And I don’t want to be her.

I want 2009 to be the year of acceptance. Accepting my life as it is, in a very Taoist way. Not standing around, watching my life pass me by, but looking at what’s in front of me and making the absolute most out of it. Accepting the people around me for their foibles and their flaws as well as learning that it’s okay to not accept bullshit from people. Stand my ground without making it deeply personal and taking it to heart.

Accepting my talents without fear or shame or feeling the need to poo-poo that these talents exist. Accepting the praise without hiding.

Accepting that I am imperfect and that I don’t need to manipulate myself to meet others’ expectations. That doesn’t mean I get to stumble around and smash toes and feelings and everything else. It just means that I accept that there are things I could change and need to look at but it doesn’t mean that every little thing in me has to change. Accept criticism and do with it what I may, which means occasionally deciding not to apply it.

Accepting also means letting go. Letting go of the clowns in my head and renting out their space. Letting go of the pieces of my heart that have scattered to the wind and accept that they’re not coming back.

Letting go of trying to change things that just simply can’t be changed. I’m alone. That’s it. I’m not going to be forever (please, God, please) but I’m alone now. Letting go of needing to find someone to make me feel whole. The two men I let try to make me feel whole just left me shattered and broken. I need to accept that I need to make myself feel whole and let go of the notion that someone else can do that for me.

And just breathe into my life, embrace what is joyful and beautiful, acknowledge what is difficult and ugly, and pick up my feet and put one in front of the other and just keep moving through my life.

Accepting that I have to let go to finally find the life I want.

Choosing

I have been living in anger for a very long time now. It’s comfortable, it’s familiar, it’s easier not to deal with how I really feel when everything’s a big, black blur of anger.

I was going to list the reasons why I’ve been angry and who I’ve been angry at but I realized that that is pointless. The main person I’ve been angry with is myself.

I have been angry that I have allowed myself to lose so much time and so many things by simply letting fear and insecurity take over my life. My anger is based so strongly in fear yet I rarely can see that that is the case.

It’s familiar because the main emotions in my family are anger and fear. We communicate in shouts, not whispers. We fight more than we hug. Raised voices are what I grew up with and it’s the way I learned to communicate. When you are unhappy, be angry. When you are uncertain, be angry. When you are afraid, be angry. It’s not your fault you feel this way, it’s everybody else’s. Everybody else is to blame.

My mother schooled me well in anger and self-righteousness. She is a fury when she feels out of control - which is very often, especially now. She is unreachable in that fury and she is devastated when the fury ceases but she has no tools to understand or deal with the aftermath, so she dives further into the fury.

More and more often as I get older, I hear my mother coming out of my mouth. I see myself echoing her self-preservation techniques - drive everyone away before they can hurt you, before they can reveal your flaws and your weaknesses. And if someone crosses you, cross them off the list and leave them behind. Live your life in a dark room, alone, empty, with alienation and loneliness your only friends.

I let go of a lot of anger last night. I realized how much energy and attention it takes to be that angry that much of the time. How it eats away at you, how it was eating away at me. How the anger and the fear were taking the joy out of things because I was allowing them to.

I reached out to my ex last night, one of the main sources of my anger. I realized that I am I control of my life and I can choose to let him in and how much to let him in. Despite all the pain and the fury, I miss him. And my anger was coming from the residual hurt and pain of our relationship and from fear that if I opened myself up to him at all, he would hurt me again in some way. But last night, I gently reached out, cautiously, fearfully, and he reached back just as tentatively. But we managed to meet in the middle, have a moment in time when we were gentle with each other, just to say, hey, hope you’re well, what’s going on, and leave it at that.

And it felt good to do that. To let that anger go, leave that fear by the side. I realize I can control how much access he has to me and how much information I give him. I can let him in to my life if I choose and in the way that I choose. And if I don’t like the way it’s going, I can choose to push him away.

I guess it comes with discovering that I am in control of my life, not him, not anyone else. When it comes to the other people who I have been angry at lately, I also realized that it accomplishes nothing to carry that anger around. It shuts me off from them, leaving them no choice but to stand at a distance and reflect that anger back at me. The only way to not live in that fury is to let the anger go, realize that I participated in creating that situation, and choose to step out of the fury and leave the hurricane behind.

I am a faux Buddhist. I say this because I know so little about Buddhism but I desire to embrace that philosophy. My grandfather was a Buddhist and I think I inherited that sensibility from him and from my father, who is maybe a little too passive within the fury but mostly seems to possess the best of that Eastern way of living. And in my moderate attempts to understand and to create a life of peace and contentment, I am slowly discovering that anger cannot exist within that life. That doesn’t mean I have to be a pansy and allow people to run over me and treat me like a doormat. Respect and dignity are a large part of the way I’d like to live my life. But in order to receive that respect and dignity, I must allow myself to be vulnerable enough to treat others that way, even if we don’t agree, even if they’ve hurt me or disrespected me in some way. I have to choose to not allow that anger to take over and color every moment of every relationship.

So this morning, I woke up relieved and relaxed, that ball of fury in my stomach gone, that pile of fear cut down significantly. I am still fearful of letting go of that familiarity of living in anger and fear. I am terrified that I am leaving myself open to truly being hurt and scarred and mangled by those I have been so angry at. But in living in that fury, I fear I have cut myself off from everyone else, not allowing someone who will treat me with dignity and respect and pride and love come through because of the wall of fury existing around me.

I know I am not done being angry and I know that the fury is going to be a battle every single day. But I also know that it was easier to sleep last night and my heart is at peace this morning. Let’s see how long I can hang on to that.

Father to daughter

He sat on my bed today, holding my hand, telling me all the things a daughter wants to hear from her father.

His voice shook. He cried almost as hard as I did. He held my hand the entire time. He heard me in a way my mother never has.

He said that they weren’t deserting me, leaving me behind when they move. He heard me say I need to be acknowledged and treated with respect. He acknowledged my pain and was heartbroken to have been part of the cause.

He told me they didn’t want to burden me anymore with their care. That I had done enough and now it was time for my sister to take over.

My heart broke as he said they thought they were holding me back from doing and being what I should do and be. That he hoped that my taking care of them wasn’t why I haven’t been able to get further. And that he knows that I am following a difficult path, one that they both don’t want me to abandon. In fact, he assured me that I never need to worry financially, that what I was doing was special and difficult and that they want to see me continue. Then he said he wants me to keep going because he wants to be able to point up at the screen and, as his eyes overflowed with tears, be able to say, “That’s my girl.”

He shared with me the difficulties with my mother, but then told me how she takes care of him and how he loves her for that. Not in those words but it was clear in his eyes that she is the one he will be with till his last day, whether it’s six months from now or another 30 years from now. He shared my pain in how she communicates - or how she fails to. He acknowledged how difficult she is but without diminishing either of us. But talked gently and quietly, making it okay to say, yeah, she makes me crazy but with a smile, not a scream.

And he never let go of my hand.

He talked about the life they’ll have in the Great North and how it’ll be good for them and again assured me that they aren’t leaving me behind, just moving forward.

Then he stopped, his eyes unable to look at me because I would see his heart in them. He said, “We’re breaking up.” I was confused until he explained that it felt like our family was breaking up because I wouldn’t be there with them. He told me how hard it was when I left Winnipeg all those years ago, to find my way while they stayed behind at home. That one of the main reasons they moved down here was because of me.

He squeezed my hand as he assured me that we would talk a lot, that we should talk a lot. That they would always be there, no matter what I needed. And that my sister and her husband also would be there, so I could continue to walk my path and be the person I’ve been trying to be without having to worry about being burdened with their care.

He acknowledged how much I’ve done and how proud he is of me. He wanted me to know that they never meant to hurt me or disrespect me. They were afraid I would be hurt and feel that they were deserting me so they didn’t want to talk about it. He heard me when I said that I needed to talk about it and that I needed them to share this with me, not cut me out and leave me standing at the side of the road.

Through numerous interruptions by both my mother and my cat, he never let go of my hand.

In the end, it wasn’t his words but his eyes and his gentle grip that told me all I needed to know. My father loves me more than he can ever express. He respects me and understands me in a way that no one else in my family does or ever will. He told me that I am his daughter and that’s enough for him. That what I do has value, that who I am has value, that, to him, I will always have value.

All because he sat on my bed today, holding my hand, telling me all the things a daughter wants to hear from her father.

Thank you, I'm fine.

I had a couple of late-breaking epiphanies today.

I’ve been struggling the past couple of weeks with changes and holidays and parents and flooded apartment and have barely been able to keep my head above water emotionally. However, I know after a bleak period like this there tends to be insight. Here’s what I’ve gotten this time.

1. I’m just fine as I am, thank you very much. There is nothing wrong with me. I am still thinking about why the OOMA (Object of My Affection, for those of you new to this blog) didn’t choose to be with me. I’ve intellectually been able to say, oh, well, too bad, his choice. But today, it hit me. It was his choice. It had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him. There is nothing wrong with me. Nothing. He didn’t not choose me because I gained some weight or I showed him my raw emotional side or any of the other million things that have gone through my head since that night that I saw him realize he had a choice. We were out for his birthday, we were seeing his friends play at a bar. I looked fantastic. I went to the ladies room and came back. He put his arm out and I slid comfortably under it, snuggling close to him and felt like a million bucks. And he went to introduce me. He said, “This is my…” Then he stopped and looked at me. In that moment, he chose. He could have said my girlfriend and changed my life. He could have not paused and just said my friend, Susan, and we would have gone on just fine. But he looked at me and saw a girlfriend. And he was not able to accept that. He was not able to make that transition because he chose not to. Not because there was anything wrong with me, or with him, for that matter. Just because he wasn’t ready or chose not to be ready or whatever. It was not me. I am fine. There is nothing wrong with me.

That sounds simple but it hit me like a freight train today. I had found some pictures of us from some wonderful times we had and it really broke my heart that nothing ever went further than friends. Then, while driving and going over every single second of our recent friendship, a tiny, quiet, sane, beautiful voice said, “It’s not you. You’re just fine. It’s him. He chose not to have you. He chose for his own reasons. It has nothing to do with you. You’re fine.” And there was a quiet peace that followed.

I’m just fine as I am, thank you very much.

2. I’m just fine as I am, thank you very much. I am proud of what I have done with my life. Taking control and leaving a very miserable, abusive, controlled and suffocating marriage. I haven’t always done well financially, I haven’t always done well emotionally. But I’ve taken those steps to get there financially and emotionally and I have been true to myself. I am proud of the work I have done, no matter what others have said in cruel, vicious, mean ways, striking out at me where I am most vulnerable - my ability to create. I am a long way from the artist I want to be, whether as a painter or as a writer or as a director. But I pour my heart and soul into every single piece of work I do and I do the best I can with what I have. I have created so much in just under four years that sometimes, it’s hard to believe. But I have allowed others to taint that accomplishment with their bitterness and their smallness. I saw myself through blurred eyes and thought their criticisms were true, despite the fact that my work has gotten more and more recognition as time has gone by. I don’t have to make you happy. I am making me happy. I know I am a great writer. I know I am a solid director, getting better and better. I know I am a strong artist who is learning and growing and discovering. I know I am fine and I know who I am creatively.

3. I’m just fine as I am, thank you. My family still sees me as a struggling, uncertain, baby girl of 12 who doesn’t know what she wants because she’s living in a family she doesn’t understand. They see me as not knowing anything, as not capable of anything, because I’m the baby and my sister and brother are older and have achieved so much more, so therefore, I really don’t matter because I don’t contribute anything to the family. I don’t have a wall of trophies. I don’t have newspaper articles about me. I don’t have a six figure a year job. I don’t exist. I don’t matter enough to even deserve more than four minutes on the phone on Thanksgiving while my folks are staying with my sister. I am invisible. To them. But I am not invisible to me. I cannot change their impression. If I won Oscars for best writer, best director and best picture, there would still be criticism of what I said in my acceptance speech or how I stood at the podium or what dress I wore. Or, in reality, they would never even notice. But I notice. And I am not invisible to myself. I am solid and strong and worthy. I can’t change them and I have to stop trying. My success isn’t six figures but it’s doing a job I love. It’s writing pieces I am proud of and that people want to perform. It’s directing award-winning plays and short films. It’s success in creating my life, not just flowing along, doing what makes me visible to those who aren’t living their life. I am visible, I am capable, and I am acknowledged and I exist for those who can truly see the qualities that are intangible and invisible and underneath. I am just fine as I am, thank you. Invisible to you but not invisible to myself.

I am just fine. I am learning the truth behind that simple statement. I am just fine. The rest doesn’t matter.

I had a long, whiny, petulant post in my head that says, waaaaaaa, I’m all alone. I have no friends. My family doesn’t even know I exist. Feel sorry for me. Feel bad for me. Tell me how important and valuable I am.

And some of that may spill over into this but maybe not.

It’s hard for me to let things go. And I guess the nature of friendship is that it ebbs and flows, like everything else in life. But I hate the ebb and want the flow all the time.

This week has been particularly hard. Naturally, the holiday made it difficult because my best friend, Z, is at home with her family, which is where she needs to be. She jokingly invited me to come along and some day, I’ll take her up on that offer. Anna offered for me to join her for her funky, funny Thanksgiving at an old ‘50s diner down near the airport, which I did and which was fun. But that was it. No other offers, no other friends checking in to see what I was doing. Nothing. But they all have their lives and things going on and I have to accept the fact that I’m just not a part of their lives anymore and let it go. I did get an invite from Kerr, a new friend, after a Facebook post about wanting something to do in the evening and ended up at a very funny, drunken, disorganized Thanksgiving dinner that was a blast and very, very weird. But even my family didn't bother to call me to wish me Thanksgiving. I had to call them and we spent a total of five minutes before they hung up.

But what has exacerbated it was a flood in my bedroom Wednesday night. Was out all day, teaching and rehearsal, etc. Came home to a waterfall in my bedroom. Literally like a tap was turned on in my lighting fixture and had been on apparently most of the day. My carpet is soaking wet (still) and smells so absolutely delightful. I had to completely dump my bedroom into the living room so I could make sure nothing else got soaked. Luckily, nothing important got wet, including my laptop or my hard drives.

I called Anna and she immediately ran over and helped me get stuff out and patted me on the back figuratively. I’m so glad she was there and willing to come over and watch me freak out.

I did what we do nowadays - updated my status on Facebook about this. Got a few “oh, that’s too bad” comments back. And nothing else.

I guess my expectations of friendship is higher than I realized.

My friendship with Z and Anna is what I expect a friendship to be. We talk at least once a week. Talk. By phone. Or in person. Sure, we text and email and Facebook in between but we have some face time in between. If I don’t hear from one of them for a while, I call them. Vice versa. Anna called me once just because I hadn’t updated my Facebook status for a day or two. God bless her.

Maybe those expectations are too high. Maybe I should settle for friendships that are loose and casual, with no expectations and no consistency. Call once in a while, see each other at events, cute Facebook comments and pictures with no real substance in between. Be happy and delightful and perky every time we’re together, keep the real feelings and stuff under the surface so as not to disrupt anything or put anybody in an uncomfortable situation. Keep my mouth shut, show up and smile. That’s apparently what I’m supposed to be in a lot of my friendships lately.

Maybe being alone with a couple of real, true friends who I can yell at and yell with and be yelled at by is preferable. I spent too many years putting on a face, hiding things without release to do that over again for people who only talk to me for 10 minutes if I come to a show and can’t be bothered to respond to invitations to do something or reach out to me when I’ve reached out to them over and over again.

These couple of close friendships require no reaching. They require only a response to a text for “Pie?”, which we have never actually eaten in response to such a text. They require only bringing myself to the table, whether it’s a table at Olive Garden or at Z’s house. Z and I can spend two hours walking around Target and Vroman’s and still need eight more hours to talk. I can tell either of them anything and be angry, both with them and with myself, and they can do the same. I can be me around them and not have to be Superwoman, emotionless and undemanding.

I’m looking at what I need to change to make sure I’m not out there, pissing off the whole world. But my constant companions assure me they love me just as I am - fragile, demanding, needy, occasionally bitchy, funny, determined, driven, angry, bitter, sad, delicate, fierce and sometimes just tired. And I love them for exactly the same reasons.

Maybe that’s enough.

The most amazing sentiment on Prop 8

I was proud to march in the Silverlake protest on Saturday (photos coming soon) but Keith Olbermann said it best. I've posted both the video and the text because he expressed what so many of us feel. For all my friends that Prop 8 affects, this is for you.



Special Comment: The Passage of Prop 8
Posted: Monday, November 10, 2008 9:01 PM by Countdown
Filed Under: Special Comment

Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the passage, last week, of Proposition Eight in California, which rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, and tilted the balance on this issue, from coast to coast.

Some parameters, as preface. This isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics, and this isn't really just about Prop-8. And I don't have a personal investment in this: I'm not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.

And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics.

This is about the... human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.

If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not... understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want -- a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

Only now you are saying to them -- no. You can't have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don't cause too much trouble. You'll even give them all the same legal rights -- even as you're taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can't marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn't marry?

I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage.

If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal... in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it's worse than that. If this country had not "re-defined" marriage, some black people still couldn't marry...black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not "Until Death, Do You Part," but "Until Death or Distance, Do You Part." Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.

You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are... gay.

And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing -- centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children... All because we said a man couldn't marry another man, or a woman couldn't marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage. How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the "sanctity" of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?

What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don't you, as human beings, have to embrace... that love? The world is barren enough.

It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate... this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness -- this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness -- share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

---

You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of...love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don't have to help it, you don't have it applaud it, you don't have to fight for it. Just don't put it out. Just don't extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don't know and you don't understand and maybe you don't even want to know...It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow **person...

Just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.

This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.

But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:

"I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam," he told the judge.

"It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all:

"So I be written in the Book of Love;

"I do not care about that Book above.

"Erase my name, or write it as you will,

"So I be written in the Book of Love."

---

Good night, and good luck.

Eat, Pray, are you kidding me?!

I’m trying to work my way through “Eat, Pray, Love” because my friend, Anna, just read it. She’s as cynical and angry as I am and she assured me that it wasn’t the typical, self-help, Oprah pabulum that has become so popular these days. She did warn me that I may find it a bit of that, but not cloyingly so.

Well, I’m about two dozen pages into it and I know I won’t finish it. Why? It’s not because it isn’t well-written, because it is. It’s not that I can’t relate to what she’s going through, because I can.

What I can’t get past is that this woman, an established writer so I can’t fault her there, took her divorce recovery and rebuilding on the road to Italy, India and Indonesia. She starts the book having coffee with a gorgeous Italian man - who has a gorgeous twin - as they exchange language lessons in Italy. Yeah, I do that every Thursday.

She spent time in an ashram with an amazing guru. I’m sure there are many other wondrous and vivid adventures she had while she took her recovery on the road.

You know where my recovery took me?

First, to my friend’s living room for a month while I figured out where I was going to live.

Then to a small bedroom in someone else’s apartment while 90% of my life lived in a storage room across town.

Briefly, I had my own place for four glorious months but my parents basically paid my rent that entire time because I’ve never recovered economically from going from two incomes to one.

Now, I’m living in a tiny bedroom in an apartment that is dominated by parents, as is my life.

Hmmmmm, Italy, gorgeous men, ashram are a long way away from where I am.

She fell in love immediately with a young, studly actor/performer who swept her off her feet.

I fell in love with one of my best friends who never so much as held my hand and now merely tolerates my presence. The only thing she writes about that I can relate to is how she drove the young performer away with her neediness. Hm, that sounds familiar. However, the OOMA was not young and not studly, although I still view him as one of the most incredible men I have ever known. And he’ll always be handsome in my eyes.

While I understand the fairy tale, oh I wish that were me quality of “Eat, Pray, Love”, I just can’t do it.

Most of us don’t have the luxury of taking our divorce/mid-life on the road to these fabulous places. And I realize that she went through exactly the same thing I did and that I will probably find other things that I can relate to if I should manage to struggle through more of it.

But what I’d like to read about is someone like me. Someone who can’t figure out how to pay their bills, who hasn’t had a date since she left her husband in June, 2005. Someone who’s managed to pretty much drive a lot of her friends away. Someone who didn’t find company with young Italian men but spends more of her life in a single room, working towards a dream but finding herself lonely and empty and melancholy so much of the time. Someone who keeps putting one foot in front of the other just because there are no other choices.

It wouldn’t be “Eat, Pray, Love.” It might be “Cry, Battle, Survive.” That I might read.

VOTE!

No matter who you cast the ballot for, make sure you cast it!

If you're like me and supporting Barack Obama, make sure you vote, even if you are sure he's going to win. He'll only win if we actually go in and punch the ballot or smack the computer or whatever the hell voting entails these days.

If you're voting for McCain, I won't hate you. That is the beauty of this country, we get to express our right and say this is who represents me.

I have friends who think that yelling at me and chastising me for my choice is somehow going to make me convert. I think a gentler approach is much better.

Weirdly enough, something at the movies yesterday really confirmed to me why voting No on Prop 8 is right. Don't throw "protect traditional marriage" at me. A "traditionally married" couple, who we're told is what voting "yes" will protect, brought their two toddlers, who we're told voting "yes" will protect, to "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" yesterday. So, the folks who are worried that gay marriage and information about two men or two women loving each other enough to desire to make vows together and create a union that is sanctioned by the law and by God and whomever else it's sanctioned by, will corrupt their children apparently didn't think that two hours of "fuck", "motherfucker", "cocksucker" and other words I won't use going into their children's ears and the sight of an extraordinary amount of almost pornographic sex apparently won't warp the minds of their five and six-year-old children. Hmmmm. Good argument.

So vote your heart, vote your soul, vote your conscience and embrace those who don't share your views. Celebrate the fact that we get to do this, that we get to say we don't agree and that we all get free Starbucks and Ben & Jerry's tomorrow!

Poetry warning

My heart
in pieces
all over the room
tonight.

The one who had my heart
and shattered it,
leaving us with
no words
but glances
that say everything
we can't say
aloud.

the other
who still
still
still
has my heart
as much as I try
to take it back
since he's not
using it.

This is why
it's just me.
Because my heart
is a long way
from whole.

Hold, please.

When I first began this mid-life adventure, I had the life I thought I would always have. Lots of friends, hanging out a lot with friends. Going to see bands and such with my dearest Chairman. Doing great work at the Ark, hanging out with those folks in the off hours. Just really enjoying life.

But things have changed in the last two years. Dad got sicker and sicker and he and my mom and I moved in together. That’s when my life was put on hold. Or so it seems.

I spend most days hanging out in my room. I love my mom but can only take her in short stints. My father sleeps 18 hours a day due to his heart only working about 15%. I teach so I get to talk to children a few days a week. I paint. I write. I edit. That’s my life.

Money’s been tight so I haven’t been going out because, well, there’s no money even for gas right now. I’m hoping that’ll change soon. But it’s reality.

I have to base everything on my folks. Taking a job - will it allow me to chauffeur them to doctors’ appointments and groceries, etc., because Mom is becoming increasingly dependent on me as Dad has good days and bad days. So I can’t take a job that ties me up in the mornings. And I can’t take a night job because Mom wakes up at 7 and by 9, her patience for those sleeping - no matter what time we all got to bed - wears off. I’m afraid to be out too late as I worry something will happen while I’m gone. So I’m on hold.

I have a few friends who are close and who I can count on to get me out of my room occasionally. They call and invite me out or to just check in on me, which I appreciate. But the vast majority of my friends are busy with their lives and broke as I am so they aren’t around like they used to be. And I’m not in the Ark circle anymore, so that creates even more distance because I’m not accessible. So the distance grows and the connection loosens and my support system narrows to a point.

But I miss mostly having a man around. I know it’s stupid but I do. Chairman was so close to me when I was first alone and it was so wonderful to just have a guy to hang out with, even if it was just friends. There’s something about men that we just can’t get from women. Even male friends can make you feel attractive and wanted and beautiful. While women can tell you that, they just aren’t men.

But that part of my life is on hold as well. Not like it was ever active. But I don’t know how I could have someone in my life right now and that makes me sad and makes me ache because I don’t know when this hold button will be released.

And it’s painful to basically be on a death watch for my father. It’s been so evident lately how bad he can be because, ironically, he’s been a bit like his old self the past few days. We went out for dinner the other night and he was chatting with me about what he was watching on TV and which shows he’s interested in and a bunch of other stuff. Usually at dinner, he has trouble just staying awake and doesn’t usually engage. It makes me sad because I know it’s just temporary, his life on hold as well, maybe.

The hardest thing is that we don’t know how long he’s got. He could be around for another five years like this - barely living, just existing, biding his time until there is no more time to bide. And Mom and I stand by, on hold, watching, waiting, not sure what to hope for because he’s not going to get better, that’s about all we know.

My sister watches from a distance, I’m sure judging what I’m doing wrong and how much better she could/will do, if they actually move up there with her. My brother checks in occasionally. But their lives go on, they travel, their children get older, they move through time like everyone else.

Meanwhile, I wait, staring at the walls, wondering if there is a future out there that I will get to sometime. But that would mean losing someone I love very much. Makes it hard to look there.

Virtual fridge - it's been a while.

This was my first "master duplication", which means choosing one of the old Masters - this case, Manet - and painting something of his while learning why he painted the way he did and how he used the paint, etc. Not just to duplicate the painting but to learn how to paint like Manet. I really love this one.



Another master duplication, this is a landscape by Monet. An exercise in impressionism. I kinda like it. ;}



I've been screwing around with learning how to draw noir/crime comics and these are a few of the drawings I've been messing with. Kinda like them, too.






That's it for now. Been working on some watercolors for "Cinderella Drives a Pick-Up", which is going out to Slamdance this week (finally!). Cross your fingers.

Just a single tear

You never cried for us. Not a tear that I saw. Maybe if you had, I might not have made the choice I did.

When I told you I was done with us and I didn’t know what to do and I needed some time to figure out things, you just looked at me blankly and said, for the first time in our marriage, “if that’s what you want.”

In the year of counseling, you never shed a tear. I cried oceans and screamed and let out everything and you sat there like Mr. Spock, staring, fighting, not willing to cry for us. Not a single tear.

When we packed up our home of nine years, the place I wanted to love so much but that you had made your own, not a tear. You coldly packed. I know you were hurt but you never asked why, you never said that simple, single word that might have stopped it all - “stay”. Okay, two words - “stay, please.”

When we stood outside our place for the last time and I couldn’t stop weeping, you just said good-bye, no tears, no questions. Just walked away.

In the time since, not a tear, not a sign that our marriage meant anything.

I realize I cut you off because I think I was afraid if I saw you, I might not have the strength to walk away from you. I might end up like Carrie in “Sex and the City” and just throw myself at you if I saw you and put everything behind us -- all the pain, all the abuse, all the shit you put me through. And then I might have another 15 years of the same thing. I could not do that.

But if you had just showed me that you valued our life, that you valued me, by letting yourself go enough to cry with me or in front of me, it might all have been different. But you coldly walked away, ending our relationship because you “didn’t want to be fiscally responsible” for me anymore. Not because you were hurt or you didn’t love me anymore or because you wanted to end things and move on, because you didn’t want to be “fiscally responsible”. Wow, that’s love.

Maybe movies have corrupted us into wanting, needing, expecting that moment when we open to the door to find the one we love standing on the other side of it, begging us to come back to them, that they don’t care what happened, they can’t live without us. Sorry, doesn’t happen in real life.

In real life, you end up with resentment and distance and anger and pain. And that’s it. No glorious romantic comedy moment where everything you want comes true. Just the struggle to get through the day, even now, almost four years later.

I know you shed your tears to your friends and your family. I know you shed your tears into your pillow.

But what might have saved us is if you had just shed a single tear around me.

Mid-life update

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted. I have had too much and/or too little to say so I haven’t been posting. Sometimes I feel like the things I have to say have already been said and I would just be repeating myself and boring all of you. But I have had a couple of requests for new blogs so here you go.

First, to answer a couple of questions from new readers – I am an art teacher for a private company with around 20 studios throughout Southern California. I love this job almost more than I love directing and writing, which are the passions of my life and one of the reasons why I left my marriage of almost 20 years almost four years ago. Oh, and he was emotionally abusive and extremely controlling.

But enough about that.

What I’ve been thinking about recently is security. I realize that I have never felt secure about anything in my life – my relationships, my talent, my abilities, my jobs. Nothing.

I know this probably comes from my family. I think I felt left behind and ignored most of my life, so I have never felt secure about my place in the family. I feel like I could have disappeared and nobody in my family would even notice that I was gone. This is still true today. My sister’s family and my brother’s family get so much more interest and attention from my mother than I do, despite the fact (or maybe due to the fact) that I live in the same apartment with her and take care of her and my father. But when packages are sent to my mother’s sisters, they include photos of my sister’s family and my very talented nephew and my brother but rarely does she ask to include photos of me. I have to go, hey, Mom, how about including the photos I took in Austin when my film was top 5 on Famecast.com and they flew me out there? This only serves to make me question my success and make me feel very insecure about my place.

I was always the odd girl out in school, always feeling like I didn’t fit in, that I would lose the friends I had if I wasn’t the fun, groovy, happy girl that I pretended to be at home. If I wasn’t happy, nobody would like me. I never felt secure as myself because I couldn’t figure out who I was. I was smart (almost straight A student), excelling at English and writing (big surprise). I loved to write even then and luckily had a few teachers who supported and encouraged that, which kept me writing. But I never quite believed that I was as good as they said I was, because, after all, I didn’t exist and I was not “special.”

My relationships with men have not done much to help with the security aspect. I didn’t date a lot because I wasn’t the pretty girl and I was smart and I was uncertain of how to “date.” I didn’t believe in sex before marriage, although I might as well have had sex with the few guys I was that close to because we did probably just about everything but that. I was afraid, I think, that if I did actually have sex with one of them, I would lose them because I wouldn’t be very good at it and that would make them leave me behind.

My first marriage didn’t give me any security (sorry, TS). We were both very young and maybe shouldn’t have gotten married when we did. He left me behind a lot, going to parties and wanting to be with everyone else but me. I spent many nights, sitting at home, wondering where he was, what he was doing, who he was doing, when he wasn’t with me. I guess I knew eventually he would leave me because, obviously, I wasn’t what he wanted. If I was, he would have been there. And it was true. I wasn’t who he wanted. After less than three years, he left me for someone else – someone younger, someone who was what he wanted, as he’s still with her today.

That left me with no sense of self, even moreso than when we got together. I thought I knew who I was, I thought I was figuring it out, I thought I was getting more secure in myself when I got to LA but I was just kidding myself. I was waiting for someone to make me feel secure, make me be defined by them. And I found him in RJ.

At first, he made me feel secure. He confirmed my strengths but always followed that up with my weaknesses. I thought that was great. I thought that was learning and growing. What it was, instead, was giving him my security in myself and letting him define me without keeping any security within myself. He never had to say that if he left, I would have nothing. He didn’t have to say it, I felt it. My only security was in trying to hang on to him with all my strength, leaving no strength for me. His continued verbal abuse and constant criticism left me with nothing until I stared at a pile of pills, not even having the security in my own choice to take them. I allowed him to steal my security in my talent and in my gifts. I allowed him to steal everything from me.

I never felt secure in my relationship with the OOMA (object of my affection, for you newbies). I fell for him so hard and I just wanted to grab him and hang on to him because I had no sense of security that I would be able to hold on to him. And I wasn’t able to. My need to feel secure in our relationship made me grab him and pull on him and try to make our relationship secure just made him finally run away, leaving our friendship in tatters, which still makes me very insecure about where I am with him.

What does all this mean? It means I’m realizing that the security I seek has to start with me. It has to be in myself because no one else can give it to me. I have to work to figure out how to hang on to that security when I have weeks like these past couple, where the petulant little five-year-old boy who lives in my head tried to stage a coup with the clowns who also live in my head. I have to dig deep down inside and trust that I am who I am and that I have the talents I have without seeking approval from outside. I have to embrace the woman I am without having to have a man tell me I’m beautiful, tell me I’m smart, give me the security I seek. I have to know that I am special and precious and gifted without seeking approval from my family and acknowledgement from people who aren’t going to be able to give it to me.

I have to take baby steps and not get stuck in “forever” mode and think that the way I feel today will be the way I always feel. I have to take baby steps in finding and hanging on to the security I feel in those moments when I’m directing and I know I am awesome at it. I have to hang on to the security I feel in the moments when I’m teaching and I know I rock at guiding these kids – whether they’re five or 15 – through drawing and sketching and painting, feeling secure when they have success because it reflects my own success. I have to hang on to the security I feel when I finish a painting – like I did when I finished an oil this week as a present for someone – that feeling when I step back and I say, wow, that’s incredible, before the voices in my head try to make me push that positive voice away. I have to acknowledge the security I feel in those moments and embrace it and color every single fucking day of my life with that security. Then, if I find someone, I won’t need them to be my security, I won’t need to cling and obsess and panic to hang on to them, I will be able to just be me and be secure in that and know that they love me because I am me and that’s it.

Virtual Fridge - cont'd

Okay, so this is what I do for a living:



It started out as a demonstration on how to draw a pig for a girl on my left. The boy on my right was drawing a butterfly and somehow, the butterfly wings ended up on the pig. Then we added a tube top, clown hair, and alient antennae. Yup, I get paid for this.

This is what I get trained to do:




I really struggled with the colors on this one. The Gluck Method narrows their palettes down to two to simplify things when we teach - an "American" palette and a "European" palette, which is what this one was. Took about six hours to do altogether, from sketch to finish. Need to get faster and more confident about how to create the colors. But I love the colors and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Every day, I am grateful for this job because I would have never known I was capable of this. I've always wanted to draw and paint and it's so incredible to be getting paid to learn how to do this and to get to make clown pig butterfly aliens every day!

Don't hedge me out.

So what is it with men with girlfriends? Why don’t they want to tell you?

Cute Boy, who I still have a huge crush on, never admitted to having a girlfriend when we were having our most intense flirts. I found out through a friend of his. He didn’t admit it until I finally had to ask, and then he admitted he was flying across the country to see her. “Yeah, I guess it’s serious,” was his response when I asked him about it (her).

New Guy just did the same thing tonight. Have met a few times through a variety of things. Nice connection, nice flirting, nice guy. Three times we’ve had plenty of time to talk about many things. None of those times did the word “girlfriend” come from him. Tonight, after walking me to my car and spending a good half hour talking to me, he asked if I was going to see the show at the theater this weekend. I said, sure. He said, what night? There was a definite feeling of wanting to meet me there. I was just about to invite him to join me earlier for coffee or something – perfect opening to get some time with him to see if there’s anything there – and we got joking about how our cell phones have made us kind of stupid because we don’t know anybody’s numbers anymore because they’re in the phone and he said, “Yeah, like I don’t even know my girlfriend’s number…” Long, awkward pause. I almost kicked him in the shins and screamed, “Then explain all this flirting you’ve been doing, you ass.”

Are you guys just hedging your bets so that if things don’t work with the chick you’re with, you have one on deck? I am just the fall-back if your girl don’t do it for you anymore?

I have one thing to say – stop flirting with us! If you’re not going to date us, don’t give us the cute boy face and the flirty eyes. We think you’re flirting. We think you want us. We get all giddy at the thought that you find us attractive and maybe you want to be with us. Then you drop the “girlfriend” bomb and are surprised when we run screaming from the room.

Is it me? Am I so safe that you all think you can flirt with me and not think I’m going to get all gooshy inside? I hate to tell you but I’m not. I get gooshy, probably way too soon.

But mention the girlfriend immediately. Save us the days and nights of wondering about you and picturing you picking us up and taking us somewhere wondrous and beautiful and save us from naming our children and picking out the house. C’mon, you know you do that. It’s not just me.

If you have a girlfriend, save the flirting for her. Don’t waste it on me. I don’t have the time for this. Be nice, be friendly, flirt with me AFTER you tell me about your girlfriend so I can know that the flirting will be just friendly with nothing at stake and no hopes to be dashed.

And girlfriends, know that your boyfriends are out there flirting with us. Maybe they mean nothing by it – after all, men are a bit dense about the signals they’re sending. Maybe find a nice, polite way to inform them that harmless flirting doesn’t exist, especially when they don’t mention you to us. Explain to them that informing a cute girl about your girlfriend will make the flirting harmless. Otherwise, they deserve everything they get.

Men. Fuck.

Technological dysphoria

I am a technomancer (I hear Monica giggling off on the Westside). I love technology. I have an Iphone, a Macbook, various IPods, just about anything Apple makes, I have. I covet big screen TV’s and I have been known to salivate and envy anyone’s technology that is better than mine.

Technology has made it easier to communicate en masse to our friends and family about good news and bad news. It makes it easier to keep in touch with folks far away and makes it easier to stalk those we love who may not necessarily love us back.

Technology has made it possible to make a film in 48 hours. Or 24 hours. From writing through filming and editing. I know this as I have done it now almost a half dozen times.

Technology allows me to post this silly little missive into cyberspace and have tens of people read it at their leisure, including people that I will probably never meet who live on the other side of the country.

This makes technology amazing.

However, this ability to communicate quickly and efficiently has taken the human factor out of our communication. We now text message instead of call. That’s great for “I’m running late” or “are you busy tonight” kind of communications. We email our concerns and worries or post them in our blogs or comment on someone’s Myspace page when they post news. We seem to have forgotten how to pick up a phone and call. Or sit down and have coffee.

Technology creates the feeling that we are all communicating so much and so regularly, which we are. We’re communicating, we’re not connecting. We’re sending messages but we’re not relating on a human level. No amount of Myspace messages or emails or text messages can make up for a single phone call. You can’t riff off onto other subjects with text messages. You kind of can by email but it’s time consuming to type all that shit.

Maybe it’s the lingering part of me that is old-fashioned but I feel more and more disconnected by this advanced technological communication. When something goes well or goes wrong, I do the technological thing and post it on one of the social networking things I belong to or the Yahoo board for the Career Success Group and I get responses. But I have to admit, sometimes those responses leave me feeling even more disconnected because they’re letters on a page. While their intent is clear and their owner’s desire to communicate is appreciated, I think I still prefer more personal contact – a phone call, a coffee date, something.

We are creating a world where we all can communicate instantaneously and constantly, which we do. I’ve seen more groups of people standing around, all talking on their phones or texting away while the others in the group wait for them to finish. I know I’m guilty of texting or checking my email while I’m hanging out with someone. It used to be a social faux pas but now it’s acceptable. We communicate constantly through our IPhones and our Blackberries and our Sidekicks but I think that is making us less human as communicators. No wonder our children are growing up disconnected and cold. They’re learning how to communicate from us. And if all they see are grown-ups on cell phones and emails and computers, that’s what they learn. If we allow ourselves to only communicate through devices, that’s what our children will learn. If we don’t find a way to stem the contagion of children communicating only through their text messages, we are creating a cold and disassociated society, which is not a society I want to live in.

So I will do my part and try to communicate more through phone calls and coffee invites with my friends. I will reach out more personally instead of through texting and emails. And I hope that you all will do the same. Know that your text doesn’t have the same impact that a phone call does. Know that your email is taken in the way it is meant but that those techie communications can feel cold and disconnected, especially at times when a connection is really needed.

Let’s just try once a day to call someone who needs support, encouragement, a pat on the back, something, instead of just dropping an email or a text saying “way to go,” “don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” Let them know you’re still a person on the other end of the technology, not just a keyboard and a wifi connection.