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.