Of the Art and Pigs and Chickens

A day spent reading creepy/unusual stories on Reddit.  Ghosts are traditional to Christmas, you know.  The barrier between this world and the others is thinnest on the Solstice and ghosts may still linger in the long nights after it.

I remind myself that celebrations are when and what we make them.

I didn't do as much theatre as I would have liked to do this year.  Or rather, I missed devised theatre.  This is, of course, problematic.  My comfortable opportunities to do that work are limited.

American Theatre Magazine had an article with a playwright about my age who went to the same physical theatre school as friends.  I've seen the difference it makes.  And the article sums up why it's not for me.  My drive has never been to be a performer, and it's always my least favourite part of the process.  I would much rather help make it happen and then not have to perform.

Why does devised theatre *have* to be physical theatre and mask?  And I presume the reason is that to build that kind of company, that's how you have to work.  Separating off the skills of the performers leaves you with a group of people who are learning one set of skills and another set of people learning another set of skills and you're back to the traditional theatre model which doesn't rely on everyone coming from the same place and thinking in the same way.  Of course, once you learn that and go out in the world in to traditional theatres, that's where the difference is obvious.  Or so I think.

But I'm not interested in learning clown or tai-chi or any of those hard physical skills.  And I definitely don't want to learn it in a highly disciplined, insular environment.  If I were capable of that, my movement teacher wouldn't have thrown me out of his class.  My acting teacher wouldn't, in a fit of frustration, have asked me, "How the hell I thought I was going to be an actor?"  My response was that I didn't intend to be.  I don't.

The process is appealing because it is comprehensive.  I never wanted to have a BFA, because I never wanted to have to choose one thing.  My degree is a general degree, neither Technical nor Performance nor Education.  I took directing classes and design and acting and education.  I took a Theatre Management course.  I took a course on Musical Theatre.  In spite of taking Playwrighting three times, there's no specialisation in my transcript at all.  I did what I wanted.  Devised, collaborative performance lets me do everything I want, but I can't pursue it because I'm not to the place where I want to do everything.

A friend mentioned pursuing grad school on Facebook, because he wants the networking and experience, but is discouraged by the price.  I told him, if he wants to gain experience and network, that doesn't require grad school, that requires doing it on your own.  If you can't do it on your own and you need the framework of grad school to force you to commit to it, maybe that's not a bad idea.  But the only real reason to go to grad school is because you want a specific experience that will help you fulfill a specific goal.  I've seen people who only want the MFA as a piece of paper so they can go back to the working world and say, "OK, pay me more."  It used to irritate me, but I've come to see that that's what they wanted, and determined that paying for the experience was better than merely putting in the years of professional work to equal that paid experience.

For me, I didn't really have a goal.  Grad school didn't work out; it was specialised and I'm not.  This is why I shouldn't even try to get a Theatre Studies or Performance Studies degree, because I would miss designing and building and directing and writing and everything else at the expense of just learning how and why those things happen.  And then I start looking up Devised Theatre degrees, and I see mask and clown and dance and pull back, because I don't want those skills.

The answer, of course, is to make revolutionary change to the landscape and figure out how to turn the application in to a theory and teach it.  I struggle to teach representational acting to ninth graders.  Reforming the entire collaborative theatre around my personal need to avoid wearing a red nose and doing a lot of self-discovery is probably not something I'm capable of.

Que Sera, Sera.

I was invited to a Christmas party that I'm not going to go to.  I planned on it, but I didn't have the motivation to go.  Being with people is exhausting.  I went to a Christmas lunch yesterday, too many expectations to eat food, to talk to people about nothing.  I don't really want to do it again tonight.  So I stayed home and watched Trains, Planes & Automobiles and The Star Wars Holiday Special.

I spent Sunday regaining the closets.  My closet space is, oddly, tripled due to closet space that was going entirely unused.  I like that when I make a mess, or stop a project in the middle, it doesn't get worse without my knowledge.

I don't think I was intended to live with other humans.

I want next year to be over.  2016 is a test year, a waste of time to set a benchmark.  I keep doing things I probably shouldn't, justifying them as a change I'll make when I find out what things look like.  They look like you spending money you don't quite know that you have on the grounds that you don't know what the year looks like, yet.  I mean, I *have* it, I just don't know if it would have been better spent some other way yet.

No.  I'm spending money on things that make me happy.  What's it for if not for that?

I just want to make it through to May.  In May, I'll see what I know.

And It Started to Rain in Southern California

I'm working fifty hour weeks and devoting my weekends to working more than that.  Or being sick.  I think I'm almost over the I'm-pretty-sure-it-was-bronchitis I've had for a month.  I haven't done laundry in 3 weeks.  I struggle to get to the grocery store regularly when it's open.  

The new schedule is totally screwing with my ability to maintain a schedule.  

I want to disappear over Christmas.  I'm torn between a desire to just stay in bed with the dog and to run away.  

How do people do it?  Presumably they don't do it alone.  

Which is a dumb thing to say because this is the exact same time every year that I determine I can't cope and I want a stage manager to run my life.  Which of course indicates that if I want an impartial task master to get shit done, that person is me and I need to stop being so neurotic about it.  

I'm going to lose a friend this year.  She wants me to direct a piece she's animating.  She and I have done group projects in school, but never for school.  She's many things, sensitive and smart and very very concerned with doing things right, well, and on time.  I get along very well with people who also have time management problems.  And I know she has a benevolent need to do me a favor, so she wants to pay me.  

I've known her since I was 12, and I know we've had at least four major disagreements I didn't know were happening until she decided I hated her.  It's worrying. That's more arguments than I've ever had with anyone other than a family member or authority figure.  

Christmas is next week.  I keep trying not to pay attention.  I keep seeing Facebook posts from friends who aren't feeling Christmasy because it's a temperate climate and this year it's been 50 degrees.  They have no idea how Christmasy it is.  I'm dying on the hill in the War on Christmas at work.  

I don't really care, but I decided I wasn't going to be bullied in to it through guilt, etc just to put that out there as a personality trait, because it exists.  

And maybe I'll survive through the year.  

What's Next

I keep reminding myself I don't need to look for a job anymore.  It became part of my routine, as soon as I run out of things to do online, start looking for a job.  

And, now that I'm there, I don't really have any goals.  I have immediate goals, but they're all working themselves out- filling out paperwork for various things, finagling my schedule to let me do the things I want to do, working on the divorce, all stuff that's going to happen, slowly, eventually and without my really needing to do anything.  

Many of the biggest things that have happened to me aren't things I anticipated five years ago.  I found a list I made in 2009, and I discover that I was incredibly bored and unmotivated, because everything on that list I haven't done is trying some kind of dumb activity in some kind of generic self improvement.  Keep bees.  Seriously.  

So what have I done?  I went to Canada.  I directed a musical.  I stage managed a major college choir concert.  I've devised weird theatre.  I've taught technical theatre to kids.  I've written.  I've struggled to save my marriage and let it go.  I took an aerial class.  I lost 30 pounds.  And most of that's been in the last two or three years, because 2009 and 2010 were sort of bad years for me.  It's when my marriage ended, I just didn't know it yet.  

Mostly, I want to discover if I can live on my own.  I know I can, but I think I want to take a couple years and just be me.  I'm pretty sure a couple years is probably going to turn in to the rest of my life.  That's not being down on myself, that's just speaking realistically.  I don't think I want to give another person as much as I gave my husband, and I don't think I'm willing to have a relationship where I'm not willing to give someone that much.  

That's, like, a perfect explanation of why I'm not a good actor.  I know acting requires giving that much, but I don't want to open myself that much to anybody.  

Except I probably will.  Someday.  

All Right

It's been interesting to track where my own money goes.  Now that I've been paying for my own expenses, I can start to extrapolate what I'm spending.  I discover that I'm about in line with what percentage of your total budget something is supposed to cost.  There are some things I can't do anything about, but when I blow them up for an expected income, they fall right within those percentages again.

I've been very, very worried about whether or not I'm a bad spender or not.  I don't know, but I've always taken the blame for monetary shortcomings in the marriage, even when I knew where the money was going, I determined that I should have wanted to go out to eat less, or not bought the clothes I needed, and I find that's really not the case and that, mostly I don't spend too poorly.

I was offered a full time job.  With benefits.  For more money than I've ever seen.  I can't quite work out how that happened, but now that it has, I'll be able to move forward.  I'll be able to do what I wanted to do 7 years ago when I moved here- live.  I won't be doing it in the arts, though, not full time.  I tried it, and it's not possible to do it that way alone.  So, for now, I'll do this.  And maybe I'll find out that it's where I want to be for a little while before it makes me go back, or maybe I'll find out I'm a sell-out, or maybe I'll figure out a way to do both.  I'm not leaving.  I keep the little theatre and the education and will still be able to volunteer, so maybe I'll be in a place to do more volunteer work for a while and save up to do something else.

It's funny how everything can change in one moment.

How Dare You Come to Me Now When I Am This?

I think I was in college before I saw The Last Unicorn all the way through.  I read the book for the first time last year and just finished re-reading it for a second time.  I completely missed Schmendrick and Molly Grue's relationship the first time.  I barely noticed it this time until the very end, when I thought, "wait," and had to go back and search for proof that this was there the whole time.  It was.

I used to consume love stories with such wanting, watching Nightmare Before Christmas and reading Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby and all the bildungsroman love stories set before the 1930s.  And then -I don't know when- they stopped working.  I assumed because I was happy in love and didn't need to want it.

They're working again.  Which proves I may be human after all.

Of course I want what I can't have.  Or, rather, what I can't find; what I gave up looking for and came to regret that I never found it.

Which might be poetic except that I keep refining what that is.

ಠ_ಠ

I've started catfishing the man I was married to.  I tried it once before, posing as a guy and didn't get anywhere.  I had an opportunity to try it again and decided to be a woman.

He talks to her.  He does a lot of things with her that he never did with me.  Sexting being one of them.  He signed up for the service hoping to hook up with people, clearly.  I don't know how well that worked out, but I talked him in to sexting.  He's pretty bad at it, but so is she, since she's limited to text speak.  Since she knows he's new to this, she asks about his previous relationships.  He mostly lies, but when it comes to me, he tells her the truth.

Why did he start sleeping around?  Because I didn't shave.

Now, from my perspective, I did.  Usually when I was under the impression that I was going to get anything out of the deal, but I never did, because what I was actually expected to do was wax.  Everything.  Did he *ever* say this to me?  Nope.

So, in conjunction with that, I've started talking with other guys, and because, "describe your butthole," is never part of the conversation, I do pretty well.  The guys mostly don't.  There's not a lot of mutual communication, which is fine if that's not what I'm looking for, but when there isn't, I get bored.

Because the Internet is a rabbit hole, this particular exercise has sent me down new ones- websites made up entirely of amateur guys.  I feel sorry for about half the guys there, not due to their personal endowment or lack of it, usually, but for their poor photography skills and lack of personal confidence.  I'm thinking, "get out of your bathroom and figure out how this works- you're trying to be sexy, very little about this is sexy."

But here's the reason I feel sorry for me.  I'm seeing a lot of trimmed hair.  A lot.  This was something I had requested once, and was told that guys did not do this, he would not do this, it didn't matter what I wanted.  So many times it never mattered what I wanted.

I've been looking back wondering what I did wrong, and what I did wrong was being a human being not a porn star, or a hooker.  I hate that I missed out on potentially years of satisfying, interesting, varied physical relationships possibly with vastly different body types and interests all because I didn't have the knowledge or experience (in spite of all the Googling) to do anything but take him at his word.

Or maybe this is what I had to learn in the order I had to learn it.

See What a Piece of Eggshell I Have Found You

In an academic sense, I know a lot about sex. Strangely enough, my introduction was through a biography of The Beatles checked out from my middle school library, because it contained a word that three years of sex ed hadn't introduced: orgasm, which was apparently something that girls suffered from at Beatles concerts. I remember standing at the big dictionary the school library had nailed down to an enormous podium and being totally unable to work out what the definition was.

So I went home, and checked out Grolier's multimedia encyclopedia. That opened up an entire web of vocabulary that was entirely new to me, and I read about the Kinsey reports and Masters and Johnson and connected things up with a host of jokes that had never really made any sense from a score of British comedies and Monty Python sketches. At 12, I had a useful working vocabulary to describe a lot of things I had not yet experienced.

By the time I did have sex, I knew a lot about sexual practices I had no interest in, and not very much about what I was interested in. I knew I didn't like any of my boyfriend's porn, and he had so much of it that I assumed that was pretty much what was out there in terms of hardcore porn, not just the realm of "I take off my robe and wizard hat," and comics about furries or Arthur Dent and Fenchurch flying that I was familiar with. So I accepted that this was what it was like and there wasn't much out there for me. Because I was strange; I'd never so much as kissed anyone until I was 19, and reader, I foolishly married him. 

And now, I'm ostensibly single. I spent some time being weirded out by OKCupid, but all that did was confirm that, um, nope, I don't even want to meet any of those people.

Casual sex has never been a thing I've done. It's not really a thing I'm interested in.

But, I've spent a year filling in gaps I should have filled in sometime in the last decade. I still know a lot, academically speaking. I can discuss at length the various pros and cons of top of the line sex toys that I've never even seen in a shop, never mind used. I can talk about consent and individual sexual response and how the biologically female brain and body react to sexual stimuli, and I've read about a lot of kinks I'm still not in to.

When I was 13, the year after the dictionary and the encyclopedia clued me in on a vast universe, I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy all the way through for the third time. I believe I mentioned Arthur and Fenchurch? I would go on to read The Catcher in the Rye and Lolita. Eventually, I discovered erotic literature and fan fiction and have always preferred it to visuals, but most of it is poorly written. Even published erotic fiction is pretty bad, probably because it all describes in lurid detail things I can imagine just as well without the description.

It is stupidly easy to get me off. Under extreme circumstances, I can almost manage without any physical stimulation whatsoever. Maybe because I was a 13 year old American trying to figure out what on earth Marks and Spencer made and what exactly was happening in the skies over Islington and what that had to do with The Beatles effect on teenage girls in the 60s, and succeeded in working it out. I've always had an extremely accessible imagination, so it doesn't take much.

One of the many, many things I'd always wanted to do and never had the opportunity for was sexting. Not photos, just text, words inside my brain from someone as interested in me as I was in them and channelling all the things I'd read. Now, it probably would have helped if the person I wanted to try it with was at least interested in literacy, but, I thought, it doesn't matter, I could make it work. It never came to pass.

It's the one thing I've tried this past year. I've been really worried that I am not inventive enough or knowledgeable enough or good enough to have sex with- the one person I have had sex with told me often enough that I wasn't very good at it. I'm learning to remind myself that he defined good sex as the kind where he laid there and did nothing. So. But I still worry.

Except that the couple of times I've wound up in a chat room with people who are there specifically to do exactly what we're there to do, it's been disappointing. Serves its purpose.

I'm playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends through Facebook. (There is a parallel here, I swear there is.) I started a game with actors, hoping that it would be a lot of improvisation and good role playing and make for a good performance. It's slow to get going. The other game is mostly with non-actors, and they're not really great at role playing. It's OK, but, not my expectation; they're not really rising to the occasion or doing or being anything terribly detailed or interesting.

Exactly the same thing. The goals are not the same thing at all, but, there's a real lack of urgency or drive present in both. If actual sex isn't any better than what I've experienced in real life, or online, and is pretty much like lukewarm D&D roleplaying, I'm not really sure it's worth the trouble.

In Which Things May Work Out

Turned down a job I'd already been hired for because they announced suddenly that new hires have to take a drug screening.

Nope.

I barely take over-the-counter drugs, but I object to mandatory urine testing.  No, thank you, I choose to hang on to my rights to privacy.  I also don't relish being accused of a crime by proxy.  The only reason to perform a drug test is if you assume someone has drugs in their system.  If you're performing them on everyone, this is the assumption you're making, "we'll assume everyone is taking drugs until proven otherwise."  Working from the assumption no one is taking drugs, you don't issue a drug test.  Working from an assumption some of the people are taking them, therefore everyone must be tested proves that it's impossible to tell any other way.

This is the same reason I don't like traffic cameras.  I cannot be accused of a crime by a traffic camera, my car can.  So, if I loan my car to someone and the ticket is sent to me, it's not actually my ticket, it's their ticket, but I'm responsible for the car, so the ticket goes to em and the violation goes on my record.  I have a problem with that.  Accuse me of a crime and provide evidence and then maybe you have something to prove.

In the process of writing this, I remembered an episode of Mister Rogers where he goes to fight a parking ticket.  I couldn't find that episode, but I did find the one where he visits Moscow.  I don't think I've seen that one since it first aired.

Watching it, I'm kind of not mad about the whole test situation anymore.  Mr. Rogers knows I'm a good person, so what does it matter what anybody else thinks?

Anyway, I think I made the right choice turning this last job down.  Right after I sent that email, I sent another one to a place I sent in an application to less than 24 hours after it went up, asking whether they had a timeline in place to interview.  "We stop taking applications tomorrow.  Do you want to come in tomorrow?"  Um.  Yes.

I assume this means, "we actually want to talk to you," and not, "oh, let's just get you out of the way so we can find someone we actually like."  I went to high school with the girl who used to have the job, and they're not looking for anyone more qualified than her.  I know so many people working in that building and it's a full time job with benefits.  That would be a beautiful thing.  And, since it's full time exempt, as long as I'm putting in 40 hours, I've got a flexible schedule, so, in theory, I can actually keep two of my other jobs that also run a flexible, temporary schedule.  Which will keep me alive.

If We Meant It

They say, when an adult walks out on their life, there's a short window before they're likely to make contact, that usually happens on the third day.  If they aren't found before then, or the person doesn't make contact by then, the chances they'll be recovered alive, or ever, are much less likely.

It's not sounding like a bad idea.

I'm not divorced.  I haven't even filed papers, the reasons for this being that I was not in a financial position to do so, no transportation, no health insurance, etc.

The man I am married to was fired from his job today.  In reality, it's the result of his real lack of ability to function in the last year, but nobody knows this.

I don't know what to do now.  Everything is exactly as it was, and worse, but I need to end this marriage.  I've ended the relationship, I need to end the marriage, and this is the worst possible time to do so, when I only thought previously was the worst possible time.

I'm not sure what the moral of that is.  Seize the day?  It *can* get worse?

How come as soon as I think I am almost able to implement a plan that will work, the situation changes in such a way that it won't?

So, I want to walk away.  To disappear.  But, just a little bit.  Tomorrow, I'll start trying to figure it out all over again.

Today was an uncle's funeral.  He wasn't yet 60.  He's spent the last two years in a veteran's hospital.  He worked the same job since he got out of the military, no family of his own.  60 people were at his visitation, there were maybe 15 of us at the funeral.  For my brother and me, he was our favourite uncle, but I kind of look at him and think, "Is that it?  Is what he leaves here just the fact that we liked him?"  Is that enough?  Out of all the things I want, or want to be, or to do or achieve, is it selfish to want that when some people, all they get is maybe 60 years and they die and a couple people remember they liked them.

Maybe that's enough.  I don't know.  I don't feel like it is.

Mawwage. Maewage is what brings us togeva today.

First of all, I'm glad that same sex marriage is considered a federal civil right.

Apart from that, homosexuals still do not retain national civil rights equality. And America does not grant total marriage equality. In fact, the Supreme Court ruling contains a statement I find supremely troubling: "No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. "

Two people marrying for love, fidelity, family? Since when was the government charged with defining what marriage was? If I were a polygamist, I would find this ruling troubling. As I'm not, and I'm simply someone who sees legal marriage as an arrangement of finances and rights, this is still troubling. 

I got married with that in mind, my legal marriage was performed before the marriage ceremony. I'm in the process of undoing that legal commitment. The relationship is over and the two were never the same thing in my way of thinking. To hear that my federal government disagrees is... disenheartening. It suggests that my marriage was null and void from the moment of my husband's infidelity, which means that not only does the last year not count, but the last six do not. I don't think that's the government's right to dictate.
Yes, it's arguing semantics, but that's the entire purpose of the US Supreme Court. That's what they do. 

The spirit of the words, that homosexuals have the rights to marriage, I understand, but I worry that the wording was made specifically to limit marriage to two people. Why? What possible reason could anyone need for marriage rights to be limited to one person? That's a personal decision. If it's because they don't want people getting extra tax breaks, well, there's no limit on the amount of children a person can have. 

It's not enough. And it's a limiting decision. 

Of course I'm glad that all marriages will be recognised equally under federal law, I just wish the ruling had not gone further.

Things I'm Learning

I'm feeling particularly stupid lately.

I've been turned down for part time, no degree jobs by every single library in the metro area.

I'm worried that possibly I've been paid all I'm going to be for the school job, which is half what I expected.

I wonder what I'm doing.  Here.  With my life.

I keep thinking, maybe in a year or so I can run.  I can quit all these obligations here and...  Do what?

I'm going to die unimportant.

Brain in a Jar

I've said before, I am not a physical person.  My dad used to take me out in the backyard to play catch.  He'd throw the ball at me and I'd invariably be unable to catch it.  A couple of times I got hit in the face with it.  I think the week after he hit me with the baseball, I insisted on the softball (on the grounds, that, well, what do you think my logic was)?  A softball hurts a hell of a lot more than a baseball, and I think that was the end of my throwing and catching skills.  I was probably 5.  Maybe 6.

I hated gym class, for various reasons, but the overall, lasting reason was that we were expected to do things without being taught.  The middle school gym teacher yelled at me for skating "wrong."  I never learned to skate properly, pushing off with both legs, I roller skate like I'm on a skateboard.  If I hadn't wanted to go to skating parties in elementary school (because it was the 90s, and everybody went to skating parties) I never would have learned.  I didn't learn to ride a bicycle until I was 10.

Other skills I was yelled at in middle school for not having included the ability to do a chin up, running a mile in less than ten minutes (though, really, that was sheer spite, I had no interest in running, I was perfectly happy to walk around the track the entire semester), jump rope, making a volleyball go over the net, and tinikling (which is some kind of Spanish hopscotch auto-de-fe).

There was no instruction.  For tinikling and jump rope, they'd bring in a couple of older kids to demonstrate and we were supposed to copy them.  That's as far as it went.  Except in middle school we were graded for our skills.  A combination of that and my refusal to consistently wear gym clothes meant that I got pretty much solid Ds in gym all through middle school.

In high school, gym was a little better.  They handed us bows and arrows and didn't teach us how to use them.  They also didn't yell.  Much.  They yelled in swimming, but we only had to take that one semseter.  I was a good swimmer, but there was no swimming done.  Diving.  Doing turns.  Neither of which I'd been taught in my lessons, and I had more swimming experience than any other kid who wasn't on the swim team.  But they yelled at us all equally.

I took gymnastics for years, at the end of which the list of things I couldn't do included a cartwheel, a head stand, or a handstand.  Or vault.  At all.  There was no yelling there, there was a lot of, "try it again," but I had no idea what I should be trying or doing differently.

Middle school introduced a new and more horrible thing- choreography.  I liked to sing, I liked to perform, and so, invariably, this lead to being forced to dance.  I couldn't learn the dances, and I definitely couldn't look anything less than stupid doing them.  I auditioned for musicals for years, suffering through the cold dance audition, watching the show choir kids around me.  What was the difference between us?

Then in high school.  Vocal and physical warm ups.  I love vocal warm ups.  I hate physical warm ups.  Yoga.  In high school, I was in the best shape of my life and physical warm ups and stretching left me worn out, sweating and furious, because there was no way we were ever going to do any more movement in rehearsal than in the damn warm ups.  These days, I understand the ritual, but I still hate physical warm ups.

In college, I was kicked out of a movement class and eventually changed my major emphasis because the professor told me I was not going to pass his class.  A combination of all those years of baggage and the resentment that this was a required class called Vocal Production, where we spent the first 6 weeks breathing and doing horrific physical exercises, of all things (I thought we were going to learn IPA).

This is what I bring to the world.

So I really hate it when I'm trying not to be this person, when I'm trying to find something I don't hate and be physical, and I get middle school all over again.

The girl teaching circus tonight had subbed in for the class I took before.  That was a bad day and did not go well.  It went even less than well when she looked at me like I was from Mars when I didn't know what a plank was or how to do one.  Well, fuck you, lady.  She did, at least, show me.  So I can do one now.

This time, she looked at me and I felt recognition flicker in her eyes.  "You didn't sign up for the whole session did you?"  No.  Just today.  The terror changed to relief.  "Well, warm up whatever you need to."

In that history up there, is there anything that might suggest I know how to warm up, or what to warm up?  When someone leads warm ups, I can barely follow along.

And then we revisit a whole bunch of the things I can't do- pull ups, hand stands, and each time, this girl teaching goes, "you can't do that?"  No, I fucking can't.  "That's as wide a straddle as you can do?"  Yes.  Fuck you for asking that way.  And apparently I also can't point my toes.  "There are exercises you can do at home with dance elastic."  With what?  "You didn't take dance?"  What part of you telling me how to point my toes maybe didn't clue you in that I didn't take dance?

This is why I don't do this stuff.  I don't need to be treated like I'm an idiot.  I have to live in a world surrounded by people who can't recite the plot of Hamlet and like to wear sandals and I'm not allowed to treat them like they should be nuked from orbit.

The lesson in all this, of course, is don't take another class with this girl, which isn't as easy as it sounds.  There are two of them and they swap schedules depending on sign ups.  But the difference is real, I've had two classes with this girl and walked out of both of them wanting to quit and never go back, and I've never had that from the other.  With the other girl, the first class made me feel that I was going to be hopeless and I was wasting my time, but after that, I didn't feel that again, at all.  So I know that's the difference.

It just makes me mad that there is a difference.  I run in to these people in all kinds of physical environments, choreographers, equestrians, gym teachers, people who don't really believe anyone who doesn't already know how to do it will ever be able to, and who want to treat those other people like crap because they aren't part of the culture.  I'm sorry my interest in something and subsequent lack of skills ruins the entire discipline for you.

Take Me For What I Am

A few summers ago, I spent a couple weeks with a bunch of people from out of state doing theatre in the rural Midwest, a foreign country to them.

We went to a museum where I noticed a person in a skirt that I assume was there with his boyfriend.  I put it down as cross dressing and didn't think much about it.  Doesn't really matter either way, and, more fairly, both of them were more or less ambiguously gendered, but I read both of them as biologically male.

In a discussion later, about how friendly people were and relatively tolerant of a bunch of theatre weirdos, the burly Californian said that he didn't think a man could walk down the street in a dress here and feel comfortable.

"Didn't you see the two guys at the museum?" I asked.
"What two guys?"
"The only other people there apart from us."
"That was a guy and a girl."
"I don't think so."
"....No.  You think?  She was a girl."
"Maybe that person is transitioning, or presenting female, but I think they were both biologically male.  It doesn't matter, but you didn't notice.  The difference is not wearing a dress, it’s the difference in the person wearing it.  You, big, burly Californian with a beard, are going to create a different situation in a dress than, say, short, fair haired cherub faced Utahan, would.  I don't think it matters what state you're in."

One of my refrains when I was a kid was that I wished I'd been born a boy.  I don't remember why until puberty when I really, really wished I was a boy and could avoid all these feminine mysteries.

I've never been feminine.  I think I've always been a girl, though.  Or I've gotten used to it.  At 12, I might have gladly switched.  Now, I don't care much for the flesh suit I live in, but it would feel strange to trade it for a different one.

It's why I hate the, "all women are beautiful," stuff.  No.  I think it's perfectly healthy to have a grip on my limitations, as well as to recognise I have no obligation to be beautiful.  I have an obligation to be who I am comfortable being.  I don't feel limited by my lack of desire to wear a bikini any more than being glad I don't have children.  That’s not what I want to do.

I guess those, "to have a bikini body, put a bikini on your body," things are intended for people who would wear one, but, and to say, "no, the but is in your mind, do what you want."  And what I want is to not wear one, or heels, or dresses, but I resent a little bit that femininity and being female are supposed to be the same thing,  as though I'm supposed to want any of those things inherently.

I think I've spent too much time in the last decade trying to pay attention to expectations that, now that I notice them, I think they'really supposed to apply to me, rather than to someone who has been absorbing exterior information about who they're supposed to be for years.

Filthy Rich

Someone posted a list of things "poor kids" know, which uses vague language to describe to rich people what it's like to be a poor kid.  Reading it, if things didn't apply to me, they applied to a friend.

I grew up poor.  Not deprived- we had enough.  We didn't have cable or a dryer or an answering machine or insulation or air conditioning or multiple cars.  Some of those things came later, others, my parents still don't have.

But that's why I never thought we were poor.  Poor people didn't have phones or cars or soap.  But I was the kid filling out paperwork to qualify for scholarships to the gifted classes we couldn't afford, the kid who can recognise the difference between a gun shot and a car backfiring and doesn't worry about either, the kid who grew up astonished at the "mansions" her middle school friends lived in.

I've spent my entire life believing that "middle class" is rich, because I assumed that, not living like a character in a Dickens novel, that qualified as middle class.

I suddenly don't give a shit about the financial problems of the "middle class."  You're busy living lives of comparative luxury, you can afford much more than you think you can.  A woman I consider wealthy, married to a local celebrity, was in a rehearsal with me where she brought in a glass vase I knew to be a gift from the local PBS drives.  Someone admired it and she had an, "Oh, this old thing," and I (because I occasionally have no tact) said, "Isn't that a [pledge drive vase]?  Those are expensive." "Oh, not really, no."  "They're the $500 donation level."  "If you spread it over a year, it's a couple dollars a day.  It's less than we spend on coffee every morning, and it's a donation."

She later bemoaned the price of a college education and how hard it was for middle class families to send their children.

I don't bear her any ill will.  I'm just astonished that anyone who owns a remote start convertible with heated seats and spends more than 3 dollars a day for coffee can't figure out what to do to pay for a college education.  Like, maybe, reconsider your priorities as "college fund" not "luxuries."  Because they are.  But she doesn't know that because that's her life, any more than the super rich kids I knew had any idea what a broom was because their families had maid service.

I'm horrified to reconsider what rich is actually like when the kids I considered exceptionally wealthy now have to be viewed in the light of merely wealthy.

I Want Everything I've Ever Seen In the Movies

About six months ago, I applied for a position that I have eight years experience in with four different places.  It's a slightly different environment, and a supervisor position to what I've done, but I figured it'd be good to apply.  

Nothing.  

A month ago, they were hiring for the position I've done.  I was interviewed and they pretty much said, "we're impressed but no."  OK, sure, whatever.  I'm pretty sure the interviewers were the result of the supervisor search and that position's immediate supervisor.  

Three days ago, I see a posting for the same position I applied for six months ago and realise that the person I interviewed with had to have given her notice near the time I interviewed. I recognise there is no way I'd be hired for that position, but I really, really want to apply.  

I'm positive I don't really want to work there, though.  There's a lot of turnover and they seem incredibly unorganised.  This coming from the uncommunicative environment in which I currently work...  

It's raining and I'm feeling useless and unproductive.  I want to run away.  I saw a literary manager position for a theatre in New York that I'm interested in the other day and cried a little.  I couldn't get it, but even if I could, I don't have the freedom to do it even if I wanted to.  I'm tied here, without wanting to be.  

Some part of me wants to be here.  

The rest of me wants to run and keep running and stop being practical and sensible.  I want some closure in my life.  I'm going to have spent five years in this stupid limbo of trying to have what I can't and maybe don't even want.  

Bitternutt Lodge

It's fair to state that I don't have emotions like normal people.

Friend asked me today if it would be a good idea to warn a couple we know before seeing a movie that might screw with them emotionally due to some personal baggage they carry.  I said, more or less, "Maybe?  No.  Yes?  No.  You know, you should really ask your sister.  Or your wife.  I am like the least appropriate person to ask on this."

I hate the song Home, by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.  I don't really hate it.  I love the song, it's fun, there’s whistling, it's got a catchy chorus that's east to sing, but I'm jealous of it.  It feels like nothing I've ever had.  Maybe like nothing I ever get to have.

It feels like the ache I used to get when I read Jane Eyre.  I stopped writing this to re-read bits of it, and discover that it works again.  The last time I read it, it was empty and shallow and I couldn't finish it because it felt false.

Obviously, I'm the change, but I don't know what it is.  Is it that I can believe in that kind of love again? “'My bride is here,' [...] 'because my equal is here, and my likeness."  How many times have I read that passage and never heard that line?  But tonight, that's the difference.  Jane gets a lot of criticism for not having a spine and letting Mr. Rochester own her, when she talks at length about how she refused to let him do that their entire engagement.

There’s the difference, they are equals mentally, but they can't be together because they're not spiritually compatible, and that’s why the last third of the book exists, to make both of them worthy of each other.

I guess that's what I've been missing.  Not in the book.

I was something of a mess last month.  I'm better now.  Or, at least, I'm not doing a lot of awful sobbing at the drop of a hat.  I realised last week that I was happy, for no particular reason, which was new.  So, I guess I'm through whatever that mess was.

I'm not used to having emotions.  Well, I am.  I'm used to repressing them.  My jaw has been clenched so hard it clicks when I open it.  I try to remind myself to relax, and then I start holding my breath.  It’s getting better, it’s not an exercise I hold at every traffic signal anymore.  Driving past the intersection to the grocery store, or wandering around it uncertain why I came in is still an occasional problem.

Nothing's changed, just me.

Warnings Fair

To the dude who is looking for his soul mate and true love with a profile containing only a photograph of himself (presumably, even weirder if it's some other guy) with a firm grip, through soccer shorts, on his junk.  Good luck to you.

A friend keeps appearing in my matches, ranked highly for nearly any combination of keywords.  He's a good friend, but, no.  Which tells me this process is not for me.  That I really am not interested enough in people to be involved with them.

I mentally reject anybody who mentions how important family is to them.  Nope.  I don't like my family, I don't like yours, I don't want those kind of complications.

I don't like people all that much.

Posing a question

My Dungeons and Dragons character has the opportunity to ask a magical dragon born a question.  Any single question.

I thought I might meta game the system, but that feels a bit unfair on the DM.  I have a suspicion the character and mine share a trait, but if I'm wrong in that assumption, it’s a waste of a question.  She also super does not trust this guy, so I also want to ask what we owe him in return, just to double check on the bargain made upon entering his home, but, on the other hand...  She's got a problem to solve, she doesn't really know where to start, asking his advice may be the most straightforward choice, but doesn't take in to consideration that she doesn't trust him much at all.

I think she'll ask what advice he would give himself in her place.  I've found most people show you more about themselves in the advice they give than anything else, so that'll tell her what she wants to know about him and let her sort herself out, too.  Or, she could just ask him if he can read the language in her letter that she can't, he'll say no, question wasted and she'll be no worse than when she started.

It’s set me wondering, if I could ask any question, and be reasonably certain of getting at least a halfway decent answer, what would I ask?  Am I going to be OK?  No, because of course I will.  Until I'm not.  That’s how it works. Which choice is the best?  I worry enough weighing my options that the path I take is the one I'm convinced is right.  Even with the multiverse of possibilities stretched out ahead and behind me, this is the universe I've chosen to create.  I don't believe this is the best of all possible universes, but why would I make one that isn't?

Separate question.  Also, mixing Candide and quantum physics is possibly not the best choice, philosophically speaking.

Forgetting to Breathe

I'm holding tension literally everyplace.  I stop at traffic signals and tell myself to relax, that's how bad it's gotten.  My jaw clicks, I'm holding my breath, one night of bad sleep will be all I need to screw up my neck again (I pulled a muscle in it years ago and re-pull it on occasion).

What am I looking forward to?  Not enough.  Not enough to outweigh what I'm dreading.

A friend started a Dungeons and Dragons game on Facebook.  I've never played, but I like it.  I could definitely move in to that world and never leave.

I have friends to visit this summer.  Their son is almost old enough to be awesome.  (Well, he's pretty much been awesome forever, but in a social-with-grown-ups way.)

I'm directing a show, which is good, but I'm uncomfortable about it.  Hooray for self confidence!  I used to have that, but then it turned out that people like to tell you anything you do is fine, but not that, and not that, and I can't cope with that.

For the foreseeable future, that's it.  I cease to exist in August.  At least until the high school work starts up again.  And then the little community theatre.

I think I'll take a nap and hope I dream.  I like it when I tell myself stories.  I wish I could let myself do it when I was awake.

The Alpine Path

Whenever I finish a book I was very attached to when I was younger, I don't feel any older than I was when I read it.  I feel older while I read it, remembering who I was the last time I turned the pages.  Perhaps it's transformative, as though a little part of me got sealed up inside that story and I can take it out and be her again, for a little while.

I'm feeling awful lonesome this week.  Last weekend I saw friends and talked to people and almost, briefly, felt whole and normal.   I miss too many things that never existed in the first place.

It is a strange fact that the girls in LM Montgomery books don't often love anybody until they find out they do.  The boys love deep and longingly and forever, but the girls mostly find out what they could have had when it was gone.  I wonder the truth of this.  I worry a little about the influences archaic heroines have had on me.  Anne, Laura, Caddie, Jo, all these intelligent, outspoken girls who grow up getting in and out of trouble but are morally sound and turn in to ideals from an age that no longer exists.

Where's the modern series?  The little girl who grows up and becomes an ideal?  Maybe we can't have heroines like that anymore.  Maybe since the ideal doesn't exist to grow in to, it doesn't matter so much how the little girl gets there.

Or maybe I'm just not reading them.

I discovered reading that I don't currently burn with ambition.  Or hope of it.  I never had specific ambitions, or when I did, they were never plans beyond vague understanding that someday I wanted...  Now I'm not sure what I want.

Seventeen year old me hates me.  She thinks I made some very silly choices for some no so very good reasons and found myself in a bigger mess than I can handle.  As usual.  She doesn’t care how I do it, but I need to fix things and quickly. I agree with her, but I don't know what I'm willing to lose.  I don't have to walk away, but since I don't know what I'm left with.

I assume the reader with Chrome on a Mac is a bot, due to the promptness with which they read my updates, but, hello to you, if you're a human.

She Needs to Sort Out Her Priorities

I'm doing the opposite of coping. I'm forgetting things, not paying a lot of attention to the things I am doing and doing them wrong.  I spent five minutes crying in the bathroom at work yesterday.

I don't want to do anything.

I have rehearsal tonight.  I'm sure it will be fine but I'm not ready for it.

A friend's coming to town tomorrow.  I'm not interested in telling her what's really going on in my life, but also fed up with hiding everything.  I'll just keep hiding.  It’s too hard to explain the situation, anyway.

I've got no motivation.  I have an interview for another box office position.  I don’t want it, but it’s twice as many hours as the community theatre, and if I can fit it in to my schedule, it'd keep me alive.  But it would probably screw up any flexibility in my schedule, too, meaning I can't just take off for Canada when I want to.

I need to figure out what I'm doing with my life and if what I'm trying to do is worthwhile.

To Have Fun, and To Learn Things

I'm reading an amazing book, Come As You Are, The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, by Emily Nagoski.  I kind of don’t want to shut up about how great the book is.  It’s accessible without being condescending and, unlike my college Into to Psych class, actually seems to know what it's talking about and back it up.

A lot of the science isn't new to me, some of it is, but what is new are the specific interpretations of this information and how they apply to actual humans.  The author says in her classes, most of her students come away saying, "I'm normal," and, yep, I'd say that's the case here, too.

I've been fretting over when my marriage went wrong.  It wasn't the marriage, it was the first time I allowed myself to be deceived and lied to and tried to make it OK.  It wasn't, but because I thought it made me a better person to be accepting of what he'd done, it set a pattern in place.  So now I know, I spent a very long time being unhappy.  And he’s actually more fucked up than I am, because he can't (or won't) examine his behaviour and try to change.

I wondered the other day if I even know the difference between love and Stockholm Syndrome.  I do.  I just have a long way back to look, and I need to remember that I can demand that from a relationship, and if I'm not getting it, leave. It just took me years and good advice to figure it out.

Haddaway

I've been re-playing my relationship in my head, wondering why it seemed like a good idea ever.

I glanced through old diaries filled with statements like, "I don't know what this is, but I suppose it's the best chance I'm going to have," and "nobody's ever shown the slightest interest in the way I look before now, so what if he’s the only one?"  I remember the words I thought when he asked me to marry him, "I should ask to think about this. Why, you're going to decide to do it anyway, just agree now."

And at the time I thought it was love.  I don't know if it ever was.  I've never really cared enough for anybody else to see the difference.  I mean, it wasn't indifference or hatred or coercion or anything else, but, if that's my capacity to love, I guess no wonder things went badly.

Ghost-Kin?

I've been reading about body acceptance. 

I think one of the problems I personally have to overcome with Other-Kin is that my personal point of view is, "Nope, you don't have a tail that no one else can see.  You are not a wolf.  This is what you've got, you're stuck with it just like the rest of us."  Because I've never thought that I had body image issues, I accept that this is what I have to work with, but I didn't think it was necessary that you had to like it. 

That's not to say that I despise people who do feel that way, I just don't quite understand the motivation.  Since I was a little kid, I've occasionally, fervently, wished I'd been born a boy.  I never thought that I actually *was* one, just that if I had been, I would've gotten the better deal.  I still kind of think that, but I don't want to be a guy, I just have days where I really don't want to be a girl. 

It's also fair to say that I have a physical body, but I don't inhabit it.  It's mostly beyond my control and ability to work with, so I don't worry about it.  I don't like it, but I don't spend a lot of time hating myself or wishing I was different.  This is, apparently, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be. 

I frequently joke that I'm a brain in a jar, and said to a friend recently, "That's not a joke, I think I'd be better off.  That's either a total lack of body problems or an unprecedented amount." 
He kind of thought that maybe it was an unprecedented amount.  But the thing is, I don't care.  I don't (apart from this) spend an abnormal amount of time obsessing over the way I do or don't look, I look the way I look, and the way I look is not great, but there's nothing to be done about it, so, it is what it is.  If I could swap it out, I totally would, but that's not going to happen, so, here I am.

This is what I mean when I say I'm not a physical person.  I know what I'm comfortable with and what I'm not and it has nothing to do with anybody else and everything to do with me. 

I listened to a kid give a speech last month where she claimed that *everyone* dances when they're alone.  Oh, sweetie.  No, no they don't.  Because I don't. 

I took gymnastics, and I was terrible at it.  I liked doing it, and I didn't care that I was terrible at it.  When I stopped going, it was because I was too busy. 

I have poor hand-eye coordination.  I catch with my face and can't throw.  People have tried to teach me and failed. 

This is me.  If I wanted to do something about it, maybe I would, but I don't really want to, because that's more work.  It's not my priority to become that person. 

But I read about loving your body, and how you're supposed to want to wear clothes I don't want to wear, and dance and that's not me.  So I wonder, is this the same thing, or a different thing?  Should everybody WANT to go skydiving?  Or is it maybe as normal to want to go skydiving as not? 

"Women have something they want to change."  No.  I don't think I'd be "better" if I had a different body, I don't think a full swap for another body would do me anything different.  I do sort of think I'd be better if I didn't have one at all, if I existed as a series of words on a page, created and processed as quickly as my brain could spit them out.  *That* would be me, that's what I'd swap for if I could.  The rest of this is just a thing. 

Maybe it's because I was so into ghosts as a kid, the idea that your body and whatever a ghost was were two different things, and the body's the part that winds up in the ground and the ghost is the thing that is capable of making the body live.  So maybe I don't want to be a brain, maybe I'd just as soon be a ghost?  Or, maybe it's the way I reason with the reality of life, the body is the thing that's going to die, and whatever happens afterwards, you've got this other thing?  So, maybe don't get too attached to the body part? 

I don't know.  I hadn't considered the ghost option before.  Well, whatever it is, I have to go clean it and dress it so it can take whatever I am to work in the conventional method. 

Consenting Inferior

I've got to stop letting other people screw with my self worth.  

Well, one other person, anyway.  Now that I can see exactly what he's doing, I recognise everything I ignored, everything I didn't see.  I still have to live here with him and I get to watch my past self's ignorance. I wonder about the person who didn’t know, who still loved him and wondered what she was doing wrong, and I kind of hate her for trusting someone who didn't deserve it.  

More than that, I hate to discover he has the power to make me feel worthless.  What was I that he decided it would be OK to sleep with other people?  I guess I never get an answer to that.  

"What are you looking forward to?"

Next winter, when I work with the high school kids again.  I've been doing it long enough to know I'm valuable.  It's been nice to be around people my own age.  43 kids on a charter bus and it's the four grownups in the front seat making more noise than the entire rest of the bus.  

Closer than that?  All I have are hopes.  I hope I can get divorced soon.  I hope I get transportation soon. Those two are related and entirely out of my control.  

Inexperience

When you're 12, you and your best friend talk about sex in the most ribald of ways.  Because you're both 12 year old virgin girls, and it's honest speculation about a multitude of things neither of you have ever done, but that both of you, thanks to the Internet, have formed an opinion about and have certain thoughts regarding.

It's a little different when you're in your 30s.

In so many ways, I'm still the 12 year old girl.  I remember asking, years ago, "What do you think you would do if a girl hit on you?"  "What makes you think a girl hasn't?"  "So what did you do?"

I don't remember her answer, but I know I still have no idea what that experience might be like.  Actually, I'm not entirely certain I have any idea what it's like for a guy to hit on me.

All of my first physical/sexual experiences occurred in a 5 month period of my life, with the same person, who I eventually married.  After a year, we'd done everything I've ever done up until the point I went on birth control about three years ago and then there was another tiny box to tick.  There aren't a lot of boxes ticked.

That was an intense year and a half or so.  It was a lot of new information and experiences coming in really close succession.  I let it happen.  I trusted him.

And now that it's over, there are things I want to try, things I want to do, but I don't want to try any of them without someone I trust.

"If you're playing chess with Albert Einstein and when the game's over he says, 'hey, what do you say we...?'"
"No."
"No?"
"No way."

And it isn't because he's Albert Einstein.  It's because I don't want to.  For the same reasons I don't want to be drunk.  For the same reasons I don't feel entirely comfortable in my own body.  Control.

My brain doesn't surprise me all that often.  It tells me what it's thinking and I'm OK with that.  We have a pretty good relationship, it follows orders, pretty much keeps everything running and I stay sane and safe.  My body, on the other hand, is way more complicated and has spent years doing things I'm not particularly a fan of.  I call this a total lack of body image problems, because I'm resigned to the relationship if not actually fond of it.  I'm about as indifferent to myself as I am to anyone else- my brain, however, is valuable.

So, of course, the stuff I'm interested in deals with the most intimate thing I can think of, sharing that control.

These days, my friend isn't a 12 year old girl.  He's in his 30s, and he calls me on my bullshit.  "Your brain is not the end of your mind, your body is.  Your perception of the world around you lives in you, and you're smart enough to know that.  Why limit yourself this way?  Your mind is gorgeous,"  A paraphrase, but close enough.

And I'm 12 again.  I don't know what anything is like, or how it works, just an academic understanding of the process.  Except now I'm in a world of people who do know, who know more than I do because they've done things I haven't, and all I know for sure is that I made a huge mistake before, and I'm not convinced I know why.

I think I'm going to be single for a very long time.

Precedence

It's a good thing I occasionally re-read emails when I'm awake.

Not House Manager.  If I know where to FIND a House Manager.  And Board Members.  Kinda.

I have been and gone and had adventures and this always makes me question my life.

My life is mostly not adventures.  So are most people's.  I forget that.  Most people also do the dishes and take out the dog and wonder how they're going to plan their week.

"What are you most looking forward to?"
I begin to think of all the things I want to do next time.
"Internet.  No, you gave that up pretty easy."
Oh.  Looking forward to at home.  Why am I going home?  Because it's the best universe I've managed to construct on my own.  Because it's the best I can do.  Because there is unfinished business, and obligations, and steps in a direction that might be right in terms of a career, or maybe I need to write the weird and strange shit that is pent up in my head but isn't a story.  Not yet.  Because it's still my story, and I carry my messes with me.

Everywhere I go, I'm already waiting for myself there.

Synthesis

The Little Theatre Company where I manage the box office sent me an e-mail to say, basically, "Hi.  We like you.  Um, are you still going to work for us next season and do you want to be House Manager, too?"  

Oh, yes.  

I'm hoping it's a paid position or I might turn them down.  It's a greater time commitment, I'm sure they could find someone else to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, but paid?  Yes, you can definitely pay me to do that.  For starters, I think it would mean they'd finally give me a set of keys and I wouldn't have to wait around for someone to show up, which would be ideal.  

After spending a few months as a guy and a couple weeks as a teenage boy, my hair was growing out into "woman with terrible haircut," so I got it trimmed and cleaned up.  Today I went to the grocery store, picked up a handful of stuff and stood in line behind a guy with maybe twice as many items.  Saw him glance at his groceries, glance at me and make a decision not to let me go ahead of him.  I look like a dude again.  

I have failed in my attempts to discourage a tenacious biomechanic.  I say that in a way that suggests I don't like the guy.  Not true, I'm just not interested in him in any other capacity and, well, we don't have a lot in common.  Or rather, I can speak to his interests better than he can speak to mine, and I'm not really interested in anyone I can't have a theatrical conversation with.  

One of the things I do when I get really frustrated by butts-in-seats seasons that fail to generate revenue is create terrible theatre seasons, ones that are worse or less well considered than any I've ever lived through.  It makes me feel better.  I post them on Facebook, where I discovered that even my local community theatre friends know less theatrical literature than I do.  

So maybe I am a closeted academic.  But I don't want to be.  I want to figure out how to make all the things in my brain accessible to average people, and I don't know how to do that.  

I've attended several "talk back" sessions for local theatre and find myself disgusted with the level of analysis possessed by the average patron who is interested enough to attend a talk back.  Maybe it's because there isn't enough structure in the session.  Instead of asking very, very specific questions, the floor is left open to talk about shit irrelevant to the process and dependent upon dealing with someone's flawed perception of what they've seen.  People, I'm learning, do not listen, read, or synthesise information well.  

Gender Neutral

Listening to someone going on and on about how all men are dangerous, and she is afraid of all men and the world needs to accept her handicap.  And I think, but cannot say, "What are you doing to get past this blatantly bigoted way of existing?"

If she said, "all blacks," or any other group of people, she'd hate herself for her racism and her stereotyping.  But in this case, women say, "no, in this case, the stereotype is true, so it's OK.  If one man hurts another woman, how can we trust that any man won't?"  To which I say, "the fuck?"

It's playing the victim, and all you have to do to extricate yourself from the conversation is say, "oh, yes, well, that's certainly a problem that you and possibly others have that makes your life difficult."  The person you're talking to believes their life is hard, that you think they're brave and struggling and you didn't actually have to agree or disagree with their frightened, narrow point of view that they're proud to have and share.

I am stupidly not afraid of people.  Most of the things I'm afraid of exist in my own head, and I do lots and lots of incredibly dumb and reckless things because I'm not considering my own mortality.  I drive the speed limit in snow storms on highways at night.  I walk along the edges of cliffs where I can look down and see the tops of the trees the size of dimes below me.  And when I trip and fall, I don't even consider how close I could've come to dying until later that night.

So, I recognise that I'm an unconscious daredevil.  I'm way more frightened of growing old and dying naturally at 70 or 80 than I am of suddenly being accidentally shot by causing a scene in hopes of self preservation.  Probably because I'm always more comfortable with the choices that I made than the things that merely happened to me.

That and I'm a total hero on paper and kind of a wuss in real life.  For all the time I spend worrying and thinking and planning, my ability to take action shouldn't come as easily to me as it does, but that's a result of my perceived power and autonomy.

And then I get to thinking about how different my life would be online if I presented as male.  I'd get so much more shit for making exactly the same arguments, but my credentials as someone who is "safe" and "understands" keep me from bad arguments with women, and my ability to let them be right.  A skill learned from the public school systems, someone with no power has to grasp for what they have, and that's the defense of their conviction that they are right.  Someone with power, of course, simply acts as though they are right and doesn't need anyone to affirm that.

Which I forget too often, and recognise as a loss of power.  As soon as I shut up and just start doing things with authority, I wind up possessing it.  I wonder if these are the leadership skills I'm accused of having, but don't see?  I've followed a couple of damn fools on idealistic crusades, but I don't think I've ever caused one.

Diversity

Local community theatre announced their season.  There are approximately 90 roles for men and 45 roles for women, not counting musical ensembles.

I thought this felt deeply fucked up.  But, not to be hypocritical, I checked the season of script readings I put together and discovered that it's come out nearly even so far.  This wasn't even a conscious choice, though it may be a side-effect of purposely searching for plays written by women.  They're extremely biased against scripts for performers of colour, but I live in a city that's 97% white.  It's still a problem, but I'd rather do that than colourblind casting in favour of white actors.

I checked another local theatre, even numbers male to female.  I looked up the closest regional theatre, a state away, and discover they're not quite twice as many men to women, more like 1.7.  I looked up the best regional theatre near me, another state away in a major metropolitan area and they represent an even gender split as well as featuring one play each representing African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic/Latino Americans performers and audiences.  Of course, they have the local diversity to support that environment and the ability to draw nationally, but it's nice to see.

I Don't Know Sometimes, I Really Don't Know

"Can you get your laundry off the lines in the basement so I can hang up my clothes?"
You're going down there anyway, why don't you bring it up?
"I don't know if it's all yours."

I go downstairs later.  The load of laundry in question is a load of "lights" red, pink, and white, fitted collared shirts, underwear, socks and a couple of tank tops I use as undershirts.  Literally the most feminine load of laundry in the house.

I can understand being unfamiliar with my wardrobe after ten years, but there's no way those clothes could possibly be confused with anything my brother might wear.

Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc

Of course.

Of course I go back to the Internet and get greeted by that Wednesday Addams video. It bothers me because it's not Wednesday Addams.

Wednesday gets her revenge personally. She doesn't need a middle man, she doesn't need an excuse. She just does what needs to be done. 

In Addams Family Values, when someone wants Wednesday Addams to smile, she smiles, and THEY'RE the ones who regret that choice. 

The other day dredged up a memory of a common conversation among Talented And Gifted kids (TAG, at the time. Presumably someone later disliked the implication they were labeling all of us and changed it to G/T later, but, TAG'd we had been). Put a bunch of us smart kids in a room together and eventually, we always got around to asking who was in the pool or if we'd been identified. I had no idea what this meant at the time, but it always came up and we all knew. 

I'd forgotten about it entirely until I happened to be reading Moab. When Stephen Fry was about 12 years old, he found a note that categorised him as "approaching genius" with the added epithet from his headmaster, "that bloody explains everything." Many years later he took the MENSA entrance, proving that he didn't simply approach genius, he embodied it, and discovered he didn't actually want to be a member of MENSA. Anyway, at 12, he'd hated the knowledge, considering it the worst thing he'd ever found out about himself, when what he wanted to be was good at sports and swim in the pool with the other kids. Stephen's childhood rejection of this idea reminded me of how this same thing was my identity, hold, on, wait a minute... Identified. Pool. These words mean something, and led me Googling.  

Identified students are, by definition, top 3%, 97th percentile and above on tests and highly gifted. Pool was everyone else, students who were maybe developmentally a little bit ahead and might eventually hit against a wall and begin to approach average. I was identified in Kindergarten, I knew that. I didn't know that it was so unusual to be identified that early. My state, from what I can tell (though individual districts are different) doesn't formally test until 3rd grade, and under normal circumstances, *won't* test before 1st. Anyway, I was identified, not pool. Top 3%.

Of course, I was miserable in school.  

Thinking back on it, if any environment groomed me to accept abusive, unhealthy situations, public education did.  It was a necessity to be endured.  You went every day, you were told you had to go, you were the problem, and you tried to survive, hoping that, maybe, next lesson, next semester, next year, next grade, next school, things would be better.  They wouldn't get better.  And you couldn't leave.

It's fucking cruelty.  It's not how life works, it's creating a cycle of accepting being treated as less than a human being all the time.

I wonder to what extent teachers are in the same scenario, unleashing that stress and pressure on their students.  I wonder if anyone has ever looked at the problem that way before.  I wonder if anyone has ever looked at a school and considered whether it was a healthy environment for students, or individual students.

They wonder why people commit acts of violence at schools, this is why.  You don't see the administrators or school board or local government in charge of reinforcing this useless environment, you see the day to day results, a building full of miserable people more then 50% of whom are there against their will or better judgement because where would they go if they could?  Leaving isn't allowed.  There are no alternatives because you're not good enough, not well-behaved enough, not smart enough, not sick enough, not enough to warrant anything but the cycle of abuse.

It's a thing I'm learning as I struggle to get my life into a new place.  I am capable of changing my environment.  I can positively control the world around me in a way I hadn't realised was possible, because up to now, it hadn't been.  I got out of high school and thought, "now," while I was living on a college campus.  It was better, but it wasn't autonomous.

After spending a decade living with someone who doesn't know what to do and to whom all ways are shut and barred, I'm figuring out that, no, it doesn't actually work like that.

Does anyone tell a victim of abuse, "It gets better, just stay in that marriage, job, relationship?"  No.  But they tell that to teenagers.  It gets better?  No.  You learn to make it better.

You do your thing, loudly, and regardless of anyone else.  Be an Addams.  

Gabbitas and Thrings

I read all of Moab is My Washpot in the last two days.  Stephen Fry's life and background are nothing like mine.  But it's the first autobiography I've read where I feel like I can actually relate to the person writing it.

I've read Katharine Hepburn's, Tina Fey's, Carrie Fisher's and Beverly Cleary's autobiographies, and was reading about a life I didn't understand.  These women were touched by things I was never effected by with worries I've never had.

Stephen's is like peering into a parallel version of my own brain.  In some places.  Stephen's capacity to love and appreciate is far greater than anything I can understand.

Which is what I wonder about.  I worry that all love is Stockholm Syndrome for me, because I have never, ever experienced a total immediate attraction to anyone.  Curiosity, yes, interest.  In high school I did develop a hopeless crush on an upperclassman who came out the year after he graduated and had the power to render me brainless.  If I have a physical type, it's that.  But I've never been struck with an instant physical need for another person.

I distrust my single adult relationship, because, well, I don't know that it was ever a right choice.  The entire relationship began from an absence of compelling reasons not to be in it and advanced under the same circumstances.

Perhaps I'm really not cut out for these types of relationships at all.  Not to say that I'm not a valuable person worthy of anyone's interest, but, maybe there isn't anybody that I'm ever going to feel that way about correctly, as opposed to a self-maintained exercise in learning tolerance and compassion for someone who repeatedly proves they didn't deserve it.

Contortion

Woke up at 4:30 this morning convinced I had another speech performance at 11 o clock today and would conflict with my needing to be in a box office at noon.  The force of waking up with this conviction made me irritate my old gymnastics injury.  

My mention of gymnastics makes people look at me funny.  However, it's true, I took gymnastics lessons from third to sixth or seventh grade.  I was terrible, but I liked doing it.  I went to a slumber party one night and gymnastics the next morning and pulled a muscle in my neck.  Tiredness and a specific movement will always irritate it again.  It's always a problem I've managed to irritate every single time I've ever moved house.  

Perhaps part of the reason it happened was dreaming that I was moving out of the house back in Illinois and, supposedly, back to an urban apartment in Washington DC, a city that I've never ever visited, never mind lived in.  I was excited because the first time I'd lived there, I hadn't had the opportunity to see all the things that were literally blocks from the apartment.  

I remembered the address when I woke up, but Google tells me no such address exists in DC.  I've never been there, but my dream showed the city like a cross between Vienna and Munich.  

Packing the house in Illinois was proving complicated because there were so many hidden closets (I frequently dream of that house with an entire basement it never had; closets is a new one) and there was more to pack than I thought initially.  

The cats were also a problem.  The dog, who never lived in the house in Illinois, wanted to go and was happy to move.  The three cats I don't have except in the dream, however, would not be convinced this was a good idea and refused to cooperate.  

I could speculate, of course, about each of these elements, but the overall message is that I'm excited about the possibility of change, but not really prepared to make it happen.  Huzzah.  

Caffeinated Enough to Hear Colours

I hate the taste of diet pop.  I *can* tell the difference.  I buy the old recipe Pepsi with sugar in it rather than corn syrup.  I drink between 75 and 120 mg of caffeine a day.

When I was in high school, I remember a kid doing a report where he stressed that caffeine was as bad for you as all the rest of the stimulant drugs.  Listening to it, it seemed to me to possibly be a reason to reconsider restrictions on other stimulants, but he intended it as a call to arms against caffeine.

Vocal music and speech competitions always confuse me.  Invariably, they sell pizza, walking tacos (because this is Iowa), candy, chips, pop and water.  Today's speech competition was the first time I've seen a school actively sell stuff that's not terrible for vocal production.  They did the other stuff, too, but they had sandwiches and fruit and stuff too, a lot of it.  I'm for that, give them an option to make the right choice.

They only sell diet Coke.  I am willing to swear that I've heard that most artificial sweeteners are terrible for kids because they do weird shit to your brain.  It may or may not be supported as well as, "sugar makes you fat," but I was under the impression that "sugar makes you fat" was at least as well understood as, "caffeine is socially acceptable heroine."

This particular high school has a coffee shop in it.  I assume one day that concept is going to horrify people as much as if schools of this era had actual meth labs in them.

In other, slightly related, news, I'm going to have to stop starting conversations with people with the phrase, "You've heard about the lab rats that..." because no.  No one has ever heard about the lab rats.

In Which Good News is Received

I heard my new favourite words today, "The contract doesn't expire until you resign."  I've got a November-April commitment for coaching high school speech as long as I care to do it. 

Again, it's another thing that requires I keep cobbling together jobs for myself, but I'd rather do that than try to hold down one single full time not theatre position, I think.  If I were smart, I'd just get the sub's license, because it's about the only thing that works with the afterschool necessity and could replace the box office job I like least.  But I'm afraid of that, still, and it's not theatre, it's school. 

My high school drama teacher apparently failed to acknowledge my existence today.  Which was nice.  Granted, a high schooler I've worked with in the past year had no idea who I was when I waved at her, either.  Time plus context equals unfamiliarity.  But in the cast of the drama teacher, I suspect she would've ignored me if she had known who I was.  I'm not sure what I ever did to her. 

I saw a good One Act today.  It was really stylised, which I like, and required that one actor have their voice prerecorded so they could be heard under the mask.  And it made me wonder to what extent you could put together a piece with mime or dance and recorded/processed vocals. 

One Act is becoming the most traditional of theatre events, and it totally doesn't have to be. 

Had cause to describe the Reader's Theatre I directed as, "The twelve months of the year telling the story of the death of a little boy.  In a light-hearted way."  This is what I do.  I think I like that. 

Trimalchio

I turned off Facebook and Twitter in a fit of petulance, and find myself incredibly lonely.  I think I'll wait until after my birthday and then re-surface.

Maybe.

I re-read The Great Gatsby, pleased for once to read a short, engaging novel that ends, rather than sprawls over thousands of pages.  Fiction to visit, not to live with.

I'll be older than Nick Carraway in a few days.  In a few years, I'll out-grow Gatsby.  I've been feeling rather Gatsby-ish.  Not in a high-living, hopeless attempt to regain a past that never happened kind of way.  More in a running away and re-inventing yourself kind of way.  Nick tried it, and he went back home at the end of the summer.  Gatsby, on the other hand, got shot.  So maybe I really feel more like Nick.  Or maybe I'm really Nick at the end of the book, fed up with a hopeless, careless, shallow world, but I don't have someplace else to go back to.

It's possible I might actually be living in a different book altogether, I guess.

One of the theatres I work for is opening a show known best for the rape and subsequent mental breakdown of the main character.  As it plays over Valentine's Day, it's being promoted as a romance.  That's... healthy.

Passing

I happened to see a Twitter tag where women pose questions to men about being afraid for their safety.  Granted, I do not commute on foot or public transportation in a large metropolitan, so none of this applies, but the idea that all women walk around using their keys as brass knuckles and calling friends upon safe arrival home...  I'm a woman, I don't even think about it.  

I don't walk through unsafe areas, though.  I suspect there are plenty of men who regularly walk through unsafe areas who also consider their physical safety.  I am personally aware of a larger number of homosexual men who have been mugged and beaten than heterosexual men.  I have to assume these guys worry more based on past experience; I have to assume that their sexuality makes them the target.  But, ladies, by all means, you are the only ones who experience this.  Of course.  

I cut my hair short recently, and when I wear my down winter coat and hiking boots (which happens every time it snows more than about three inches), I get called sir more than I ever did with long hair (which was never).  I happened to be out shopping today and noticed that women were watching me.  Not because I'm attractive, presumably.  I've never, ever noticed a man watching me.  I also got ignored by store clerks, which was amazing.  I haven't been invisible to clerks since I was in high school.  

A hair cut is all it takes for me to threaten women and enter shopping stealth mode.  

Misogynist, I.

I was taught to think like the men of my father's generation.  When I meet a college educated man of a certain age and style of humour, they recognise in me a strange kind of kinship.  I've read the books they read, written the styles of paper they wrote, heard their lectures and held their discussions.  My childhood was their college experience.  

Were I a feminist, I would reject this as the Patriarchy, I suppose.  But instead I grew up a misogynist, who thinks the world belongs to her and no one can tell me anything because my voice matters.  A good place to live, as a female.

I've been despised by Quaker lesbians and children of the 70s, who feel they fought to earn what I claim as my birthright, because someone decided to teach them it wasn't theirs.  They feel, and they apologise for what they think, because it might be hurtful.  They are considerate.  We should all be considerate.  

And here am I, the misogynist, who says what she means and does not suffer fools who want to be hurt by words I never said.  If you want to be hurt, you will be.  If you choose to hurt, you will.  I am not responsible for your pain.  

You are.  

Dreaming Again

Dreamt it was my birthday.  My birthday is in February, so I'm not sure where I was because it was definitely warm and sunny.  I was in some kind of school scenario, because I was living in a sort of student housing- large, odd shaped room, shared bathroom.  I'd come home to discover that everything in my room had been changed very slightly, but a letter had been left explaining why each thing had been changed.

The details of that aren't important, but the gesture and the sender are.  It was a friend who had done it for my birthday, as an opportunity to create an adventure for me, but I was mad about it because I thought it was someone who was just messing with me and stealing my stuff.

I'm sure there's a message in that, someplace.

Adventures in High School Speech

Had the opportunity to watch upperclassmen perform a piece in the same category my freshmen are entered in.  I'm satisfied that my freshmen are better than the upperclassmen.  The piece is better, the execution is better, and the kids don't appear to be more talented.  They did a much better performance on Wednesday afternoon, I wish I'd thought to tape it, but they'll go to State with it, so I'll record their next rehearsal.  

I have my doubts about the other set of freshmen.  Judged as freshmen, I think they'd advance, but they aren't.  If we have two tough judges, they won't go, it'll get called out for being simplistic and kind of messy, because it's a hard piece.  The kids have come a long way, all of them have shown fantastic growth as performers, but it's a fluff comedy piece that doesn't show off the skills they aren't old enough to've acquired yet.  I thought we'd build a bunch of wacky stuff and get them working as a tight ensemble, in order to hide their lackluster physical comedy skills, but we didn't have time to do it that way.  

Still, when I was a freshman, the event I was in advanced to state.  I think it may've even gotten one ratings at state, and it was genuinely terrible.  Our set was a table, two chairs and a hideous potted plant and possibly a door, and we all played animals that had been transformed into humans.  I had to play a snake.  And tap dance.  Do you know how much it sucks to tap dance as a snake?  When you can't tap dance?  When you're 14 and convinced that you look every single bit as stupid as you feel you do?  

So I share my sympathies with these poor kids who don't want to look like idiots.  But it's taken me 16 years to learn that failure to commit is the best way to make sure you look like an idiot, and maybe it'll only take another 10 more before I remember to commit all the way all the time as a performer.  Right about now, in my life, I would be an excellent high school actor.  

Contest is Saturday. We'll see.  

Things You Learn Online

Guys, no one in the history of ever has referred to you as "old-fashioned."  If you refer to yourself in that manner, it reads as one thing, "repressed and proud of it."  So, on the one hand, that's not doing you any favours, but on the other, thanks for the warning.

I'm willing to assume if you have to say you're easy-going and like to chill, neither of those things are true.

If the only example you have of you dressed up was at someone's wedding, and you're wearing rental gear, don't post that.  Or, rather, do, because it tells us two things, you never dress up, but you think we'll be impressed at the way you look in a rented vest in a pattern a woman picked out because it matched what she had the bridesmaids wear.

However, I'm creepy.  I've discovered that I can find out someone's name when all the identifying information I have for them is their age, hometown and their degree.  That's a creepy-ass talent, because I can't be found as easily.  I don't think.  Nobody try to prove that to me.

Freshmen

I'm a fan of the girl cast in the lead for one of the high school speech events.  She's talented, capable, and apparently a total jerk.  She's skipped out of multiple rehearsals without a word, so I contacted her mother, who apologised for poor communication and intimated it wouldn't be a problem going forward.  I responded, explaining that we had three rehearsals left, and she had to be at all of them, was this a problem?  Nothing.  

Imagine my total lack of surprise when she didn't show up to rehearsal today.  We made the shuffle to re-cast, which is sort of a hassle, but they'll get through it all right.  One of the kids announced that our lead had determined she didn't want to be there and hoped she'd get kicked out.  

I just can't even be mad about that.  I have to assume she's waging some kind of war where she thinks this choice is winning.  Yeah, you just show all of us how totally irresponsible you can be, upset kids you're going to have to keep going to school with for three and a half more years and put your participation in the event you like in jeopardy.  That sure does YOU a lot of good, kiddo.  

There's a tiny voice at the back of my head wondering whether or not this girl's mother was involved or not.  90% of these parents are totally hands off until they want something done, and then it's their kid's problem.  "Oh, whatever, no, you don't have any conflicts."  "What do you mean you have rehearsal every night until 5 like always?  I MADE YOU A DENTIST APPOINTMENT."  So, it would be really, really easy for a kid to invent a gmail or hotmail account for their parent, list it on the information then check that and fake emails.  

In which case, dang, kid, that's a lot of trouble to go to.  It probably didn't, but I acknowledge it's possible.  

You know when you watch Arthur, and you see one of those kids suddenly make up some hair-brained scheme that can only lead to inevitable, painful disaster, but seems like a perfect idea to the kid?  A lot of episodes of Arthur have the ability to look at that scenario and say, "OK, we can let this play out to its obvious inevitable end, OR, we can let it play out into some totally fucked up alternate reality scenario that may or may not provide any kind of closure, logic or consequences."  Which is, of course, the reason you keep watching.  The infamous Snowball episode is a perfect example of this- in any other kid's show, someone would have stolen the snowball, let it melt, confessed, gotten in trouble and been lectured.  But not on Arthur!  

This whole experience has been like an episode of Arthur.  I like it, but I kind of never want to do it again.  In a year, I will probably have forgotten this and do it again anyway.  

Mixing Our Metaphors

Told a friend I was digging holes for the future, and he responded, "sooner or later you'll hit water."  Great, so I'll drown down there.

I spent today looking for theatre work.  This is the time of year all the summer stock jobs start to come up, and it turns out regional theatres and companies post more now, too.  I'm trying to decide whether or not to entertain the thought of full time work elsewhere.

I will, in spite of my better judgement, apply for the 7 week position in a city two hours away, because it's a professional Equity house and they're hiring an assistant director and assistant stage manager.  I'd like the professional credit on the resume, even if I could make more working my current job for that same period of time.

There's a fringe festival I've been invited to.  In what capacity, I don't know, so I say invited in case that's really what it means, "come up and hang out and watch our show," because I don't think they can legally pay me or officially involve me.  It would start immediately after the 7 week job ends.

Several of these postings are for out of state.  And if I apply, what if I get one?  It feels unlikely, because of the difficulty I've had getting a job here, but, what if it should happen?  I'd have to quit two jobs I won't have had for six months, but it will be to move out of state.

And then there's the house.  Oh, the house.