YellaLand

How We Learned to Love The Things That Suck: Aha Moments

2011-12-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

You never know when an aha moment will arrive, or what will cause it to come about. Sandwiched in between two weekends of Dezart Performs' - the theatre company I co-founded in Palm Springs and continue to shepherd - biggest production to date, a powerful aha moment struck.

I have never thought of myself as much of a people pleaser. I don't have many of the typical symptoms - I don't care awfully much how I look, I have no problem saying no, I feel no guilt about sneaking away for an hour of me time, or feeding my children breakfast for dinner instead of taking the time to concoct something more nutritious.

But on Wednesday afternoon I experienced a hit by a truck realization of this complicated triangulation of my, not people pleasing exactly, but approval seeking behavior that has railroaded me to exactly right here.

It is easier to talk about these kinds of realizations when you can think, "If I had it to do all over again I would..." I have been stubbornly adhering to a no-regrets policy. The early iterations were "Everything happens for a reason" all the way to "It's in the universe's hands". But in recent years, and particularly this year I have been growing skeptical that the universe actually KNOWS what it is I want in the first place. I can actually finish the sentence now with no compunction or fear of hurting other peoples feelings. I really now know what I would do if I had to do it all over again.

Well, maybe the universe wasn't the only one who didn't know what I wanted. See, I grew up in a family of semi-stoics. They could laugh, but there weren't exactly heartfelt conversations around the dinner table discussing the college prospects of the children, or reminisces of the adults' past missteps. Everything I knew about what my family, (and I include my grandparents in that category, though we didn't spend regular time with them, only holiday time, their influence was prevalent) I had to ascertain from unspoken messages. No one ever said to me directly "You must go to college", although my mother did say when I graduated high school that I did have to either get a job or go to school full time (I did both). No one ever tried to dissuade me - and I am grateful for that - from pursuing acting as a career. But on the other hand, neither did they seek out ways to support me, or take it all that very seriously. I suspect the family-wide attitude about it was that I would grow out of it.

So throughout my adult life I have been running in parallel tracks. One down the road of the kind of life I have always wanted to have, a creative life. The other track I have been running on is more like a treadmill, trying to prove to my family and the world at large that I am smart, not ridiculous, and an all around hard worker, not the obviously lazy clod that someone who wants to be an 'actor' must be. Clearly, it is not the fault of my family that I chose these paths. It was my interpretation of the unspoken rules and mores of my family, which I often ran afoul of in childhood and certainly put way too much stock in as I got older. But I was just never a 'go it alone' kind of gal. I couldn't have pulled a Demi Moore and rejected my family of origin to pursue my dreams. I would have been a puddle of emotional baggage, some sort of addiction just waiting to happen. What I just could not fathom, and thought I could not possibly tolerate, was the rejection of my family.

And how I came to finally realize all this was in a few short hours when that aforementioned truck hit me. I've been helping out the PS High Theatre teacher, helping some students get ready for festival performances next year. On that particular day, a visiting lecturer from UCLA was in to speak with the kids and help them with their August Wilson monologues. She is roughly the same age as I, but way, way ahead of the acting curve, not just in career success but also knowledge as well, and as she spoke this dread crept over me, the dread of realizing how exactly it is you have come to waste large chunks of your life. I'd always thought that I was pursuing my dreams, but in fact I'd been on those two tracks and the one I'd most often jump to when the gap between them got too wide was the "impress the world" track, leaving the acting track to go around the mountain without me. Here and there I have been able to pick it back up but the need to convince my family that I was smart in a way that THEY would be impressed with always won.

Wow.

And now what?

This is a fairly good place to end the year though, and this series of blogs. I don't think I have learned how to LOVE the things that suck so much as to tolerate them without having a heart attack. And there have been some mightily sucky moments this year, which is why there are so few blogs from me in large chunks of the year. I have a high tolerance for pain, and not getting what I want. But as I get older I am less impressed with the ability to be patient and reasonable. The more so as those around me seem to feel free to be disagreeable while I am expected to be patient and reasonable. I just might try being selfish and unreasonable in 2012. Yeah, that would be good. Everyone is always making "good" resolutions for the new year. I might just make mine bad.

How We Learned to Love The Things That Suck: Age Over Beauty

2011-09-21T15:58:00.000-07:00

When I was young I assumed I would enter into my middle age with resources - for creams, and powders, procedures, and whatnot. So I didn't sweat the load about aging per se - the whole sagging, puffing, plumping business, I mean. Well, none of those goods and services I'd banked on have come to pass. And yet, though I find myself looking hard upon the border between the beginning side and the other - peeking over top of the bell curve of life - I feel... better. I figure 90 for a conservative life span for this day and age, although I keep telling my kids I am going to live to 135 - just to annoy them.

I'm less insecure than I used to be for no apparent reason. I'm certainly not as thin as I used to be. In those days I didn't feel it though. I look at pictures of my younger, svelter self and think, "Stupid git! She didn't even notice!" I'm less fit than I was before I had children, less gainfully employed, less free. But also less anxiety-ridden. I've learned, counter-intuitively, that if I slow down I actually get more done. I've learned, rather imperfectly let me point out, to shut up and listen more. I rarely have too little to say and generally in the opening of one's mouth less really is more!

I'm less hard on myself and other people - and by that I don't mean to say I thought so much ill of others as I'd assumed they'd think ill of me, which is an accusation of bad-behavior if you think about it. I've learned that self-loathing and self-pity, while they may illicit sympathy for someone young and pretty, at middle age and above just make you look like an asshole. I'm certainly years past the powdery buff of beauty intrinsic to youth. But I've learned that outer beauty is for catching partners, inner beauty is for keeping them.

I don't claim to be wiser though I am older than I used to be - but aren't we all?! I didn't come by any of this through smarts, or searching, or spirituality. I think I just got bored. How long can one keep up the self-deprecating? And since my standup comedian career never materialized it wasn't really doing me any good anyway. So, at some point I just figured, eh, why bother. I'm fine. Or in the infinite wisdom of Popeye, "I y'am what I y'am".

If I had a porch and a rocking chair you'd probably find me in it, hand tucked in waist band, watching cars go by. Certainly much more fascinating than picking on myself.

How We Learned to Love The Things That Suck: Mild Scrapes and Minor Humiliations

2011-08-11T21:38:00.000-07:00

So Monday, I'm walking to the bus stop after work and just thinking to myself, "Gee, (I do say that to myself actually)I'm managing to maintain my dignity about having to ride the bus pretty well!" Despite the heat (over 100 degrees every day now) and the inevitable and unsightly sweating that goes along with, despite my odd foot virus that makes it difficult to walk comfortably, despite the waiting and what could be, wasted time. Earlier that day, the street on which I catch my first bus in the morning was under repaving. The flagman assured me that the bus would stop in the middle of the street for me, after all there was no sign from the bus system saying the bus stop was closed for the day. All stops within walking distance on that line were coned off, so the construction and bus system must have coordinated this... surely.

At 8:24 on the nose here comes the bus and there goes the bus. Not even a wave, or a point, from the driver! I had to call for a ride to the next stop. That afternoon when I was feeling proud of myself you see I had good reason. I hadn't been incensed or sorry for myself, I just handled it, found a solution, got on with the day.

As I turned the corner to the stop that Monday afternoon, I thought briefly, "What's up with my left ankle, hurts a little" then I noticed the early bus, I am never in time for, sitting there! I started walking faster, could I possibly catch it? I waved at the driver when I was within sight and shockingly he pulled away from the curb! I started running and waving at him thinking he must not have seen me, but I'm so close now I have to try. Then, just as he pulls back toward the curb - SPLAT! Down I go, flat on the ground, my right foot having hit the concrete edge between sidewalk and landscaping. I lay there briefly, swallowed in a puff of dust. I pick myself up, don't even bother to dust myself off, and get on the bus. I realize my right knee is bleeding through my pants, my left ankle twisted and throbbing - see, somehow it knew.

Then the driver says to me, irritated, "You didn't have to run, I was pulling back to the curb. You're alright I take it".

Yeah, sure, all except my dignity.

How We Learned to Love The Things That Suck: I Am One

2011-08-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the only way to deal with things that suck is to be one with them.

Yeah, there are things that suck. Everyone has some (at least one) thing that sucks in their life. But sometimes the suckiest of the sucky thing is the way you look at it. So, if you can just relax your mind and let things that suck, suck, well then at the very least you can get perspective.

The difficulty is in not letting the "this is" attitude bleed into a "this is and that's not fair!" attitude. Not an easy task. I think if one could accomplish it for more than, say, a few minutes, that would be a colossal achievement.

I think of all this because I watched 60 Minutes last night wherein they replayed their interview with Mark Wahlberg. Now, that is a guy for whom things could have sucked for a lifetime. And though he may be more talented and/or determined than the average bear, he certainly is not more deserving. Herein lies the rub. Deserving. Oooooo. It is the elephant in society, at least since the 80s (good job by the way baby boomers on changing the tone of the nation - I'm assuming its all your fault - see, I'm laying blame, a sure sign I have not yet grappled with things that suck in my life, I'm trying...). This idea that if you are wealthy, have a good job, married a pretty person, have well behaved children, that somehow you have been divinely touched. Or maybe you went to the right college, made the right connections, have "talent". Maybe you said all the right affirmations or were able to unleash the awesome power of the law of attraction on your ass! That, if you have all these things, you somehow (in a way unknowable to us mortals and thus inarguable) DESERVE it. The implied and ancillary meaning, that if you don't have all those things (i.e. if your life sucks) that you do not, in fact, deserve it.

OK. There, I said it out loud. Almost as hard as saying pretty women have better lives... oops, didn't mean that to slip out. What I am trying to get at is that this idea of 'fairness' is entirely erroneous. In fact, any explanation you try to lob at any life situation comes up short, because there are ever exceptions to every rule and platitude you may step on.

So, here is what I think. My husband is unemployed. That sucks. I have a crappy, underpaid job to no where, my talents sorely underutilized and non-appreciated (see, not even 'under', that really sucks). That sucks. My daughter has ADD and struggles with school work and behavior. That sucks. Because my daughter gets so much attention due to her ADD my son feels neglected. That sucks.

Now, in the very next breath, you would expect me to start spouting all the unexpected but wonderful side effects of the above chock full 'o suck situation. But then we would be getting on the boat for a trip down denial. Trying to look at the bright side of a lousy situation is one normal human response, which could be characterized as either healthy optimism or delusional, depending on your particular perspective of the moment. Wanting to doooooo something to better a crappy situation, also normal and questionably good, again depending on your particular philosophy at the time. Ignoring said suck-o-rama, also normal, could be defined by the self-medicating and more lazy among us as healthy, or, easier. But none of these is what I am talking about. What I am talking about is that awful aphorism I have avoided till now, "It is what it is" (usually used by the lazy, I am aware of that).

One with the things that suck. Really, just allowing things to be the way they are without mentally changing or judging. Not so easy, but if you can achieve it, even for a moment, it can be relaxing and even, dare I say it, enlightening. Things that suck, still suck, of course. But without the judgement or need to do anything beyond observe, a little bit of stress and tension may fall away.

Now, of course, you can't do this forever. Only Eckhart Tolle can make a living just 'being'. But maybe, if at least for a few moments, we can look at the things that suck as 'what is' at the moment, we can really connect with life, our own life. Instead of always trying to get distance from it...

How We Learned to Love The Things That Suck: Slow Ride

2011-06-27T10:15:00.000-07:00

You know what I used to love, and what now sucks? Taking the bus. For a number of reasons and not just the obvious.

Where I grew up in the Bay Area if you were a kid you actually COULD take the bus to the movies or to the mall or an audition or rehearsal as I used to. I doubt if that would be possible now. I don't know that I would let my own kids ride the bus, even in the relative safety of my current community. But it was a different time (and there hadn't been a 24 hour news cycle to make it seem like hundreds of thousands of children were being kidnapped each year) and so we felt it to be a bit of freedom to hop on the bus and take the nearly one hour ride+walk to our town's nearest movie theater or wherever. Inevitably we'd see two or three, get out of the theater after dark and someone would have to call a mom to come pick us up. Mom's couldn't be bothered to drive their kids places, even on weekends, when I grew up, when they could just as easily shove a couple bucks in your hand and tell you to take the bus.

But even beyond freedom it was a great learning ground. Since the Bay Area is a large and diverse population one could always count on great people watching. My friends and I engaged in something you might call people speculating. Convinced we can know a lot about a person by the way they look, human beings have always made lots of decisions about the value and interest of a person on that basis. We just did it out loud (not loud enough so they could hear of course) to each other on the back of the bus. Not satisfied with the realistic for long, our speculations soon diverged into the wild and implausible. Consequently, my childhood bus rides were populated with Russian spies, embezzlers on the lamb, and any manner of wealthy and/or mentally impaired eccentrics.

In my later teen and college years I too often reverted to "someday I'll have a car" thoughts to have much fun on those rides. But I always observed people. Everyone does the visual sweep upon stepping on the platform - see who's on, who to avoid, who to sit next to. In the Bay Area, generally people were too occupied talking to companions, or tired from work, or sleeping, to notice or care who came on. I would make mental commentary on who looked weary, or sad, or happy and wonder intensely what had just happened in their life to make them so.

In those years, particularly in college, I would even venture to take the bus (and BART) home late at night. A whole 'nother drunk and/or high, on for the night homeless, just going to or coming from an underpaying hard scrabble late shift would be on board. Occasionally there was a scuffle, some "what you lookin' at" would erupt but I had the young-with-my-whole-life-ahead-of-me-and-nothing-could-go-wrong bravado propping me up. I felt like one of them in a way and yet not. Always conscientious of being a white girl in a minority world, I didn't swish or flaunt or try to appear too affluent or happy - sometimes I would adopt a sad countenance to ward off potential advances of any sort if the compartment had just that right mood where it felt slightly dangerous. I rode with the confidence and air of someone who was not so different from everyone else deep down inside but sure that I was destined for greatness, to succeed, to make things happen.

Flash forward some 20 years and taking the bus is a whole different experience. When my husband lost his job in February we also lost our second car - a company car. We'd been juggling kid drop offs to school with my work and errands pretty successfully until gas prices started rising. I realized that the 10 mile drop off and pick up to my work was costing us nearly $10 to accomplish. We were filling up the tank twice a week - unheard of previously - and with prices over $4 and one less job in our pockets, it was painful. So it is not like I made the decision unwillingly.

But it is a whole different time, and place. After all, the me-me-me 80s and earn-earn-earn 90s and spend-spend-spend aughts have passed us by, leaving in their wake a recession, but also a general attitude about ourselves as a society that now no longer squares. "We're number one" does not resonate exactly the same way with the unemployed or underemployed as it used to. Economic factors do have an influence on attitude and on how we perceive ourselves and others. And in Southern California as well, there is a force of opinion that blasts "You don't have a car!!!" when one steps on the bus.

What is similar is that I am, generally, though the numbers are smaller, still one of the only white faces on the bus. What is new are cellphones and mobile devices, and the solitariness that comes with them. If no one looks up to see who is coming on the bus it is probably because of the despair of the long slog (our valley is geographically huge with few and far between bus routes which means lots of transfers, waiting, and walking in high heat and wind) but just as likely that they have their face stuck in their cellphone or are talking (way too loudly) on it. One tries not to seep to that place but I often find myself, face stuck in Kindle, just as bad. No more the long sweep to see who's conversation I might overhear - there are rarely people traveling together and when they are they are usually silent - nor do I search for a place in the back so I can watch people unperceived as I used to. Now I just quickly find the nearest place in the front, put my head down, enjoy the airconditioning because it will be soon time to get out and walk the 1/4 mile to work in the heat. There were always the people who couldn't afford a car, or the car in the shop people, on the bus in the Bay Area. But there were also the "I'm doing this for the environment" people too. But So Cal does not so readily cotton to idealism.

I am just like everyone else too, still. I am underemployed, struggling to get by, deeply debt leveraged (though mine is student loan debt primarily) with little chance of ever getting out. My prospects of better employment seem just as dire as my companions on public transportation even though I am highly educated. The difference 20 years has afforded me is experience. My experience of the feeling "this year things will happen for me" in my 20s not really being true then, or my 30s, and now half way through my 40s. Though I still remain hopeful, and believe in possibilities, and my own abilities, I am no longer under the misapprehension that that is enough for "things to happen". I now know that sometimes life, the world, the universe, for a reason you may never know, just doesn't notice you or your talents or potential or rewards you for it. That even when you know for sure and follow your passion, you still can be just another rider on the bus.

How We Learned To Love The Things That Suck: The Age of Reason

2011-05-25T23:27:00.000-07:00

We all know the age of reason hits a child at around their 7th birthday. That moment in time where they really begin to understand that they are an individual apart from their parents and family, and moreover that others are individuals too. It is a beautiful thing seeing your child develop their very own sense of compassion. Less so, and a little bit painful, to see them gleefully make conscious separations from you! But as the child passes into this phase there is a corresponding enlightenment that happens for the parent as well.

If we are really paying attention, it is at around this age when we begin to relax a little bit about what our kid is up to. As they begin to make the separation between themselves and their parents so too do you, as parent, begin to get more comfortable with the idea that your children are not necessarily little extensions of yourself. And if this doesn't happen naturally there just might be something to knock it into you.

My daughter has just recently turned 7, and been diagnosed with ADD, and been recommended by the school to repeat first grade. That's a kick in the head for ya! Any one of these things alone might be enough to send a momma into a "my baby!" spiral. But three! Come on! Of course, the difficulty in school follows hard on the heels of, and logically, the ADD diagnosis.

We noticed that she was struggling with behavior and attention, aka following directions, even in preschool. Not a squeaky wheel nor a severe ADD case, educators and doctors gave us the "oh, she's fine, probably developmental, let's see how she does next year" through preschool, then kindergarten, then most of first grade. A(quiet) squeaky wheel was turning inside my head however. How I wish that in this post I could wax triumphant about a mother's knowledge of her child over the reluctant authorities. But alas, I cannot. "OK", I said, accepting their assessments instead of insist that there was something abnormal.

See, now there is the icky bit, "abnormal". Frankly, it took my husband, who himself has ADD, much less time to come to terms with the obvious (to us) fact that she had ADD. Because, of course, he could relate. But also because she looked a lot more like an extension of him than me in that regard. He didn't have my problem - the "I don't recognize that in myself" problem - the problem that is essentially an ego problem. That's right, I said it. I essentially did not have my child diagnosed sooner because of my ego. My husband didn't push the issue either, but then he probably forgot (That's an ADD joke. For the uninitiated and uncomfortable, it's OK to snicker).

And it is so easy - before the age of reason hits - to buy into the 'developmental' and 'she'll probably grow out of it' and 'all kids are distracted at this age' deflections. Because, well, you sincerely hope that your child will not be *gulp* abnormal. Who wants to jump the gun and slap a label, a potentially debilitating one, on your own child? Who wants to force the issue or speed to call your child 'different'? It's not of any obvious benefit, barring Munchhausen by Proxy syndrome of course, if there is no ensuing treatment.

Do I sound like I'm justifying here? You may be right. And it could be a little bit of both. Nothing like "repeat first grade" though to make you self reflective of your motives. We pushed her as we could without causing conflict (because children with ADD are experts at causing it) and sometimes caused it anyway, on a number of things ripe for it - homework, extra reading, keeping up with the class. I admit to feeling panicked when it was clear that she was far behind her cohorts in reading and recognition of high frequency words. But my panic and guilt at not finding a way to push her harder only added to her already just below the surface stress. At one point, early in the school year, I even attempted to bribe her with a Nintendo DSi. But, as we now know for sure, long term rewards do not work for people who can't really remember what day it is.

And, being an attention hound already, I didn't want to inadvertently (or vertantly, arh arh) create in her a taste for or create a lifelong pattern of garnering attention for bad behavior/illness/incompetence... Even now, having a brain doctor of her own (Daddy already has one so the concept not unfamiliar) is enough to make her feel special in a way that makes me cringe. Too much of that pull self up by boot straps, keep nose out of air upbringing I'm afraid seeping through. But stiff upper lip away her very real challenges I cannot. And so I head full on into the age of reason, right along side her. She is not me, and I not her. You know, on an intellectual level, that your children will not be exactly like yourself. But on some deep instinctual plane you just cannot help harboring hope that they will be. Reason says, do what you can to make it easier for her, make sure she's not falling behind, or not being noticed, or being misinterpreted. Reason does not say bury head in sand, ignore what might work, just because ego says so. Her life and little self doesn't get to be the way I imagined it just because that's the way my ego pitched it in my head. Shut up ego, deal.

After all, they don't call it the age of unreasonable - I guess that would be the teen years.

How We Learned to Love The Things That Suck: Time and Gravity

2011-05-13T17:03:00.000-07:00

I was never one of those obnoxious twenty-somethings that was loud and pretty and attracted a lot of attention with my antics (sober anyway). So by the time I started graduate school at 27, even I was irritated with the perky little things that lackadaisically swarmed the campus of SDSU. "Time and gravity, girls. Time and gravity, happens to us all" I used to think as I did my Bay Area-I-have-somewhere-to-go-walk across campus and the be-booted shorty shorts clad late teen/twenty chicks ambled around as if they had all the time in the world. I understood even then, being myself only slightly less pert and perky than my school peers, that we would all grow old and fighting it was a fool's mission.

Fast forward some mfehmmummblemum... years later (see, vanity) and I get it. I eat my own words. I really get it. On the inside. I mean that quite literally too. I now understand that one cannot eat 5 pieces of birthday cake in a week's time and skate into the end of the week un-internally-scathed.

When one is no longer twenty-something, (thirty-something might be pushing it) some foods are just no longer an option. Never one to have much in the way of digestive issues, it has always been a big red flag for me to not eat any more of that (that which just went in the gullet) when the tum goes rumble, I have benefited, clearly, from the instant effect of being in touch with one's body. The cumulative effect however I am just now noticing.

Woke up feeling quite hungover and blech. But I had drunk only one glass of wine - how is that possible? Frosting. Lovely, fluffy marshmallow frosting from my daughter's birthday cake of last Saturday. That, plus one on Tuesday evening (Tuesdays and Thursdays are dessert night, they are designated, that's right. I have children, if you don't designate these things they get quickly out of control), one at her actual party, one chocolate one at a friend's birthday that same day, and one later that evening. It was one of those "darn it, it won't all fit in the container" pieces. You have no choice really, you have to eat it. The Chinese children of my youth would cry if they knew I had let food go to waste.

Funnily enough, for us mfehmmummblemum-somethings (vanity, again) sugar is just like booze. Easy going down, queazy in the processing. Who knew...

How We Learned to Love The Things That Suck: Or Rather, Things That Ache

2011-05-04T16:06:00.000-07:00

Ah Spring! You may all say. But I say, "No not yet!" I know it is here because my head starts to ache. Something about the heat changing the pressure or the sun or the brightness of the... who knows. It's ouchy. I'm grouchy.

See, Spring here in the land of 363 days of sunny-sun-sunshiny days (pinch me!), is what the rest of you, across the country, call Summer. And it never seems to fail: Family will be descending, or rather ascending up to us from that Mediterranean climate/heaven that is San Diego, this weekend because of a little girlie's birthday party. And in typical fashion last weekend was lovely, moderate, cool breeze... this weekend will be 90s, no cool breeze in sight. From Spring to Summer in one short two hour drive.

Spring to me, marks the time of year when I must steel myself against Summer. Summer here is like everyone else's Winter. Except you can only take off so many clothes, before you get arrested. And even still, hot sun on bare skin is ouchy, make me grouchy. Maybe this year I will purchase a pair of sunglasses though. Seriously, I don't own any. It's sooooo sunny here all the time - relentlessly so (have I mentioned that before?). I just figure, what's the point? You'd have to wear them every single freaking sunny-sun sunshiny day. And frankly, I've never been that cool.

In other news: check out my new blogger digs. Eh? Eh? Nice, eh?

The reason for the change (my old template was so aughts) is that I am prepping for (read: trying to learn how the hell to do it!) self-publishing my novel, Pernicious Pill. I will be offering some short stories I've written on this site. So follow me here, or at Twitter, or Facebook, and I will let you know when I post a story and when the novel will become available.

Your comments here are welcome. I would love to know who my readers are and what you're reading these days.

How We Learned to Love The Things That Suck: Mama's Trying Week or The Can, The Bug, and The Egg

2011-03-29T15:17:00.000-07:00

I think I am done now with Life in Exile blogging, as it were. Ready to put that beat bit of prose to bed. I cynically/optimistically now begin a new series perhaps called, "How We Learned to Love the Things That Suck". Past tense, because, of course, we haven't actually learned yet how... If I was learning as I went along it might be called "...Am Learning To..." But I like the irony so... here we go...

So Friday, the 18th my lovey and I are sitting at lunch, just about finished, and somewhat relaxed, considering. Just a couple of weeks earlier he had been let go from his job. It was a stressful, difficult to learn job and he'd been feeling the pressure. Reassured one week that he had time to learn (he'd been doing investigations on his own for only 7 months) and would not be allowed to fail, (in fact, they had just implemented the ironically named "No Investigator Left Behind" program) only to be let go another. In the letting go process the company had made a number of, one could argue, cruel mistakes. Being reassured that you won't lose your job and then being let go shortly thereafter is bad enough. But they had let AMX know he was being un-employed long before they let him know. So the letter canceling his company card arrived before the canning did. They also called on a Monday to schedule a "we've got to talk to you" meeting on a Friday. ??? "Honey, I'll be home from Paris in a month. Can we have a sit down and talk about the continuation of our relationship then? No, we'll talk about it then... buh bye" - like that, only more vague and evasive when asked a direct question.

So during the "we've got to talk to you meeting" they make some noises about stats and not being up to par and "should be farther along"s and whatnot - and hem and haw when shown the reassuring "don't worry we won't let you fail" letter. So they make it look like a firing for cause, but really it is more like a layoff. A number of weeks earlier supervisors had requested a volunteer to go "independent contractor" status, and no takers. Weeks after being let go, his job is still not posted on their website - they never had any intention of replacing him, only getting rid of low hanging fruit. So much for No Investigator Left Behind - probably modeled on Bush's No Child Left Behind, which should probably be renamed, Failing, Well Screw You! (Either or, take your pick)

The company also did the not so nice, and a violation of state labor statutes, thing called delay in getting final pay stub to former employee. When you let someone go, 24 hours baby. That's all you get... a week or so later, lovey's finally arrives so NOW he can file for unemployment... and with a high unemployment rate in our county, that nerve wracking phone call is delayed by a further week.

So by the time we find ourselves at lunch on a sunny Friday afternoon, after a morning of us both volunteering at our kids' school, we are finally feeling some sort of equilibrium come back into our limbs when... the phone rings and it's the school - come pick up your kids, they have head lice.

Ugh.

This is not a phone call one welcomes. But spring into action we did. So 12 hours later - after treatments and nit picking hair and spraying and washing and changing of sheets and towels, etc. - the last load of laundry goes into a hot hot hot load to wash out any potential critters at 1am. Oh no, but that is not the end, my friend. If you, or some small one you love, has ever had this affliction you know, our party was not over. It seemed like (though this is not literally true) I spent my entire weekend with my face in children's hair, combing out lice eggs (nits) and squashing live ones between my fingernails. I now have a new appreciation for and deeper understanding of some parts of the English language, such as "nit picking" and "louse" and "bug eyed".

Come Monday morning our daughter was still not ready to go back to school. No live ones allowed in school! But thank goodness for the leniency of NOT having a No Nit Policy. That would just be maddening, and detrimental to a little girl who is already behind in her studies. Finally, she gets the go ahead on Thursday. I relax, just a little too soon because...

When the kids and lovey came to pick me up from work that afternoon I noticed a red spot on her forehead. She had bumped her head on a metal pole at school and a giant egg had grown there. I asked her a few questions and she seemed to be fine. But as we made our way home and I began to make dinner (breaking a glass sending me into a stress-tizzy for a moment), Natasha Richardson kept creeping into my head. I was worried. But I couldn't exactly point to anything to be worried about. After dinner (Thursday is dessert night, don't you know), having no treats, we headed to Dairy Queen. When girlie started complaining her egg hurt we were close enough to the Urgent Care to swing by, so we did. As the physician asked the girlie questions her face changed. Seems she lost consciousness for a couple of seconds - and any loss counts. Off to the ER we go.

You learn things, being in the ER, for 6 hours on a Thursday night.

Number one) If you land yourself in the ER everyone will show up. If they are within driving distance they will arrive, if only to wait and worry-ish in the lobby (there will be a good amount of giggling, though I don't think at the inflicted's expense). So be heartened if no one shows up in your actual room they are probably all in the lobby. Making noise.

Number two) It's scary when the ER goes on lock-down because 'something' is happening or criminals or suspected criminals or some unknown something is happening 'back there'. As subtle as the staff try to make it, being a mom alone with a 6 year old daughter in the middle of the night in the ER, when it goes on lock-down, is not the most comforting place to be. Trust me, I experienced it, three times.

Number three) If you must go to the ER on a Thursday night and you are in Palm Springs, make the hike to Indio to JFK. Thursday night Street Fair apparently attracts trouble and the ER ends up busy. Who knew?

Number four) After midnight hysterical single women will visit the ER. That's not entirely fair, I don't know, they might have been married. But three of them, really. I think they just wanted to talk. I know how that is, I've woken up in the middle of the night too all stressed and worried that my life isn't going the way its supposed to. I suppose that is the prophylactic effect of children - they (mostly) keep you from going off half-cocked in the middle of the night. (Bet you never thought you'd read that sentence in your whole entire life.)

So, there you have it. It is now Tuesday and I am still tired. I feel something like someone has taken a cheese grater to my psyche. And yes, still nit picking, thanks for asking! Every night. Twenty one days. Go on, I know you're jealous you don't get to make your children hold still for you for twenty one days.

Note to self: some day this will all be funny, some day this will all be funny, some day this will all be funny...

Life in Exile: No New Year's Reso-bleeping-lutions

2011-01-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

As the new year begins I think back, not on all the great things that happened in the previous year as many do (though I know there were some pretty great things that happened, namely making a new acquaintance and starting a new job with a lovely lady, meeting a new great friend, starting a credential program so that I can validly apply for teaching positions, theatre things all well and revving forward) but rather thinking about all the mistakes I've made. Not just in the course of the last year. Why limit myself! But mistakes or should I say missed opportunities, and wondering whether I would be sitting here, in the desert, in a lonely office working a parttime hourly wage job, needing to supplement it with two other parttime jobs the sum of which does not even amount to one decent job wage wise or anything that could remotely be called a career. Or do all roads lead to the same destiny and I just need to breathe and learn to love the things that suck?

I go way back to when I was young and pretty and wasting my youth auditioning (when I could get them), waitressing and bartending at midling chain restaurants, married to an alcoholic. It was December one of those years and I coincidentally had an audition on the same day as my husband's Christmas party. He worked at a small company in SF and they were having their party at a restaurant in downtown, my audition was some blocks away at a new theatre company. I said I would meet him at the restaurant and all was agreed, but he got home early from work or didn't work that day (I can't quite remember) and decided to go into the city with me. We got off at the stop for his party, not my audition, and I was just going to say hi to the guys then get right back on the BART train. But when we got there, no one else was there. He said he would just wait at the bar. Doing the hours till party starts to possible consumption of alcoholic beverages (of an avid alcoholic husband in a party mode) quickly in my head, I decided to blow off the audition to stay with him, go for a walk around the block and hopefully reduce the cocktail intake. I was not successful and I remember his boss saying something along the lines (in all somewhat levity, of course) of "He's crazy, you should try to control him" meaning, "don't let him drink so much"... which of course I had tried, but his disease got the better of him and me as it usually did and made him look a fool and me even more foolish for being with him.

Missing that audition still haunts me. I try mightily not to engage in what ifs as I do not believe they have any inherent value per se, but sometimes that McClelland melancholy I inherited gets the better of me. That was the only audition I have ever missed.

Then we move to several years later when taking classes to qualify me to get into graduate school I turned down an opportunity to become a TV news reporter. Granted, there was no guaranty of a job but there was the implicit indication of help in that direction in the "Ryan, you've got talent, you're going places kid" support and encouragement. I turned it down because my classes in electronic journalism I found depressing. I didn't want to spend my life investigating bad news though I apparently would have been good at it. I just thought it would make me drink more than I already did (if you can imagine what that was, being married to an alcoholic and all you might see the validity in my worry).

But I often wonder if that wasn't a mistake. Would I have been successful?

Then shortly before the end of graduate school I got yet another one of those "You're going places kid" offers of support from a professor I had an internship with. "What about working at Qualcomm, or something like that? They start at $65K" Nope, I said, I'm goin' to Hollywood to make movies! This proves at least that I am not greedy, lest anyone was wondering. But scary to think that I might have been better off. The idea that I make just about the same as I made in graduate school is frightening, not to mention wrist-slashingly-depressing... thank goodness I have children to keep me sane. The only upside to that career track not taken is that some years after I moved to Hollywood and was gainfully and happily employed working for a producer and 'going places', Qualcomm laid off some 60,000 newly hired workers in the tech bust.

Then there was my break with above mentioned producer. I had worked for him for four years and needed to have some bigger role in the company or learn something new. Only so much can be learned in Hollywood behind a desk and I had reached that limit. While looking for a job I was offered one with a foreign sales company. It was, however, shockingly similar to the one I had just sat in for four years. Alone in an office, making just about the same money but not doing much different than what I had been doing. I laugh now at the 'career assistant panic' that made me turn the job down (as well as the $ offer being reneged on just as I was to step through the door). What I was worried about then I wallow in now, but not even as good as I could have had it there... because I am here.

The only upside to that missed opportunity is that 9/11 happened shortly afterward and the job would have entailed traveling that October to MIPCOM. Having not done much for work travel I didn't have the kind of familiarity comfort that would have been needed to stave off the post-9/11 traveling by air fear that took over almost everyone. Plus by that October I was pregnant and sick sick sick.

Then there was the Israeli film festival which hired me for a day, "just to see". I can understand why they did this. They had a panic exit, in case of bombing you know. But with a 10 month old baby, and lactating like crazy, it was uncomfortable being away. Who knows if I would have done well or not. It was essentially a sales job and I is no salesman! When later that day my husband got the job in Palm Springs he'd been hoping to get - to restore his place as breadwinner and bolster his self worth after over 10 long months of unemployment - I willingly gave up the film festival job. But what I also gave up in one fell swoop was my career in all total, such as it was, living in LA for good, such as it seems, and the building of relationships that comes with raising children alongside your friends in the same area.

Already far away from any family in LA, in the desert we were now far also from friends. I didn't realize the isolation that would grip me or how difficult it would be to shake off. The wrongfully imprisoned inmate still sees himself as a prisoner, and can't help but comport himself so. Even still, visiting friends in LA (even if rarely) I feel as though I have snuck temporarily back into the fold and will be kicked out if discovered at any moment. I have to learn to navigate all over again the outside world, so cloistered and dim is this one.

I was even offered a job with the film festival here but I had very small children at that time and a husband who worked odd hours. The income and hours I would have put in would have put me in the red in the final analysis after all the various babysitters had been paid. It just didn't make sense, as much as I would have liked to have been out of this office once and for all.

But here I sit, welcoming a new year, wondering if I could have done better. If I had been more selfish?, more hungry?, more ruthlessly driven? I don't suppose this is a calculation men really ever have to make, or do, but I wonder if I had just not considered the effect of my actions on my spouses and done what the hell I wanted, if I'd be any better off. Or maybe in some strange sci-fi like fate driven process I'd be here now anyway.

Anyway, happy new year... my non-resolution (because I do it now anyway) is to take my fate cheerfully, like so much medicine... maybe I will try harder this year to learn to love the things that suck.

Life in Exile: A Little Muse on That Thing We Call… Frustration

2010-12-21T14:48:00.000-08:00

I have heard it said that unhappiness is when your expectations do not match up with reality. OK, fair enough. If that is so then frustration is when reality does not match up with reality. What I mean to say is, generally when we are frustrated it is with something/one (OK, let’s face it, usually it’s a ‘one’) outside of ourselves. If we are to get to the crux of true frustration, as opposed to say, a temper tantrum, it would be when your reality does not match up with the reality of that thing with which you are frustrated.

A phrase sprung to my mind upon hearing of the demise of Elizabeth Edwards, the much suffering-with-grace-and-a-good-publisher wife of former VP candidate John Edwards: Don’t be too OK with things, it might not actually do you any good.

In the long run, I was meaning, you know with the cancer and all. So in the long run, squashing your feelings and taking that trip down denial you’ve been dreaming of may not be such a good plan. But I wish to posit here that faced with untenable frustration, a little jaunt on a cruise boat down denial – weather permitting – could be just what the doctor ordered. Just make sure you get off at the next stop. Not getting off is what I suspect leads to high valium and other recreational/FLIPPING NECESSARY drug and alcohol use by wives, harried parents, harried assistants, etc.

Such as not enough time. Your reality is that you need to get X done, but the T available is not adequate to complete X, ergo X/T – T = F. You follow?

Or when you need a youngster to do her homework. Said youngster does not want to do her homework, did not read the cost/benefit analysis memo you put together for her, and can’t envision being held back in 1st grade and is therefore not freaking out as adequately, as say, a harried parent might.

There is also the usual partner frustration. You have relationship need, let’s call it R, and partner doesn’t care/notice/see what’s the big deal/is incapable of providing. You try to reason with partner, “I really need R!” P agrees to ‘get right on it’, forgets. So see, Self as reliant on Partner for Relationship success often leads to the dreaded Frustration. Or this equation can be expressed as: S + P/R = F

Or just go to work, oh anywhere really, and find a numbskull, add a task that needs to be accomplished alongside said numbskull and there you go. Instant frustration!

Or the frustration of exile let’s say. Want career. No career to be had in area of your exile. OK, settle for decent job. No decent job to be had in area of your exile. OK, don’t have to tell me twice, change tack, head Self on different career path. No, different career also not available in area of your exile. Alright bloody fine! Learn to be OK with family life. Family life rife with above frustrations.

Shit.

“Someone hand mama her pills!”… repeat mantra of “At least the kids are in a good school, at least the kids are in a good school…” as often as needed, take two glasses of wine, and try not to be OK with it in the morning.

Life in Exile: Things Fall Apart

2010-12-06T13:31:00.000-08:00

I was reminiscing about a moment in time a few years back when my life in exilehood did not seem so bad. Things… came together. I had been performing my solo-performance play at the gallery, and by all audience feedback, moving people. I had randomly answered ads for various services like writers and artists and such the like, and suddenly there came offers. I was a Teaching Artist at the McCallum Theatre Institute! I was a contributing writer to Dune Magazine! I was writing apace on my novel! It felt good. I was busy but I was happy. And in the way of such moments I got more done. Ironically my house was cleaner, I made it to the gym several times a week. My toddlers were relatively clean and well dressed, and supremely happy. I was happy damnit!

Then, as they do, things fell apart. My husband lost his job. The magazine folded. I got let go from the Teaching Artist position for reasons I am still not clear on (too emotional I suspect though I have no overt evidence. If they had wanted unemotional people they should have put a call out for Quaker Artists!) And, as these things have a way of infiltrating all nooks and crannies of life, my husband and I entered a protracted and supercilious period of battle… to be right… as all battles of marriage seem to be. Which of course led to child behavioral issues which led to, wait for it… iCarly permeating our house, what seems like 24/7.

As all parents know you have to make concessions sometimes to keep the peace. And if you don’t, well then you are a dictator, or a member of the Greatest Generation. It started as “just iCarly, nothing else”. Said concession stemmed from some serious and persistent fuss/misbehavior and downright stubbornness and refusal to change the channel, which stemmed from little sister’s intense neediness, which stemmed from the long battle which… well, as above. It has grown to Big Time Rush, Victorious, and various other teen laugh track comedies, and a venomous need to see every single special every single time it airs. The justification to which is “but it’s the Special!” Duh-uh!

It is impossible, for me at least, to separate achievements from how I feel about everything else about life, including my kids’ childhoods on which I am a contributing editor. One could distill it all down to enthusiasm I suppose, but you would lose the subtleties. As I was enthusiastically going about my creative life in that time before things fell apart and after the long, lonely-time in the beginning of my exile, I could WOW them with my passion, my enthusiasm for life and them. Who needed TV! We had activity instead. They were also a great deal younger, a great deal less jaded by the long battle, and we were all still in that period of hope – that point in time of very early familydom where there is still the possibility of more – maybe more children, a dog, maybe a move to a new and better (or old and better) place. Children themselves being still so incompletely formed, as toddlers, seem to embody possibility. We had not yet hit the grooves of family life. Those grooves which are children’s particular personalities and proclivities. The grooves of daily life. The grooves of holidays, celebrations, school. The grooves of how you treat each other. There still seemed time to enlarge our family (which I wanted but the husband decidedly DID NOT!) or change its rhythms to something slightly more coordinated and soft, not the hard jerky inconsistent syncopation groove we now live in.

And when that something that swooped underneath the knees of me and washed away all that hope, I grew more cynical (if that is possible), and tiresome, no doubt. And tired. So I caved. And now we are in some sort of horrible TV groove. As I was trying to imagine how we could get some iCarly out of our lives, and remembering fondly the relative calm of shows on Noggin, like Oobi and Franklin, Little Bear, even the craziness of The UpSideDown Show, I realized all that had led up to that moment of weakness.

I have a congenital inability to hold on to and recount for all within earshot my achievements. I don’t want to think about what I did once. I actually flush with embarrassment when I think about or talk about my various accomplishments. “Stuck up” comes to mind – obviously a song I heard so often in childhood it is permanently etched in my psyche and rears up on hind legs when even the thought of tooting my own horn emerges. I don’t want to rest on my laurels but new ones are so hard to grow out in this desert, my beautiful prison, though I keep trying. I want to do.

I wonder though, had I a little more reminisce and a little less angst to accomplish, if I might have been able to hold it all a little more together, not caved, not lost my enthusiasm for life, not gotten weary of the harrowingness of it all… maybe I would now live in a land less populated by teen idols… maybe.

Life in Exile: Cloudy, With Absolutely Not A Goddamned Chance of Rain

2010-11-16T11:55:00.000-08:00

Or, I was gonna call it, "Black Mood Faded Irrevocably Grey By The Sun"

My capacity to tolerate tedious work sanguinely is stretched today. Not because of the particular tedium of the task... just... sigh...

You know when you are doing something mindless because it just needs to be done? (I'm actually good at stuff like that - which goes to my favorite piece of wisdom imparted to me by my grandmother that I have never been able to follow - "Don't get good at anything you don't want to do for a living") But it ends up feeling like biding time. It's painful, that realization, of how much time you have actually bode. Despite all New Year's affirmations that "this year things will finally change" here we are in November, and nothing actually has. (Ironically, I have lost weight this year.)

Well, that is not strictly true. Change happens, although seemingly glacially (not in a global warming sense, in the building a glacier sense). There are the normal increments of child growth spurts, dog adoptions, relational truces, good grades easily won in school (mine and Angus') and slow, hard earned progress (Violet's and Matt's) in school and work... you know, like, normal stuff. But I so never wanted to be normal. That sounds really shitty doesn't it? Poor little middle class white woman complaining that her job is tedious and she doesn't have time to work on a new novel and that new play that's been floating around in her head for years aching to get out let alone clean the bathroom. And did I mention I just got a new car on Sunday.... ahhhhh... excuse my while I just go slap myself.

Life In Exile: I'm Burnin', I'm Burnin', I'm Burnin'.... for peace

2010-10-26T15:31:00.000-07:00

I believe in not burning bridges. It's because I'm always thinking about the nuclear winter. So, I go to personal, at times stressful, extremes to get along with Difficult People (DPs for short).

Disclaimer: If I know you, and you are reading this blog, then by the nature of this very reading, you are not (most probably) a DP and are therefore NOT ALLOWED (notice that is in caps, that means I mean it) to think I am writing about you.

I know Oprah and modern pop psychology are always exhorting us to stand up for ourselves. But I don't always do what Oprah says, and so sometimes I become a doormat, just to keep the peace. Because slashing and burning a relationship - no matter what its nature, is frankly, painful.

And that nuclear winter scenario thing. I'm always picturing the seeming inevitability of burning a bridge and then being stuck in a service elevator that no one uses anymore with that person. Or in a blizzard, with no cell phone reception, day three and no one knows where we are, and the person with the last morsel of food is that person I screamed at and called a wanker in front of the entire Board last week... or something.

Makes me wonder, you always hear about people who have lived at extremes of some idea - the uber-conservative who became a radical liberal. The free love hippy who became a fundamentalist. Between extremes must be the still smoldering ashes of vilification.

See, in order to legitimize oneself in one extreme after having lived in another, one would basically have to badmouth the hand that fed them. It's got to be cool, though. I mean what more street cred would one need! "I've been there, man and they are wack". No doubt that kind of cred would hold the flock in rapt awe, "He's been there, he knows they are wack". Would make one kind of a rock star... if you raked your former self over the coals to win friends and influence people. The evil side of self-deprecation?

It is akin to talking smack about an ex-boyfriend right after he broke up with you. There is an instant gratification in announcing, "Well, I always knew he was an asshole". Aside from the logical next question, "Well what the hell were you doing with him then?", you are sort of being extremely judgmental.

On those occasions where I have burned a bridge I have felt a momentary superiority. But it led to the inevitable vindictive-high crash of reality. I just sort of felt, well, gross... inside... Would a vegetarian fault the grizzly bear because he ate the salmon? (Well, maybe a vegan would) All the while I would have been bad mouthing, vilifying, entertaining whatever supportive audience with stories of misbehavior and my innocence, I would be completely ignoring the fact which is, who the hell am I to judge? Yes, that bridge may be shoddily built and deserve to fall, but should I set the match? And wouldn't that possibly put me in line for arson charges?

It occurs to me that I have been potty mouthing my beautiful prison here in the desert and I am here to apologize desert. Whilst I have been complaining about what you did not possess I have been ignoring your wonderful qualities. I promise to stop being a wanker and get my head out of my ass and pay more attention to reality, you are pretty. You are a nice place to live. And if I pay attention I won't be bored anymore (oh, man, see I knew I should never have started saying that to my kids - "If you're bored you're not paying attention" - I should have known it would come back to bite me in the ass!)

Life In Exile: The Future’s So Bright (but only because it will just never rain in the desert)

2010-09-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

You know the problem with being human, right? The problem is the past is so much more vivid to us than the future. And we only nominally live in the present. In actuality, we are living in the present, thinking about past things we liked and projecting those things on the way the future should be. And since we are all Revisionist Historians, the past is way better or worse in our heads than it actually was, depending on your perspective. We are creating now what we imagined was so great about then for later. (“Who’s on first?” – if you understood that joke then you are either way old dude, or a totally cool/geeky film nerd).

Except somehow it just doesn’t seem to work. Because of this whole present, real time, you can only be where you are stuff (thanks a lot Eckhart Tolle!), things don’t get accomplished except if you are focusing on now, and that’s hard. The mind wanders. Being one with, say, filing, is slightly more difficult than being one with nature. OK, OK, they are both technically in the universe, but seriously. Dictation – running amongst the lilies? Folding laundry – dipping toes in the cool ocean. Which one is clearer? Number one – number two.

Maybe the real problem is getting older. Allow me to expound. When you are say, early 20s, you can spend a little time doing mundane tasks. I’m not saying you don’t gripe about it but you’ve got all the time in the world. And that’s the thing, it feels like you have all the time in the world. The future is out there, you can see it, clearly envision how it’s going to be! All you have to do is one-mundane-task-at-a-time your way to it! But then you get older. And not only is there less time left, but you have clearly become cynical. Yeah, right, you can power your way to positive thinking all you want but the fact is we all get jaded. It is as inevitable as thick hips, chin hair, monkey arms, you name it. Because you have done the ‘imagining your future’ thing and then you passed through it. And guess what? That future when you got there, was not like you imagined it a bit, if at all. But you can bet that later, when you are in the present thinking about the past, that future you imagined but didn’t work out like you had planned, will actually seem a lot better than it actually was. In retrospect. Or worse, if you are that sort.

How many of us have kids, raise you hands. Now tell me, is this just like the adorable, yet familial controlled chaos you (in movie fashion) imagined your family life would be? Who among us can say they made their 5 Year Plan and it turned out just that way, and it is swell!

See, I’ve made those 5 year plans. I’ve done the self-help-y, The Secret-y, Oprah-y thing and it doesn’t really work so much. You work towards a goal and when you get there, or to the marker point where ‘it’ is supposed to be, it’s not. Something else entirely is. The future looks bright when you can imagine good things happening to yourself without the Negative Nelly in your head going “Yeah, right, like that’s gonna happen”. After having been through a few decades worth of 5 year plans, and wandering around aimlessly in the desert, in my beautiful prison, and not getting pretty much anywhere I wanted to be in my career or my life in general, all the while accomplishing amazing feats, one wonders – is it even possible to imagine a reasonable future, an obtainable future? Is it even wise to try?

I could totally slip into a couple of icky platitudes here – hope for a miracle but plan for reality – learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow – think big but relish small pleasures (hmmmm, relish…) – but I hate platitudes. They’re all so quipy and cute and begging to be repeated and meaningful and stuff… Platitudes, so self aggrandizing… Maybe the thing is to just stop planning, be happy to wake up to a new day (and if you need sunny sunshine every day, day after bloody flipping relentlessly sunny day! - move to the desert), do what the hell you want, and stop watching Oprah… No, the money will not come if you follow your passion. The only thing that will happen is you will be looking at the ass-end of your passion…

Life In Exile: In Isolation

2010-09-14T15:48:00.000-07:00

We just got a dog. I know, what does that have to do with anything. Besides cuteness you mean? Well, I tell ya, a dog is by nature a pack animal, yes? Likes the other dogs around, likes the other warm bodies and playful paws and camaraderie. And if a dog likes to be alone, or goes off alone, then something is definitely up.

So I've been thinking about isolating recently - even before the dog - and doing a little navel gazing 'bout it, and I realize that I have been doing this for years. And generally, when I do it, it is because something is wrong (not because I'm looking for a secret place to pee, I know that was what you were thinking!). That something is usually along the lines of 'things not working out they way I'd planned' or 'feeling ostracized/criticized/terrorized'-pretty much any of the cizes will do. And we humans, OK certainly at least me, are also pack animals. We like the warm paws too and if we isolate too long getting back into the swing is problematic.

Simple small, one on one or two interactions I'm fine with mostly. But when I have to go back to the cave and try to fit in, I get a little bile of panic. Ick. "So don't do it" says brain. Which is entirely unhelpful. The fear is, of course, not fitting in, not being liked, or worse invisible. People like to say that kids will take any attention, even if its negative, over no attention. But as adults we learn to skew all attention. It somehow just seems easier that way.

I know that I particularly feel like crawling under my bed (except there are too many candy wrappers under there from my sneaky kids!) when I've been accused or lambasted, particularly for something that either I didn't do or wasn't entirely my fault. (Sometimes I wish I too had the mighty high opinion of myself that I could control all under my purview.) And this just makes one jumpy, ready to be thwacked at any moment - skittish doggie. I get to the point, in that perfect circular storm of criticism, isolation, and awkwardness where it just seems natural, expected, that people (read: anyone other than me and a few close friends and my children) will look at my and react badly - "Wrong! Whatever you're doing, and I don't know what you're doing but I'm certain it's wrong". I'm way beyond "why me?", which is not good because beyond the Forrest of why me lies the desert of "of course" despair. I just don't expect good things to happen... to me, anyway... anymore... and that is bad.

I'm trying to teach my puppy (Buttercup) and my children (and husband by osmosis - because he hates when I try to teach him stuff directly) that good things still can happen - even though number one son might have a hard time believing that one. His fish died today. Remember that kind of 8 year old sad? That is a bummer and a quarter, because he's super sad right now and probably his whole day will be ruined. But hopefully not his attitude or his whole life... can't let him isolate - 'cause 'whole life' and 'nothing ever good' only comes of that.

Deep breath, stick out a paw. Ruff!

Life in Exile: The Long Hot Summer of My Discontent

2010-09-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

As the stores start putting out the down jackets and corduroy, we here in the desert look forward to dipping into the upper 90s. While you all out there are experiencing sweater weather we are still months away. And even in December we may get temperatures so mild that really a long sleeve shirt will do. No need to get all crazy and don pants people.

As summers here go this one was not too bad. We have birthday parties in May and June for our kids and usually by June it is just too hot to be outside, so by about 2 o'clock everyone migrates indoors. But this year we spent all day outside, adults under the covered patio, cool drinks in hand, kids on the slippy slide. And even during the true summer months it was still cool enough in the early mornings to sit on the patio.

See that is the thing that gets to you. In other parts it may get to high 80s or even 90s in the day but by nightfall it gets cool again. And one off-shore or northern breeze can sweep the whole thing away. But not here. Sure temps may dip by 20 or so degrees at night but if you're starting at 110, well...

I used to say 104 was my threshold, that after that point I was disgruntled and everyone might as well just stay away, leave me alone because I was going to grumble till October (yes, non-desert dwellers OUR summer is from roughly mid-May through the end of September, sometimes October so eat that June complainers!). OK, that last comment was grumbly, and I apologize, because what I was going to say is that my threshold seems to have risen. Either that or the mildness of this summer's temps have not thrust me over to the dark side.

Or maybe it could be that I have a plan. I'm not saying it's a good one. I don't know that I've ever made a good plan for my life, and at this point in my life I'm not gonna go getting all cocky about it. By normal weights and measures it may not actually turn out to be a good plan, but it is a plan nonetheless. I am getting a teaching credential so that I can teach to my degrees (see, I told you it was not necessarily a good plan). Where, you may ask, could I possibly teach something having to do with theatre and or film and television in the desert! (Don't you dare say, "You should move to LA" or I will roll my eyes so hard at you!)

Well, though this may not be the mecca of media innovation and creativity (although we have a Mecca in this valley, I just don't know what it is a mecca of... sand possibly, or trailer parks, boasting the largest welfare check rolls per capita... I know stop me now, and it's not even hot today! Only about 95!) there are a number of colleges and universities within shooting distance, well long-commuting distance. And though I have never really wanted to commute, or teach necessarily (I attribute that last comment to high school peer pressure, you remember, the old "those who can't do teach" saw that only makes sense to 16 year olds) I am thrilled at the prospect of thinking about and researching theatre, film, and television or any combination thereof.

Or maybe I am maturing. Or maybe it is my forays into raw food eating (and subsequent "oh my god I lost how much without even trying!" weight loss) and focusing on getting healthier. I am a relatively old mom afterall. I will need to be a fit bird if I want to live to see and pester my grandchildren. I also may be working well into my 70s since there is no pension waiting for me on the other side - I just better not get to the other side! (of working, not death, relax) So if I am to possibly be the oldest living waitress at Sherman's then I'd better get ready. Or maybe all those self help and new spirituality books finally kicked in.

Or maybe you can only be grumpy for so long, particularly if it is not in your nature, which I don't think it is in mine. Mine is circumstantial grumpy. Although to be honest I can hang on for long periods of time. And you know I did have 7 whole days off in a row, how you say, vuh... cau... vay... va-ca-shun? which I haven't had since 2006. And I did get to drive to LA-ish for my friend's babyshower and spend some time with her and another friend. That made me happy. I could still be riding those oh-you-mean-there-is-intelligent-life-somewhere wave.

Or most probably, my kids are 8 and 6 and that has an impact. No longer can I fool myself into thinking that I am not influencing who they hope to become with my mood. Especially my daughter. I see my kids trying on their parent's behavior for size quite often now and it is scary when it is your darker moods they are emulating. So, there you go, a slap in the face by your adorable children. Snap out of it Ryan! Fhhhhwack!

So life gives you lemons you make lemonade. Or if you drink too much lemonade - there are lots of lemon trees growing in the desert - the summer drink of choice, and since summer here JUST NEVER ENDS, maybe a nice meringue pie? Oh, or what about a lemon chiffon cake with lemon icing! Oh you know what would be good, shrimp sauteed in lots of butter and lemon juice... lemon curd on toasted brioche, yum....

Life In Exile: Hitch Your Wagon

2010-08-08T01:19:00.001-07:00

You know, I hate to be cynical, but when one has been reared by sarcasm, it’s hard not to be. I say this because what I am about to say may sound to some of you rather negative. But here goes.

Not that much has changed for women in marriage since the women’s revolution. The division of labor is largely the same as it has always been and women are still defined by the man they have married. I can hear the empirical evidence pouring in already: “My marriage isn’t like that! My husband stays home with the baby!” But I’m here to say, I think not so much.

I have noticed, in the last several years, articles and studies popping up about how, shockingly, marriage is not so great for women. Has it ever been? Ladies, who does most of the housework and childcare? We are freer now only to have two jobs, instead of just one. The balance is tipping certainly towards more women earning more money than their husbands, but until there is wage parity, clearly this perk will hit a ceiling. And despite who makes the money, as with housework, there are still divisions of spending labor. We will, I will venture to guess, see our husbands in our golden years be the ones to put gas in the car just as we now see our grandfathers, fathers, uncles on Sunday mornings at Costco filling up the tank. And I’ve no doubt most women, barring a few rogue and foodie men, will continue to do the grocery shopping and cooking. Or microwaving, as the case may be.

Natural affinity for certain things? Social pressure? Probably both, and the fact that social change just takes bloody time. There are things that, generally speaking, men do, and things that women generally do. Lines are being crossed all the time, I’ve no doubt. But if I can make a gigantic gross generalization - boys will be boys and girls will be girls. Even when they are all grown up.

What comes to my mind foremost in marriage, however, is the buy in, the basket that all the eggs are now in. By definition marriage is all in. When you get hitched you must take all that is in the package. When you marry a man, you not only ‘marry’ his family, his friends, his social status, his wealth, but you also acquire a new public persona. No longer will your self be defined by yourself alone.

I just heard on the radio an interview of a blogger, who lost her husband in Afghanistan, ask (out loud!) of her place in the world, “Am I still a Marine wife?” Who you are as a woman is, in no small part, defined by who you marry. Because you marry a particular man, you marry his particular habits and routines. You go full hog into where he is willing to live, what he wants to do with his spare time. How your lives will be arranged socially, financially, emotionally. You marry in to how many children he is willing to rear and who he is willing to spend time with. If you are ‘lucky’ you will have an ‘understanding/kind/loving’ husband who is willing to take your opinion into consideration.

My husband asked me the other day in the middle of an argument why I didn’t move to LA when I was younger (it was a ridiculous question in context but it started me to thinking about this subject now). Without going into immense detail about that time, simply, I was married to a man who had no interest in living in LA or NY or anywhere I might have made a go at a career in acting. I did go against the marriage grain by enrolling in graduate school in San Diego (a city he seemed moveable towards, though clearly he was not immediately convinced as he did not move until I had already lived there 8 months) – without him. We were still married but I wanted something different, so I moved alone without him. As I now know, had we had children it would not have been the same. I probably would have made do with a program in commutable proximity.

Once my, then, husband moved to San Diego I was no longer the same person as I had been. Time constraints, surely (you do have to spend time with a spouse to keep being married to them, of course) but there was also the matter of how friends and colleagues perceived me. There was a discernable difference. When my husband was still in the Bay Area I was not seen as ‘really’ married – evidenced by the number of times I was hit on. Once he moved to San Diego I was seen as more ‘married’ but also, as a sort of extension of him. Parts of his personality were attributed to me without my permission or knowing, let alone control. People treated me differently. This had been true where we lived before as well, but it was in the relief of being alone and then him being there, that I really took it in.

There is this idea that spouses can somehow ‘control’ the behavior of their significant others. Wives are looked down upon if not seen as ‘reigning in’ the more extreme parts of their husband’s personalities. Women are supposed to somehow socially engineer their husbands into smoothed out forms that fit tidily into behavioral norms. If not explicitly expressed, we have all experienced those long sideways glances when our husbands are telling fart jokes loudly or screaming at the TV in company. The message: “Why don’t you do something about him?” The method, (which everyone seems to think is some sort of universally effective punishment), to withhold sex. Can I just point to the rebellion that is ‘man caves’ or exclusively male spaces, as evidence that said man-molding is ineffective.

Too, you women, will be hitching your wagon to a particular kind of marriage. Whether you have a spiritual bond, shared household chores and childcare, mutual hobbies, long romping vacations without kids, is largely (if not wholly) a product of what your man can and will tolerate. Believe me, I’ve been married three times and not a one of those marriages was alike. My current life would not be discernable to either of my previous husbands. Clearly, I am a compliant sort (my marriages looked more like my husbands’ personalities than my own) and there are women (I dare say many more now than in our mothers’ generation) who are not so. And the divorce rate keeps going up – not because of the lifestyles women are creating for men that they just can’t tolerate, but because women want more from marriage than to sustain two jobs (three, if you count yourself wife to a challenging man).

I have learned finally that my house will never be clean unless I clean it. I will always be responsible for managing child schedules, no matter how much I throw in my husband’s lap, he will be able to manage only what he can. And the rest will fall by the wayside. Onto the floor. Where it will sit. Until I pick it up. Because he will not even see it unless I point it out and then is just as likely to walk right passed it saying “Oh, I didn’t see that there” as rush over to pick it up to please me. There are just certain vacations I will never go on, certain conversations I will never have, certain colors my living room will never be painted. People will always look at me as a different person as I stand next to my husband as when I stand alone. Not because I have a difficult husband or an uncaring husband, but because I have a husband. My marriage will simply look more like my husband’s personality because I am the one willing to bend. Because a marriage really is a bend or break proposition.

Life in Exile: Denial Is Not Just A River In Egypt - But The Weather Is Very Similar

2010-07-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

And now a little word about what you do when your life is not going your way. A word about denial. You read that like it's a bad thing! But it is a normal, natural, useful human capacity. I say we need it and we, frankly, have all done it.

Denial is that cushion that gets you through a bad patch (or few years) and keeps you relatively sane if not at least functional until... well, until reality sets in. I had to engage in some willful (if not totally conscious) denial upon moving here to the desert. What I told myself, and everyone else, was that I had agreed to try it for three years so the hubby could get his job started, move up in the company, etc. (I never let myself believe it was the permanent move it has turned out to be.) Then we'd go back to LA. Therein lies a tasty little slice of self-deception, that my career wouldn't suffer too much if I were out of sight for that long. It is a perennial bit of womanly denial (in all but a small few select exceptions) that you can exit a career for a few years to raise children and then get back on again, like exiting a roundabout and then swinging back onto the highway, like you never even slowed down. We all know, deep down inside, that that is not really true. You do, in fact, have to start practically all over again.

And if, like myself, you are starting all over, with fewer resources and less options you have to paint a picture for yourself of those opportunities that makes them seem much more rosy than they actually are.

Now a brief digression here to include the hubby. Not in a mean spirited way, mind you, I just think it bears saying that he too thought that somehow things would be easier for me here. Less competition was part of the equation of his thinking, I gather. He always thought it would be easier for me to make a movie here, in the desert, than in LA. And I have had friends who have made successful careers for themselves, making movies, here in the desert. But that idea of 'easier' is like trying to flatten a waterbed - one side of it may be smoothed out but then you get a bulge on the other. And I, in some way, hooked onto his optimism that I would at least find something fulfilling to do.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't lay down after three years living here, when that magical moment (or rather months) passed and reality set in. As that three year mark came and went and I realized that my hubby was not ready to move back, career-wise or otherwise, and there was no career in the offing for me to drag him back for, I decided the thing to do was to tapdance till the time really came. (See, I was still engaging in denial that we actually would ever move back to LA) Fake it until you make it, as it were. I scoured the newspaper and craigslist for a (better paying, more full-time and entertainment related) job and cobbled together a string of gigs that were satisfying, uplifting even. I wrote for a local, short-lived lifestyle magazine. I wrote and performed a one-woman show (I still rest on that tired laurel as often as I can). I started writing what I thought would be a short story and ended up with a novel. I taught some theatre games classes to little kids. I was even employed for a time(ever so briefly - that's a whole 'nother story) with the largest local arts organization. I was busy! I had paying gigs! Things were looking a little up and dag gum it, I was even happy. Then, as they do, things fell apart. In some cases I knew why, in others I knew not.

So, OK then, time for a little personal examination. Knowing I was going to be here for the duration, I had to figure out how to do it so that I didn't make myself and everyone else about me miserable. I did A New Earth seminar with Oprah online. I did targeted (targeted mind you, they're better!) postive affirmations, read The Secret, read Four Questions and questioned and questioned myself. I did journaling (lor' help me how I hate that term - almost as bad as 'good to go' or 'he's good people'), The Artist's Way, yoga, worked out, talked to myself as I drove to work. Pilates.... walking around the block on my break at work.... and ugh... each has its own little tidbit of value certainly and strung together they kept me limping along till now, so I can't really knock 'em. But...

Disclaimer: OK, do I really have to do this people? Fine. I am not badmouthing nor would I badmouth any of the above mentioned endeavors as cockamaimy or ridiculous. I would, and in some cases probably will, engage in some of them again. My relative un-thusiasm is no commentary on their relative value. Happy?

A little move diversion: Can anyone say what is the difference between denial (an unconscious defense mechanism used to reduce anxiety by denying thoughts, feelings, or facts that are consciously intolerable) and delusional (a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact)? Maybe only that one comes with pills, the other with religion - you decide which.

But here I am. Seven - yes, count them, seven! years later, still in the bloody desert, still working at the same parttime, part-film, part-whateverneedstobedone job and not much higher on the happiness scale than I was at the three year mark. Chalk it up to the seven year itch maybe? I dunno, but I come smack against reality every day and the face of it is this: I have no career. There may be no career for me to be had, ever, in my chosen field here (there may not have been much of one for me back in LA either, it would be speculation on my part to say that there absolutely would have been). My family is what it is (that is a whole 'nother post) and I am where I am. With nothing new on the horizon. And did I mention the massive student loan debt/guilt I incurred while getting a degree for my chosen field? A debt I have no hope of ever paying in full?

What does lie ahead is a whole lot of reality knocking me about the face and arms, forcing me to switch career aspirations. Will my hubby up and move back to LA? No. I will not be holding my breath. Could we even afford LA anymore? I dunno, dwellers of said city, any opinions? If I found a fabulous job there? Possibly, but neither am I holding my breath for that fabulous job - anywhere, let alone LA. Good sense says, find something to do with a pension - or at the very least more pay! And do this without incurring yet more debt I will never ever pay off, how again? Not sure. I have ideas but face it, we are in a recession and the job market is depressed for every kind of everything I might be able to think of or be good at. Let alone be able to tolerate. Because face it, I could do a lot of things for money, but will I sacrifice my last shred of self worth and sense of self (because I only have a shred left) to do any mind numbing and/or back breaking and/or spirit crushing work I can get just for money? Probably not.

If I were another kind of woman, one that domesticates more easily (I could, just not willingly) I would be happily floating down this river, gardening, baking bread, playing with my children, engaging them in activities (all things I do with joy, mind you - I just can't to the exclusion of all else), watching my middle adult years float by untapped. But I value work. I value my brain. I value accomplishment. Aside from the home I can make for my husband and my children there is not an endeavor I have yet found out here that can serve those needs and value me in turn. So I continue to float, willfully if not wantonly, down this river in Egypt, believing that just around that next bend there may appear some reason for me to get off.

It's either that or I try one of the two things I have not: pills or religion!

Life in Exile: No Concept Left Behind

2010-06-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

Part of what I left behind when we left LA was a concept I had of myself, one which worked there but does not work here. In fact, this concept I have carted around since I was, oh seven or so, has managed to serve me well, so long as I was striving for a career.

But in the desert there is no striving wagon to hop on. I’ve lived in the Bay Area, San Diego, Los Angeles and now the desert. In all those other areas there was an energy of building something; lives, careers, communities. But the desert is a retirement community, a second home community and a vacation community. Those of us who are left here to wrestle with the whole of the year and not just some pleasant three month sojourn work primarily in one of those leisure industries. What we moved out here for, in fact, was a job (my husband’s) in a hotel. So, life, by definition and execution, here is transient. People have either come out here to relax or retire. Basically one is either golfing or waiting to die.

Of course, if you follow life to it’s ultimate conclusion death is the result for everyone anywhere. Period. But we like to think, as free Americans, that how we occupy that time before death is up to us. My choice was to occupy my time as an actor, then when it was clear that was not going to happen (face for radio, voice for print) to the degree of success that would keep me… well, fed frankly, I looked around and thought to myself, if I can’t be in them, then I at least want to have a hand in making movies. This aim took me through the Bay Area and college, San Diego and grad school and finally LA and career. A career IN the industry of my dreams, mind you, if not exactly the dream job. My foot was firmly in door.

At the time we left LA my job had just ended. I had been working on a TV pilot and then I had our first child. Having a baby in an all consuming industry was going to be difficult, I knew that, but I was confident I would work it out. I had a friend who was pregnant with her first and just getting married, another who was soon to be married, another pregnant with her second. I had a friend and former boss who seemed to have the hotline to babysitters and child entertainments. I had a network that, as more babies of friends were added, would only grow stronger.

And then the move to the desert. Not only did I leave this burgeoning network and (I hoped) an equally swelling career but suddenly the concept I'd indulged all those years no longer worked! And it is not as if we had lived in LA for a while with a baby, tried it, found it too frustrating or frightening (before we left we could walk around with the baby in the Grove or to breakfast in Hollywood and literally be the only people with a baby we ran into all day – it is now baby haven as my last trips back have shown) and made a categorical decision to leave for more child friendly climes. Nor had I tried my hand at Hollywood, failed to get a foothold or achieve what I set out to and in disgust packed up and left as soon as the Fall leaves back home began to change. In Hollywood you can tell the seasons by the yard sales. About every three months, as the failures and disappointments would mount, Moms would call sons and daughters to extol the beauties of the Fall/Spring/Winter/Summer leaves/blooms/snow/gorgeous weather, and followed would be a lot of justifying with, no doubt, some swarthy swearing and impulsive packing of it in. This was helpful actually as Hollywood is fairly mild weatherwise. But I was not one of these casualties. I wanted to be nowhere else on earth at that moment in my life.

Sure I did have disappointments in my career and no doubt more were sure to follow. But I felt certain that I would find another job, act in another play, write another script, make another friend, work on another project... in effect, continue to strive. There were possibilities, you see - energy, movement, people were achieving things! And now, in the desert, I was not amongst them any longer. Worse still, I would tell people I met what I had done for a living or that I was a writer and, at best, the blank stares of incomprehension were monumental. You could hear the crickets in between blinks. At worst I would get the “You know you should move to LA for that” response. I felt pride at my great self-restraint in never yelling “That is where I just bloody said I had been living!” at anyone. Not even once.

So here I was, isolated, (I wasn’t working the first few months) not meeting many people and when I did… well, the above mentioned crickets. The energy as stagnant as a deaad of summer wind. And here is me, with this caaaawn-cept of myself which keeps landing flat and sliding off a cliff. I am Wiley Coyote and this concept is the Roadrunner. No one here it seems to me is striving for anything. I mean (at the time we moved) if you weren’t in real estate everyone else thought you were kind of a numskull for not. So it’s not like I had anywhere to fit in and wasn’t. There was no ‘in’. Not as a preexisting condition at least.

So this feeling, that I’m creative/special/driven/talented/stubborn/lucky enough to accomplish something – to make films! (which, no matter how little the film when you first make them that brand of 'special' is stupendous) fails me utterly. And then is run over by a steamroller that just happens to be passing by, in this hot hot, hot hot desert.

Meep meep!

Life in Exile

2010-06-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

I was compelled the other day, by the birth of a friend's baby, to write once again about my feelings living here in the desert. "My life in exile", as I think about it, though my husband despises this phrase, or "my beautiful prison", equally despised by husband, of equal measure amusing to my sister.

I have long thought ('mused' sounds too whimsical for a practice that is normally for me a downer but that is actually a more correct characterization of what I do - thought implies direction, a move, but in the musings about my situation there is no logical resulting action) of living out here, in this desert, as a sort of undefined sentence. It makes me feel sad, angry, humble, extremely difficult to get along with, and at times (way too many, in fact) lethargic - the lethargy, I assume, of a prisoner marking the end of the first decade of a, say, thirty year confinement. Sometimes I feel all those things at once, sometimes back to back in a (for my husband especially and no doubt too for my bewildered children) confusing and irritating string of nebulously-connected-to-any-real-event bad moods. That can last... and last and last for... I dare not say for how long lest social services or my ex-therapist come with the men in white with the funny jacket to sweep me off to somewhere I can be safe. But don't worry, these are mostly times of implosion, and less often, a lashing out at my husband.

No solace there, however.

I know that for my husband this is a done deal, that I'm just engaging in post-mortem equine abuse at this point. But is there any satisfaction for a difficult situation you just can't get out of? Why can't I move on, in fact? I have often wondered what is wrong with me. "Beautiful prison" is only funny because of the kernel of truth it holds. I could barely hope to have landed in a more picturesque place than the valley that embraces Palm Springs, California. Surrounded by rugged, gorgeously light-changed mountains, living in a well run, ecologically friendly city. Kids attending what is now officially one of the best elementary schools in the entire state and the best in our region. So, really, what the hell is my problem?

But I can sooner stop fussing about my predicament than I might, realistically, pack up and move back to my chosen city. I am, for all intents and purposes, stuck.

I have written myself out of some lousy moods before - notably I wrote a novel whilst living here with two toddlers, two cats, not enough money and an alternately always working or underworked underfoot husband in an 800 square foot apartment. I figured it was time to take this exile-hood of mine head on and write about it. It's time, if not to somehow write it away, then to at least put a finger on it, open the curtain and get this thing to rear its ugly head at me. Then, maybe at the very least, I can replace some of the anger and lethargy with amusement.

So, back to this baby that was just born of a friend of mine. I wrote in my journal, "I feel viscerally all the milestones, big and small, I've missed because of my proximity so far flung - the firsts, the births, the heartaches that couldn't be shared in person over a glass of wine but had to suffice over emails, MySpace (yes, I've been gone that long) and Facebook. The friendships I left were only 'off to a good start'. Foundations laid, common experiences shared and the establishment of mutual affections made." But not yet set in stone. So I am not a 'best friend' or someone to 'make sure to get out to visit', but that friend who lives in Palm Springs that is mildly concerned, amusing and/or interested and/or interesting. In short, what I get to share are the neat and tidy formalities of a well wishes cards. Electronic or handwritten and stamped, they are still, necessarily the same finite, detached sentiments. I don't get to get in there, down in the muck of regular life with the people whom I consider my friends. I am peripheral and thus extraneous.

Which, feeling this way, is at least a step up from feeling unwanted. Isolation can do that to you. So, well, that's progress.

You Make YourSELF Look Bad

2010-01-26T11:59:00.001-08:00

I just got yelled at by an old, fat, red-faced white man in a gigantic SUV (god I love it when the Bob Hope comes to town because, really, there are just not enough rich people in this valley already!) about my Obama bumper sticker. He rolls down - or should I say lifted a finger to push the button down - and yells "How's that hope and change working out for ya?" several times, because I did not respond, until he got his green left arrow and then did his best evil laugh as he drove off. Why are conservatives so mean spirited?

I suppose the best I can hope for is that it bothers him all day that I said nothing. I am being called a stupid twat over a martini right now I imagine.

Possible retorts I thought of after:

"I suppose you're a banker?"

"Watch Fox News much?"

"Guess you got yours!"

"Do you speak Russian?" (I actually almost said this, only to confuse and annoy him all day long, trying to figure out if I was actually Russian or if I was making some commentary)

"How's that SUV working out for you?"

"Why are you talking to me? I am one of the little people you so despise."

I dunno... others? Ideas anyone?

Playwrights, come out, come out wherever you are!

2009-12-15T15:29:00.000-08:00

We have just opened for submissions to our Play Reading Series at Dezart Performs.

What is cooler than having your play read in an hip art gallery!!

If you have friends, fellows, countrymen, relatives who are playwrights send 'em our way.

Dezart Performs 2nd Annual Play Reading Series – Call for Entries

Dezart Performs call for 2 – 4 person original plays for its 2nd Annual Play Reading Series. Plays may be one act or full length, no more than 4 characters, and have not been read or performed in front of an audience in the Coachella Valley. Accepting entries from December 15, 2009 through January 15, 2010 (postmarked no later than 1/15/10 please). Six to 10 plays will be selected to be read in the Play Reading Series in April 2010. The Audience Favorite will be performed as the first production of Dezart Performs Season 3 in October 2010.

Please send 2 paper copies to:

Attn: Daniela Ryan
68444 Perez Rd., Suite O
Cathedral City, CA 92234
For further info contact: Daniela@DezartPerforms.com

Dezart Performs is the performing arts arm of Dezart One Gallery, one of the hippest galleries in Palm Springs, committed to bringing cutting edge professional theatrical performance to the Coachella Valley.

"4 at 40" Performances in Los Angeles in March

2009-02-23T11:45:00.000-08:00

Please come see me perform my one-woman show "4 at 40" in March!

"4 at 40: Mothers’ Letters to Their Daughters" a play written and performed by Daniela Ryan
The women of Adelaide Farms have always written letters to their daughters. Even after the farms are sold their bitter acquisition continues to exert force on generations down the line.

Performances
March 13 & 14 and
March 20 & 21, 2009
at 8:00 pm

WORKING STAGE THEATRE
1516 N. GARDNER STREET
LOS ANGELES, CA 90046
(323) 851-2603

TICKETS: $10.00 at the door or purchase online (click below)
http://www.workingstage.com/now_showing.html

“Ryan gifts us with a tour de force performance… with her thoughtful and compelling play” - Jack Lyons, Desert Post Weekly

What the hell!!?

2009-02-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

I mean, I know the economy is bad but come on!

So in December I get pulled over - me and the kids just going home from the grocery store, in the minivan. I know there is not a lot of crime in my town but pla-leese! I think it might have even been a Friday night... anyway, I get a fix-it ticket for an expired (in November) registration. That has never ever happened to me before three months, seriously. You?

Then incidentally the following week I see three minivan's pulled over by cops... Is there some gang that uses minivans? Are soccer moms suspected of some sort of illegal shenanigans?

So I go get the smog check I missed on my registration renewal and then the sticker comes and later the instructions to send in the original ticket signed off that the fix was actually completed as it says "By any local law enforcement office". I go to my town's sheriff department and the tell me "You're in luck, it's not the normal hours that he does this but he happens to be here" Apparently no one can be bothered to look at and verify a registration except on Tuesdays and Wednesdays between the hours of 2:30 and 3:30 pm. What!!??

"And that will be $15 please. We only accept cash or check"

Wait, I have to pay $25 to the county court just for them to process the ticket now I also have to pay the officer to sign off on it! So, let's try another local police department.

"Is that our ticket, ma'am? I said is that our ticket, don't you have the original ticket?" Why does it matter I ask (why oh why oh why did I ask a question?) and she scowls at me. She was cranky.

"We need to know if it's our ticket. That's $20 to sign off on it"

What!? Because it's not their ticket it's more, of course....

I know every city is hurting for revenue but really? Seriously?

Voice Lost

2008-12-27T18:42:00.000-08:00

I think I made a New Year's resolution last year to "talk less and listen more" but I can't find it anywhere, on blog or otherwise in print. If the universe speaks to one it is talking to me. Over the last few days I have contracted yet another flu/cold thing. Starting the day before Christmas a sore throat began to manifest but I was cooking this year so giving in to illness was not an option. S.O.v.2, the baby gal, had already been to the doc on Tuesday for pink eye but she too was not mending but getting worse. Christmas day I just concentrated on cooking dinner and getting everything out on time and warm - the constant challange! I was sort of oblivious to the family goings on - the kids opening presents, the kids throwing all the sandbox toys over the fence into the neighbor's yard, the toy explosion they detonated.

Dinner complete, everyone fed and a kaluha and coffee in hand and it really hit - I felt awful and had the worst sore throat I'd had since childhood. So, Friday morning, egged on by my mommasita (ironically enough I recall a Christmas dinner two years ago at her house where she was too sick to even come down the stairs so I cooked, she resisted all insistence that she get her butt to an urgent care) and S.O. I hiked mine and S.O.v.2's big and little (respectively) butts off to the urgent care. Two hours later and prescriptions dropped off at the Rite Aid I was beat and didn't emerge till late in the afternoon only to find my family heading off to their hotel.

Oh, did I mention that when I woke up on Friday morning I had no voice? And it has not surfaced yet, two days with no voice. So, yes, universe, I hear you. Talk less, listen more, that is my new year's resolution. Whether I like it or not.

A Pretty Perfect Day

2008-12-04T23:11:00.000-08:00

I say a pretty perfect day begins with art and ends with art.

This morning I began my newest job (yes, I have a few of these) as a Teaching Artist with the McCallum Theatre Institute. Well, technically speaking I have already started but hadn't been in a classroom. This morning I joined a fellow Teaching Artist to sit in on her first session in a unit studying flamenco with 5th graders from a local elementary school. I love kids because they aren't particularly charming or adorable or fascination or whatever the many adjective people lob onto them. They are just real, which is frankly, damned refreshing. They aren't particularly trying to 'be' anything or 'do' anything or 'accomplish' anything, they are so busy learning and being and absorbing that they can't help but be real.

Then as I was driving home I heard a thunkety thunk and thunk to myself, "Self, that doesn't sound good, better look at that when I get to my destination" Well some kind citizen honked at me to tell me my tire was flat. So I filled it up but that piece of rubber was having none of it. It blew before I was two blocks from the gas station. So I called S.O. told him the situation, called Triple A. All of this could have pissed me off but I was in such a great mood that it just seemed like the next thing to do. I did worry slightly that I would be late picking up S.O.v.1 from school but I was sure I could flirt the tow truck driver into swinging by the school, so I wasn't really worried about it. BUT the amazing thing was, when I was on the phone with Triple A (I had pulled over next to a vacant lot with a bunch of date palms in Rancho Mirage) I notices a squirrel running across the lot. My eyes followed him and then I noticed a red tailed hawk swoop out of a tree, follow him around and then land on him, grab him, hold him down till he was dead and then eat him. Now, I know what you're thinking, "Yella, weren't you appalled? Where was your compassion for the squirrel" and my answer to you would be "No. It seemed perfectly natural" and it did. It was fascinating. It was, frankly, just life and/or nature (whichever you prefer) in action and so it seemed kind of great that I was there watching it.

Then I had some minutes - uninterrupted!!! - to read over the notes from the session of that morning. Then the tow truck driver - who was a lovely human being - arrived and took my car to the tire repair shop. Whilst there the shop owner recognized my truck and remembered S.O. who had had a tire repaired there just a few weeks earlier. Apparently S.O. made an impression....

Then the tow truck driver dropped me off close to my neighborhood! Nice! I mean, I was well within walking distance anyway, but he just saved my bunions a little bit of wear and tear. I just had to tell him it was good karma.

So, got home, drove S.O. to work, went and returned an unneeded cork board and left with seldom seen cash right next door to a Coffee Bean. Had 45 min. till time to pick up S.O.v.1 so sat and had a coffee and !!!!45 min. of UNINTERRUPTED time to brainstorm some story ideas!!!

Picked up S.O.v.1, went to return my brand new glasses with the antireflective coating melted on and manager apologized profusely. HAD two quarters to get S.O.v.1 a treat from the candy machine, came home, did his homework, picked up S.O.v.2 from school, shopped for dinner, ate and then....

Went to see a Flamenco dance group from Spain at the McCallum theatre with S.O.vs1&2. The look on S.O.v.2's face alone was worth the imminent fuss that comes along with starting an extracurricular activity AT bedtime! She was just beside herself happy within the first two minutes of the dance. And during the second act I noticed S.O.v.1 doing flamenco hands in the air while watching riveted! For an artist there is just nothing better.

They were just amazing. Muscular, passionate (I do not use that word often), sinuey, emotional, raw and human. Compania Flamenco Jose Porcel. If they ever happen to your town, I wag my finger at any who miss it.

And then we went to pick up the S.O. at work. Yes, at 10:20pm there was indeed fuss but I would do the day all over again, exactly the same way. I don't even miss the nap I desperately needed all day after being sick with a cold for the past three days... sometimes joy just wins out over ill.

The Cynic Will See You Now

2008-11-05T13:48:00.000-08:00

I sit here this morning happily eating crow for my cynicism over the election. I must say, you surprised me America. I was not convinced you had it in you. Perhaps it is because I live in a primarily conservative area where even the working class are Republicans (oxymoron perhaps?). Perhaps I was just so hurt by 2000 and 2004 that it was my defense mechanism. Or perhaps I am just more of a negative sad sac than I ever realized.

No matter. I was wrong. Today I happily admit that I didn't think you had it in you to elect the smartest candidate America, but you did it. Congratulations. How does this shade of egg look on me?

Will They Ever Stop Patting!

2008-10-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

It's bad enough that The Greatest Generation, boosted by their lobbyist Tom Brokaw, does it constantly "We saved the world!" But now the Baby Boomer Generation has started in on it (and they are different from their parents how again?), "We changed the world!".

http://www.usaweekend.com/08_issues/081026/081026health-forever-young.html

Well grand, congratulations you Boomers, you all must be so proud... all that protesting and burning of draft cards worked out just grand. So now groups can't really protest anymore - note both political conventions this year: sure protest is 'allowed' (those are strong air quotes) but was so shoved to the fringes as to be irrelevant. And what about all the protest over the Iraq war? Millions of people marched, made signs, wrote letters, yelled pleaded and what happened? (What generation was George Bush born in again?) Now government just ignores protest and does what it wants anyway. They're mavericks!

And we no longer have a draft. Now we just have stop loss. But that volunteer army feels so relieved that there's no draft. "Phew! Wouldn't want that common rabel with us here for three, four tours... oooo pinch me, come on tour five!" The Boomer parents must be so proud of their kids and grandkids in Iraq and Afganistan.

As you can see from the attached article the Boomers are lauding themselves for changing medicine (thanks for all that Vioxx and Viagra), changing the way we eat (that high fructose corn syrup was a GREAT idea), the way we exercise (OK, I'll give you that one) and communicate (except with their own kids who they just keep saying "Good job!" to but keep forgetting to remind them that they will actually have to work hard and have integrity on the job").

And you know, I wonder, what generation Alan Greenspan belongs to? And all those other guys, Senators who decided to forego regulations, or CEO's who created fancy financial 'products' (I would really like to pop the person who coined that phrase one, it's not a cookie for christ's sake!), real estate folks who pushed the second home market and said "We can list your home for $15,000 more than it's worth and probably get even more on top of that!" that indeed have changed the world. Even before the 'financial crisis' the Greatest Generation had left their grandchildren and the Boomers their children in a position where they were NOT better off than their parents. But a shrug of shoulders and a shout of "Charge it" and they looked the other way - for all the many years the economy moved away from industry and manufacturing, to service now to... what, consumming.

Where were the hippie values when food became industrialized? Where were they when cars and car culture grew from necessity to insanity? Where were those values, that angry protest when our government stopped calling us citizens and started referring to us as consummers? What's next? Maybe someone would like to just be honest and start calling us cogs.

Yes, they saved their own world the Greatest Generation, just not for us. And yes they changed the world, for the better, then for the worse, and now disaster (the ultimate flip-floppers). They say all parents want their children to be better off than they were. But they also say actions speak louder than words. I guess the Boomers were just so mad at mommy and daddy that they didn't care if they scorched the earth for their own kids, and grandkids... and maybe their kids too....

Keep patting yourselves on the back.

McCain's new slogan "If Elected I Will Save You Money!"

2008-09-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

That's right, if elected a female Republican Vice President will be cheaper to pay! Since Republicans do not adhere to the equal pay for equal work doctrine (oops, sorry threw a confusing word in there, doctrine another word for 'plan') then that means we, the country will be able to pay Sarah Palin less!

Best figures I could find:
Cheney salary $208,100 per year
Palin will save us over $40,000 a year (Cindy can buy a new pair of shoes on that!) at a frugal $160,237 a year.

Wow, pretty and a bargain! Why didn't we think of it sooner! Who says McCain doesn't care about the budget!

Reasons Why Sarah Palin WILL Get McCain Elected

2008-09-08T21:40:00.000-07:00

"She's so pretty" - She almost reminds me of the high school cheerleaders who were pretty, popular, snide, poking fun at 'different' or nerdy kids was their platform.

"Voters don't vote on VP because it's not really the VP who runs the country" we liberals like to think. But don't tell that to Dick Cheney, come on now, people, see look, you made him cry. Everyone knows Cheney has been working diligently all these years on his own on our behalf, destroying shoring up the country for us. Of course he runs things. Who do you think sneaks quietly into the White House quarters and slips a drunken finger off the button each night?

"Well, at least their ticket is all white!" (See post "Who's Your Daddy" February 13, 2008) - or I could be wrong and we hate women even more than we fear black men... well, not if they're pretty. "If they're pretty and we make then VP will the sleep with us?"

"Sarah Palin, bet she drinks beer huh?"

"McCain is gonna pertek the wealthy. I'm gonna be wealthy one day. I just know it. I been prayin' on it."

Everyone likes to think they have 'small town' values - even if they didn't grow up in a town all that small. And we all KNOW Palin has small town values just from growin' up in one... hmmm, wonder where her daughter grew up? (Shotgun weddin's invented in small towns?) How those values workin' out for you, Bristol? Yeah, she looks pretty happy. Of course, everyone knows the 'rules' per se are for them. All of those people who can't realy handle themselves.

Palin will remind voters that not only does she have small town values - but McCain has them too - because his own homes and staff make up a small town, not to mention Cindy's jewelry collection - the yearly budget... of a small town! See!

'Cause them religious people only mind when you neglect the baby in utero...

Riches First!

2008-09-06T22:55:00.000-07:00

In The Making

2008-07-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

Maybe there is something good about living here in the desert (at this time of year I am grumpy because I am hot and have to drive a car sans aircon to work, so I find it difficult to be grateful, oh between late June and early Sept., the time the rest of the country is frolicking and basking - plus I haven't had a vacation in about 3 years... that doesn't help). I mean, yes, it is pretty and most of the year is lovely weather and all that... but it is distinctly devoid of creative stimulation. I have been seeking and have found many people - but most of us seem to be on permanent seek mode here with little find.

In any case, this lack of stimulation leaves a lot of time on one's hands. Time, which, if I were in LA I probably would not be availing myself of. Because LA is so stimulating. Just going to the Coffee Bean down the street was full of interest and curiosity - enough that I did not get a lot of writing done. Short bursts of creativity sure, but volume-wise I have done more while living here.

Granted most of you have not read or may ever read any of my work... but something happens here that never happened to me in LA. I have just finished my first novel. I wrote and performed my first solo performance, I've written several short stories and articles for a local magazine (Dune Magazine - dunemag.net for those of you who are interested), several screenplays including one for the production company I work for and written a couple episodes of a web series I am working on with a partner. So I have been busy, and working, and productive... but now that all of these projects are completed and/or on summer hiatus and/or in holding pattern I have nothing to work on.

And with nothing to work on comes an odd sort of restlessness, sleeplessness, a creeping panic even. And when this happens no manner of creative desert community could help. The only thing I can do is write - something, anything... even writing a letter helps.

Now if I were in LA just driving around town I would be confronted with a thousand bits of stimulus that would suggest a story, a scene, some dramatic activity I could get involved in. I would be continuing acting class and auditioning, looking for a play to be in or a new job or working on a show with friends. I'd be supressing the panic with lots of things and people and projects. But here it is just me and my computer. There is not the same sense of urgency in creativity here too, that there is in LA, that urgency to create, which I suspect, drove many to LA. But here it is all about the beauty and the pleasantness and the 'lifestyle' (my new unfavorite word - worse than 'moist' way way worse) and the just being happy to live in such a beautiful place! Oooooooo pinch me!

It is that Bay Area dark side, the cynical, that was branded on me from birth by my extremely sardonic family (I didn't really even understand any other kind of humor for years) that creeps out and won't be shoved back - no matter how good the weather and no matter how many chapters of The Power of Now I have read. No, deep down I just don't buy it - that all is well in paradise - and it makes me just want to &(&#^*%*&#@ write something! That is how I show my ingratitude for living in such beauty and magnificence, I write something subversive... well, subversive for ME, which being a 'nice' girl is only so raw...

I've been thinking about this short story where two neighbors kill their spouses on the same night and then have to cover for each other... maybe that's next...

Sacrifice

2008-07-09T16:17:00.001-07:00

For some reason I had been thinking about things and this thought popped into my head - probably because I just finished my novel and now that it's done my mind is seeking new stories - this thought, that I had thunk before but never quite in these words. And when I did I thought, "Ah, that's so true".

This thought was as follows:

Women sacrifice their self for love.
Men sacrifice love for their self.

Now before you gross generalization fiends start ringing off your bells, I know, I know, it's gross, it's generalized, it's a platitude which makes it not true for some people and maybe even many. We are 'liberated' after all (if you call being able to have a job and be paid less and then be able to go home and do the house work too liberated I suppose) and shouldn't be sacrificing anything for anybody.

But the fact is we do. Women, in general, sacrifice. We sort of... can't help it, I suppose. But that doesn't make it feel any better. And the reason I say I think we can't help it is because we sort of don't realize we've done it until it's already been done, till it's too late and to rectify would be so much worse.

And, dare I suppose that there might even be something... genetic about it? Now, settle down y'all. Men can be gentle and giving and very generous - they have the capacity if they choose to use it, this is true. But back them into a corner where you are asking them to do something that would force them to lose their sense of themselves and you have a fight. Again I am generalizing people.

But women will inevitably... do the right thing. Whatever consequences that right thing brings upon us. You can make all the "Sex and the City" movies and TV shows you want but women will always do what they see best for their kids (and they are looking mind you), try to make everyone else comfortable even if they themselves don't feel so, make sure everyone is fed and thanked and isn't offended... and then after the party is through try to figure out what is right for themselves.

Meanwhile, your hopes and dreams for your liberated self are slipping through the cracks in the floor boards just as you are sweeping. Your sacrificial self is bolstered and supported and help up by everyone around you as admirable and worthy. And then if you try to 'take' time away from the kids, from the housecleaning, from the spouse you either really do or are expected to feel guilty. Like they can't make a grilled cheese without you (well, in my case that actually may be true)

Harumf! Maaaaaaaaan, being liberated is hard.

Add to the Annals of Less for More

2008-06-29T18:40:00.001-07:00

Ah modern life. They myriad conveniences that we enjoy... prepackaged food our subject matter today.

Andy Rooney famously skewered the "less than a pound of coffee in a can for the same price" years ago. Since then almost all packaged coffees pose as a pound while minutely announcing - in the smallest possible font - on the farthest nether regions of their package that they are indeed 13oz or 12oz or the, basically insulting, 11oz. Now we can add to that pasta. Pasta used to be sold by the pound per package. Easy, measurable, a bargain calculable... no more. I have just noticed (and maybe I haven't been paying attention) that pasta is now in the "Let me charge you the same price for more!" category of 12oz.

That should be the new motto of all grocery stores "Now Bringing You Less for More! - Prepackaged for your convenience" or maybe "New! Improved! Less!" "We Know What You Need and are Bringing it to you, now in smaller packaging and you only pay exactly what you used to pay!"

Please add to this list at will.

Maybe I'm missing something

2008-05-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

Do you ever get these emails that offer some nice thought or words of wisdom and then at the end they threaten you to "forward this email to as many people as possible!!" Because if you don't bad things will happen. But if you do good things will happen.

At 5 people you will find a penny in the street
At 10 people you will find a dollar and someone will smile at you
At 20 people you will find that missing 20 dollar bill you thought you lost and your spouse will want to have sex with you
At 50 you will get a new job! a new car! and your in-laws will stop bothering you!

Or whatever the hell they say... anyway, it all sounds a little punitive to me. That is exactly what does not attract me to religion. The whole specificity of do this and good things happen, do that bad things happen, burn in hell, etc. just never appealed and seemed, frankly unrealistic given the kinds of things that go on in the world. Certainly millions of Iraqis are not bad people, certainly millions of Chinese are not bad people!

Anyway, I don't generally forward these emails on. I spit in the face of these emails basically if they threaten me at the end. (I don't mean that literally by the way) I mean, don't get me wrong, I like the nice sentiments as much as anyone, only why does it have to go and get spoiled at the end.

And then I got to thinking... well I'm not finding that many pennies on the street... so maybe the Universe IS punishing me because I'm not forwarding them on! Oh my! Watch out all my email contacts! Here come the smarmy/threatening emails winging your way!

Random Thoughts About The Race

2008-05-07T23:01:00.000-07:00

OK, so why are we so exercised about Hillary Clinton staying in or dropping out? Isn't this the way an election campaign is supposed to work? Can you imagine two white male candidates coming this close to a decision at the Convention?

They are both good candidates and both would make a great President - we hope. So the question for those Americans left to vote is whether they are more misogynist or more racist? Didn't we have, a mere 8 years ago, a 'lesser of two evils' campaign? Isn't that what the media was overwrought about then? "They're both the same" they said, "There is really no difference at this point between Republicans and Democrats" they said. Can we all stop listening to the media please? See how right they were then? What makes us worry now?

Can we look at the evidence:

Bush: One ill-concieved war, millions dead

Gore: One Academy Award, one Nobel Prize

No difference my ass!

Three-Year Oldisms v.2

2008-04-24T23:38:00.000-07:00

So we are standing in Trader Joes line. We had just dropped of S.O.v.1 at school... S.O.v.2 loves being a pseudo only child. We had lunch and apart from our friend visiting from Australia momentarily traumatizing S.O.v.2 - because she had tried (for her daddy) to snatch the check for lunch back, which he snatched back, insisting on paying... and apart from the hiding under the chair for a moment while said friend went to pay the check... she was having a swell time, cheered up pretty fast once we went into Trader Joes and the promise of a colorful balloon loomed large.

After wandering around, pondering healthy snacks and blueberry soda we decided to check out. While the adults talked behind her S.O.v.2 looked around as toddler's do observing her world. As she came to the senior gentleman in line in front of us she made her way down to his footwear.

Suddenly S.O.v.2 says (loud enough for him and us to hear):

"Socks with flipflops! That's just crazy!"

The older gentleman did not acknowledge this comment - we hope he was in as much loss of hearing denial as S.O. Because when I repeated to S.O. and his friend what she had said we had a hard time not busting up.

Who thought they gave badges for the Fashion Patrol to three year olds!

Must Hear

2008-04-20T19:39:00.001-07:00

For anyone skeptical about the motives of the Administration you must listen to this...

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1236

CLEM

2008-04-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about starting a new blog... but of course no one reads the one I already have... how do people find blogs anyway? I keep wanting to post until I realize I have almost nothing to say. Well, I mean, I do have things to say but they are dreadful and boring.

CLEM. Well if you've recieved an email from my 'home' email recently then you've seen my quote - as we, so many of us do now, I never really did until I got really frustrated with this obsession with stuff and bigger stuff and newer stuff and more stuff and then storage space... I always HA-TED paying for a storage space when we first moved here to the beautiful prison that is the Coachella Valley. But surprisingly enough our Hollywood apartment was bigger than our identical rent Palm Desert condo, and so things had to go in the brink. Then when we moved into our house - my own beautiful cell (and getting prettier, we painted our kitchen last weekend!) in the beautiful prison I decided that if we couldn't keep it somewhere, neatly stored in our own house then damnit IT GOES! Thus we got rid of about 24 boxes of books - hate to see them go, but somehow they seem to keep coming back, in paperback form. I fear my Significant Other was somewhat traumatized by the enormous piles of not only books but small pieces of furniture and stuff, just stuff, stuff, where the hell did all the stuff come from and what did I buy it for anyway!? And S.O. was also traumatized by my willingness to, without even looking at things for but a moment, chuck it. The garage (the typical man's purview) is still cluttered with stuff he can't seem to figure out where it should live.

Not that I dislike the action of procuring the stuff. It is always fun, I get that. I've had my fun too. But I am now obliged to seek restraint. Financial instability (bigger mortgage than rent bill, less income, you know how it is) will force one to think hard about what really is the meaning of that new thing and do I really want to forego not having to cook on a Friday night and ordering pizza? My answer is usually 'no'.

So, as a reminder to myself and others, and probably to some extent to seem more Gore-like, I added a quote, which is not so much a quote as a... an... uh... well, I thought it up but assuradley was not the first in history to ever say it. Consume Less Eat More. No wait, what am I saying! That wouldn't make sense, no no no, it's Consume Less Enjoy More. Sort of my motto, my credo, my own way or aim of a way to live... and I have tried... oh Lordy lord knows I have tried and still continue to... but 'tis hard. Ah man, wish I were better at it... but sometimes Easter comes and you just can't decide between robbins eggs or chocolate eggs so you get both... or one bag of plastic eggs at 79 cents a bag or two... I mean, it's only 79 cents... THAT'S NOT THE POINT! Then you just hide more candy for your two children and they find it and sneak about 12 pieces each before you notice they haven't handed it all in and then in about a week and a half you feel like you need to send your toddlers to sugar detox! Thank God Betty Ford is just a few minutes away.

So anyway, consume less, enjoy more. I thought, since I am expert apparently at nothing else, except... well me, and even there only nominal knowledge... I'd give it a shot... so here goes.

http://consumelessenjoymore.blogspot.com/

Testing, testing, one two three

2008-03-31T23:06:00.000-07:00

I've got no idea whether this will work... but all three of you should be listening to this weekly audiopodcast!

" "

Things I've Been Thinking

2008-03-17T11:35:00.001-07:00

Arrogance is always followed by incompetance.

Some men collect women like some women collect shoes.

When will we stop consumming each other?

Why don't we care that we are all under surveillance?

Everytime I try to do less I get busier.

When I sense to myself "I know who I am" I don't have a laundry list of items that make up me, but I am satisfied that that is the answer.

When I realize the aliveness of me is when I feel most happy.

OK, I Know But...

2008-02-28T00:38:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who is noticing that we, Americans, have been and are presently, totally obsessed with STUFF? I have been hammering around at this subject for years... mainly, probably, because of my lack of it...

I was just talking with the Mother (mine) about this and with S.O. the other night... remember a Time Before Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? That damn program started it all. Remember it was on Saturday afternoons when absolutely NO ONE was watching TV because not programmer ever thought anyone would be interested in rich people - how boring! Now it seems that is all we are interested in. And as Michael Moore has so aptly pointed out we all think that someday that might be us, rich that is.

Am not religious, wasn't raised that way, but I am beginning to understand that passage about the rich man and the eye of the needle and milking the camel and whatnot... But maybe them biblical peoples were really talking about us. I mean, how pious, how balanced, how peaceful can you really be when caught in the throes of envy, or greed, or debt? All so stressful, in'it?

Where is the peace in stress?

I remember the peace I felt - and the possibility I felt - when I was a little girl B-LRF (Before Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous) - when I felt successful and pretty and OK with myself... that last time was about, oh, 7 or 8... But how can anyone who watches, listens to, reads any media anymore really be OK without tremendous effort?

And can we just stop pretending that the media has no influence. Can I just mention a few things you NEVER would have wanted: an iPod, an SUV, an infinity pool, a Carnival cruise, Taco Bell... do I have to continue to make my point? Really, what was wrong with taco night at home with the family? What was wrong with a road trip and seeing giant dinosaurs or the world's largest ball of string? What was so awful about seeing all your friends from school one summer when you hadn't seen them in weeks at the community pool? What was wrong with the station wagon you could lay down in the back of and look at the clouds as mom drove? What was wrong with the surprising randomness of the radio when suddenly in a totally blue funk and yous absolute favorite song comes on the radio?

OK, OK... so, let's just face it. Let's just admit our sins and come clean. We have been dazzled by the shinny thing across the room and we have not been paying attention to the life right in front of us. Can we just admit that having all the stuff is way more work than we ever expected - that the 3,000 sq. ft. house is way too big to clean alone and we feel guilty nor can we really afford to have Conchita come in and clean. Can we admit that the SUV gets dirty and ratty too, just like any old car? Can we admit that even if the vacation costs you $3,000 you are just as likely to fight and not get along if that's what you do as if it's a $300 weekend? Can we just admit - oh please someone else admit this too! - that a $100 blouse gets stained as easily as a $12.50 from Old Navy and you can't throw it in the laundry? Can we just admit that inside a rich person is a beating heart, a spirit, a love, an ambition, a hope a dream and there is the exact very totally totally SAME! thing inside a poor person?

Come on, what is all the stuff for... really?

Three Year Old-ism

2008-02-26T16:32:00.000-08:00

S.O.v.2 is having trouble relinquishing babyhood (as am I, hers, not my own) and so plays 'baby' often. In addition, she has a love/hate relationship with the Pull-Up. She wants to wear her Hello Kitty underpants but she clings to the modified diaper, most days wanting the Pull-Up. But this morning she just simply could not decide. Is there anything more heart wrenching and adorable than a 3 year old sobbing and saying "I want to go commando"?

Stockholm Kitty

2008-02-20T12:26:00.001-08:00

Over the weekend we went to my mom's house in San Diego to enjoy a day at Legoland with the kids, including cousins, and for S.O. and I to enjoy a childfree and relaxing time at a Veterens For Peace function on Sunday. We had a delightful weekend but decided to come home Sunday night instead of Monday morning as S.O. had an interview, I a dentist appointment... and thank goodness we did!

When I got in the house I heard that feignt muffled meow you hear when a cat is underneath the bed or clothing or something... When I got to our bedroom it was clear where our kitty, Wasabi, had spent the weekend! In our closet - shut in because Mifune (other cat) does not know how to work a door handle! Poor guy, he used a couple of S.O.'s dress shirts and his robe for a potty and had to sleep nearby of course. I mean, it's not cool for humans to have to do it but it's like an insult to cats! He looked crazed when I opened the door and reluctant to come out.

Mifune is STILL not getting along with him. We aren't quite sure why - something akin to survivor's guilt I guess. But the funny thing is, even though he was clearly miserable in there, he keeps wanting to go back in! He keeps standing by the door and letting out the most deserate meow. It's obvious, he has kitty Stockholm syndrome!

Weird Dreams

2008-02-19T23:03:00.000-08:00

What is it about dark chocolate that gives you weird dreams? I had restless and persistent ones last night about being married to a junkie and me just living with it... It was an exhusband actually which is, I think, weird. I don't usually have dreams with real life people from my own life, usually actors or unknowns - to me although I am sure they put in winning performances in other peoples dreams, they are usually very good. When it happens it is always disconcerting and makes me search more for meaning than I normally do. And they tend to stay with me longer throughout the day...

But nothing is weirder than the imagination of a 3 year old. S.O.v.2 has some pretty vivid dreams. When she remembers them she shares. Usually she just remembers having them but no details (who knew dreams started so early! But of course S.O.v.1 started having bad dreams about this age too). A while ago she shared with me the dream about being flattened - ala Looney Tunes (though she doesn't watch them and to my knowledge has never seen a steam roller flatten a cartoon duck) and then cut into pieces and eaten.

Last night she told S.O. and I the rules of the house. Too many to put down here but I will share a few:

"Number 1 - We don't throw in the house (very good),
Number 3 - We don't throw cupcakes in the house,
Number 3 - We don't put cupcakes in our hair,
Number 3 - We don't eat cupcakes on the floor,
Number 3 - We don't share cupcakes with the cats..."

Like that, you see where she is going with this... She always has some crazy three year old-ism... I must share them more often. When they are past this age (like S.O.v.1) you forget how damn cute and purely entertaining they can be.

Need I Say EVEN More???

2008-02-19T12:46:00.000-08:00

What Is Sexist?
Submitted by christine on Fri, 02/15/2008 - 5:31pm. Be-Elected
BE ELECTED
by Christine Bowman

The National Organization for Women has endorsed Hillary Clinton. BuzzFlash has not.* Instead, we've been very critical of her record and of certain campaign moves. But we sure don't want her to lose because she's a woman.

NOW's President Kim Gandy has responded to email she has received with a commentary, "Below the Belt." She identifies media behavior that disparages Hillary Clinton and, she argues, women as a group. Listen up:

Excerpts:

The press have been brutal to Clinton, no doubt about it. Whether consciously or not, too many reporters, commentators, pundits and the like appear unable to critique Hillary Clinton without dusting off their favorite sexist clichés, stereotypes and insults. Some of these remarks seem mild, while others are offensive and truly outrageous. Taken together, they create an environment of hostility toward all women, not just Senator Clinton. At this moment it feels like she is a stand-in for every woman who has ever tried to get ahead and be taken seriously by the powers that be.

There are four common themes in media coverage of Clinton's candidacy:

First, Clinton is criticized using a gender-based grading system. The media evaluate how she looks, dresses, talks, laughs and even claps. She is held to double standards familiar to working women. A man demonstrates toughness and strength; a woman who behaves similarly is called icy and rigid. His behavior shows compassion and warmth, but her similar behavior shows too much emotion and maybe weakness. He knows how to work the system; she is manipulative. He shows a mastery of the subject; she is nit-picky. He thinks through all the options before charting a course; she is calculating. Familiar?

Second, our society still has not come to terms with ambition in women -- it is suspect. Clinton is frequently charged with doing or saying anything to win. But I think it has an extra sharp anti-woman overtone as it is used against Hillary. In other words, everything Clinton does to win the election -- strategizing, organizing, confronting, comparing and contrasting -- is interpreted as calculating, fake or just plain evil. But when a man campaigns hard, refusing to cede an inch, they call it . . . running for office!

Third, Clinton is presumed to be where she is today because of her husband, Bill. The fact that Clinton has a famous former president for a husband is used to discredit her own achievements and to imply that maybe she couldn't have made it on her own. I’m trying to remember if any of these commentators implied that George W. Bush shouldn't be taken seriously as a candidate because his father had been president. Or that people shouldn't vote for a certain male candidate because he clearly got a leg up from his powerful family's money, legacy? Or say from the advantages bestowed by his wife's fortune? Who's to say that if Hillary had taken the fast-track first, instead of Bill, she wouldn't have risen to the top before him?

Finally, when all else fails, belittle the voters. Women voters are irrational and biased, and voting only on the basis of gender, the press are happy to intimate (at least about the women who are voting for Hillary), and they not so subtly imply that all voters are stupid and shallow. When the pundits try to mind-read the general public to guess why they cast their ballots one way or another, they often conclude that voters make decisions based on the same superficial traits that fascinates the talking-heads themselves -- like who seems "comfortable in their own skin" or who strikes them as annoyingly nerdy.

One more thing: Hillary Clinton, and women in general, aren't the only ones subject to gender-based assessments. Barack Obama and John Edwards have also been degraded when the media detect in them "feminine" characteristics or behaviors (like paying attention to your appearance) that supposedly are unbecoming in men. That's right, both women and men can be poked with the "girls are icky" stick.

Regarding women and men and politics, we really ought to be past the tree house-years. It's not just those in the public eye who are hurt when the media promote sex stereotypes. Daughters everywhere are hearing the message that a woman can't be as competent and effective a leader as a man. Or that all strong women are ball-busters (or nut-crackers) -- right up until they finally reveal that they're just weepy wimps. (Never trust a crying woman. She's after something, you know.)

Just so you don't think I’m making this up, here are a few (of course I had to leave out MSNBC's Chris Matthews because he deserves a whole list all by himself) -- of the latest offenders:

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Feb. 13, 2008
Relaying a joke told by Penn Jillette: "Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it's not fair, because they're being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there's no White Bitch Month."

Katie Couric, CBS's 60 Minutes, Feb. 10, 2008
Interviewing Clinton: "What were you like in high school? Were you the girl in the front row taking meticulous notes and always raising your hand? . . . Someone told me your nickname in school was 'Miss Frigidaire' -- is that true?"

David Shuster, guest-hosting MSNBC's Tucker, Feb. 7, 2008
Regarding Chelsea Clinton making calls for her mother's campaign: "[T]here's just something a little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea is out there calling up celebrities saying, 'Support my mom.' . . . doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"

Lester Holt, MSNBC's primary coverage, Feb. 5, 2008
Incredulously, apparently shocked by exit poll results: "With the field of Democratic candidates reduced to two, we asked primary voters, 'Who would make the best commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces?' And here, it was Hillary Clinton who was the clear favorite. The first woman candidate with a serious shot at winning the presidency beat out her male rival -- look at these numbers -- 50 percent to 35 percent. Keep in mind, this at a time the nation is fighting on two fronts."

Andrew Sullivan, TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 4. 2008
"The second bout of public tears just before a crucial primary vote - after no evidence that Senator Hillary Clinton has a history of tearing up in front of the cameras - provokes the unavoidable question: should feminists actively vote against Clinton to defend the cause of female equality?"

Bill Kristol (New York Times columnist), panelist on Fox News Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008
"Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women . . . . White women are a problem, that's, you know -- we all live with that." After other panelists stated their disagreement, Kristol responded: "I know, I shouldn't have said that."

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Jan. 30, 2008
"Like Scarlett O'Hara after a public humiliation, Hillary showed up at the gathering wearing a defiant shade of red."

Mike Barnicle, guest on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Jan. 23, 2008
"[W]hen she reacts the way she reacts to Obama with just the look, the look toward him, looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court, OK?"

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Jan. 23, 2008
"It's odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line."

Tucker Carlson, MSNBC's Tucker, Jan. 22, 2008
"It takes a lot of guts for a rich, privileged white lady who is one of the most powerful people in the world to claim that she is a victim of gender discrimination. . . . She hasn't driven her own car in almost 20 years and she's a victim of discrimination? I mean can't we both agree that's just BS?"

Gail Collins, The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2008.
"The women whose heart went out to Hillary knew that it wasn't rational. . . . they gave her a sympathy vote."

Chris Matthews, guesting on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Jan. 9, 2008
"Let's not forget -- and I'll be brutal -- the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York."

Sexism, like racism, is not a progressive value.

*(BuzzFlash doesn't endorse any candidate in a primary.)

Need I Say More?

2008-02-15T16:27:00.000-08:00

This from the Huffington Post yesterday:

Why Is David Shuster E-Mailing With Anti-Hillary Group C.U.N.T.?
New York Observer | Felix Gillette | February 13, 2008 12:05 PM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Read More: C.U.N.T., Chelsea Clinton, Citizens United Not Timid, David Shuster, David Shuster C.U.N.T., David Shuster Chelsea Clinton, David Shuster Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Breaking Media News

It was a little before midnight on Tuesday, Jan. 27 that MSNBC correspondent David Shuster hit the "Send" button on a curt e-mail to Republican rabble-rouser Roger Stone.

Days earlier, Mr. Stone and others had filed papers with the I.R.S. to form a "527" organization dedicated to educating "the American Public about what Hillary Clinton really is." The organization was called "Citizens United Not Timid," i.e., C.U.N.T.

"Hey Roger Stone," wrote Mr. Shuster in an e-mail to Mr. Stone's personal Web site, the Stone Zone. "Why not put your own name on this?"

Mr. Stone was in no mood to take flack from an uptight reporter unable to take a joke. Mr. Stone felt the suggestion that he was hiding behind the site was ludicrous. After all, he had invited reporter Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard to sit in on the organization's planning meeting.

The next afternoon, he responded. "Hey David Shuster," Mr. Stone wrote back. "I in essence did when I let the entire planning meeting be on the record for a reporter."

Who's Your Daddy?

2008-02-13T10:04:00.000-08:00

I have been wondering about why Hillary Clinton's campaign for President is seemingly imploding. Then I realized, Duh, of course it is. Wonder! Why has it done so well so long is what I should wonder about!

I mean we should have all realized the country was not ready for a woman for president when the media made hay of her cleavage and no one was outraged. Nothing like the indignance that was exhibited by liberals with a platform (unlike us liberals with blogs that three other people read) when the Foxies made the connection between the way Barack Obama dressed, sans tie, and Ahmadinejad's tendancy to go without his as well.

The dislike of Clinton (by the way, why is it OK to call her 'Hillary' but we say 'Obama'?) is as without comprehension as the adoration of Obama is without substance. But this really isn't an essay against him. It is obvious to me why we don't like her as a nation. It has some to do with the Right vilifying her and some to do with the fact that she stayed with her husband after he cheated on her (we like think she should have thrown all his clothes out the window onto the White House lawn in outrage and righteous indignation, making a scene and not caring because she was standing up for her rights as a wife) but the real reason she'll never get elected (my prediction) is that we don't want to be in trouble with mom.

If she were prettier she might not evoke the stern momness she does. But of course if she were prettier we'd think her too dumb to be president and she never would have made it this far (we also would have accepted her staying with her husband if she were prettier, but that she is so smart makes it seem that much more calculated and weird "what was she thinking?"). We categorize as human beings and the more complicated life becomes the more we do it. It is a defense mechanism, as well as a survival mechanism. It is too risky to take each person for who they are, to understand them.

Right now the liberals in the country are excessively priding themselves on seeming to take Obama at face value - but really they are just being swept up in rhetoric (anyone who's been to college will recognize this phenomena from either rhetoric class or debate club or even a beautifully written but lacking in substance term paper, usually written by one's self!). He just sounds good! He just performs well on the platform, sounds intelligent (and his wife, by the way, seems to us like the type of woman who WOULD throw his clothes on the White House lawn if she caught him in any shenanigans!), looks good. Liberals are excessively priding themselves on being able to like him despite the fact that he's African-American.

But it's like being at a party and getting caught up in the excitement, going off to toilet paper the Principal's house, doing a really amazing job of it because just everyone was there! and then being put in detention all day on Monday morning (believe me... really, I'm serious... I know!). But if he gets the nomination - which the media is now solidifying with their own 'done deal' rhetoric (and if you don't believe they have any power in that direction Exhibit A: John Edwards campaign - The most forward facing and progressive of all three major Democratic campaigns. Disclaimer: I was a supporter, and yes I voted for him in the CA primary even after he'd suspended his campaign because I want him to weild control over Clinton and Obama to keep their eyes on the ball! Us, remember us? The American people? We he work to pay those taxes, wouldn't it just be nice if the government would spend some of it on us - instead of handing us a few hundred bucks in May and saying "Here, go buy yourself something pretty") then there will be a moment when the nation will panic (the Republicans already are) and think to itself "Oh my god, what if he wants to pimp the White House?" Especially if, as I read the wish in a comment post to an Alternet story, he should choose or even consider Harold Ford Jr. (Rep. from Tennessee) for Vice President.

But to get back to my original point: We don't want a Mom in the White House. Men do not evoke the same emotion because most men are not the disciplinarians in their household (and if they were in yours, you're probably not afraid of Clinton). Bush is like the 'drunk dad', man you can get away with anything if you can manage to distract him long enough. (Didn't we elect him because we 'wanted to have a beer with him?' Little did we know he wanted to have many, many beers with us.) Clinton (Bill) was the benevolent father who just wanted you to do well in school, would listen to everything you had to say - for the ten minutes a week he spent with you - and left all the discipline to his wife. Bush Sr. was the nasty, one cocktail a night "to calm my nerves if you could just get those kids to shut up!" father. We didn't like him so we voted him out. We didn't like Carter because he was too earnestly good because he felt he could trust you let you fall on your face - so we voted him out and elected a father figure who seemed to have it all under control - Regan - who left all the discipline to mother so he would never, in your eyes, seem like the bad guy. But after growing up and looking back, what did he really do to take care of us... he was charming, and compelling and... and... "was that really an insult when he said that to me that way when I was 6? Was he really laughing with me or was it actually at me? And what ever happened to my college fund?"

So there it is. We don't want Clinton as President because she will make you do your homework and your chores and no arguement about it from you, little mister! We may need it as a country, but we don't want it. We want to be wooed, we want to be paid attention to and made to feel special. We want to be able to be dropped off at school and say with pride, "That's my daddy!". Is it no wonder that all the youngest of voters are the most enthusiastic about Obama? By the way, on the otherside some of the most enthusiastic young voters are all for Huckabee, because they want the Wizard of Oz in the White House - it is magic you know!

So we may be wooed, we may be allowed to eat all the ice cream and cake and candy before our dinner we want, we may be allowed to shirk our chores and our homework but we'll pay. We'll have the hangover in the morning but our leader very well may be a caught in the headlights doe, looking around wondering why the rhetoric doesn't work with real life, why the corporations won't roll over and give up control, why won't anyone agree on anything, why is it so difficult to get out of Iraq without making it a bigger mess... Or we'll really panic at the polls and vote for the familiar, comfortable old white man...

Woo woo

Lonely

2008-02-06T23:09:00.000-08:00

I've been missing things and people this week.

I've been missing the Bay Area. I grew up there, in Hayward for my childhood and part of college and Oakland and Berkeley where I lived where I was going to college and then trying to 'make it' as an actress after. I miss the places I used to tread. I miss, oddly, walking alone... and some of what I thought at the time were the most scared or lonely or fearful in my young life I now long for. I remember going to movies alone in Berekely, sitting (and laying) near Strawberry Creek on the campus of UC Berkeley between classes when it was warm reading and dozing, I remember this little cafe on University Ave. that I would go to and study at - they had the best lentil soup. I remember and miss the soup cafe at the intersection of Telegraph Ave. and Dwight(?)... and the salad restaurant that you couldn't ever find a table after standing in line for 20 minutes... it's not only college that I miss...

I miss people. I miss Bay Area-type people. They were willing to take a chance on new friends... I miss LA too. I miss the places we'd used to go and the way they would change - you'd think about going to some restaurant and head there only to find that it had closed just last week. I miss my friends...

I have noticed in my life that I am not so much drawn to people (that just doesn't work for me, everytime I am drawn to someone either they don't like me or turn out to be crap friends) as people are drawn to me. This is how I have gotten the BEST friends of my life. That is not arrogance, au contraire (SP???), I only mean that I don't know what I'm doing but I am graced to have people in my life that know way better than me!

All my best of friends have been people that have been the one's to either 'make the first move' or been the persistant friends (because there always is one) and then once I fall I am like the stalking one (don't let me go!). When I make the choice it usually doesn't work, or it ends up being one of those cordial friendships where everyone is oh so happy to see you but a 'real' friendship, ya know where you, like, call each other on the phone and stuff... hasn't really happened so much for me out here. Except for my one, very busy gal pal, Judy.

But I miss my friends! I felt like, when we lived in LA, that I had 'made it' friend-wise. That all the people I considered to be my best pals were the best people that I was likely to ever meet and become friends with. And I was happy. I was content. Not with how much time I got to spend with them - this is the great downfall of couplehood - you never get to spend enough time with you friends after. And AC (After Children) is just that much worse, which is why friends with children end up spending so much time with each other and not with the sans children friends.

And then being 'out here' does not help matters much.

I attribute much of my melancholy for all things past a reaction to S.O. having lost his job. You know, when you teeter on the edge of a precarious lifestyle you tend to think back. Maybe I am just longing for easier lifestyles, ones that can't be lost with a job loss.. or maybe I am longing for parts of myself that I left behind in those places. The Bay Area, san Diego, Los Angeles... all dynamic stimulating areas... and here I am.... in the... desert.

We have lived here coming up on five years and thus far I do not have a friend that I long for...

I love LA

I love SD

I love BA

The Only Thing That Trickles Down is Attitude

2008-01-22T16:37:00.000-08:00

I was talking with S.O. the other night about my failed acting career - a subject that comes up way to often for his taste no doubt. It is a subject that bothers me, a lot. Some psychologists/therapist/counselors or Dr. Phil promote dissecting and event in one's life in order to come to some conclusion or closure perhaps. I'm sure there are some out there that think one ought to just drop it and move on (I would guess that would be the therapist S.O. would send me to) but they don't get TV shows so...

And then driving to work it occured to me that my (relative, i.e. not being able to make a living at it, NOT a qualitative judgement) failure as an artist is a family legacy. It seems there has always been a struggle between intellectual pursuits and artistic ones. Intellectual have thus far won out not necessarily to the good either.

My Grandmother told me several times when she was alive that she dearly wanted to be a ballet dancer but that was "just not something her father was going to let her do". My Grandfather was a jazz musician in his teens and twenties, playing both piano and stand up bass. I always wanted their baby grand in my house, but alas, when they died I did not own a house and even now that I do it would have taken up the entire living room!

My uncles too have experienced the push pull of income vs. art. My youngest uncle was a painter and a musician and gave it a go in his early years. At some point he moved to my grandparents' neck of the woods and all his artistic pursuits slid away until he was at the very end of his life. His very last painting, which he did shortly before he died hangs in my foyer. It is a painting of three cups. Any of your who know anything about tarot cards know that three of cups means celebration. I look at that painting and always think the message he is sending is "Celebrate the life you have"... It is sad to think that he left off his art and music until the very end... maybe instead the message is "celebrate your art".

We all have some 'art' whether it be writing or performing, dancing, singing, knitting, gardening. Don't we just get wrapped up in how unsuccessful our art is? And why is that?

My oldest uncle struggled with intellectual pursuits - he is IQ wise a genius and went to Berkeley where he left off intellectual pursuits for more personal ones.

Ironically, my Grandfather, who was by all estimations outside himself a successful professor. He taught at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State and finished his career at USC. His emphasis was the Middle East and something akin to a chaos theory applied to international relations. He was consulted by presidents, sultans and CEOs. He made a handsome living, had a nice house, a vacation home, a wife, three kids. But he never felt successful or appreciated in his career. It is a sad irony to have left off a pursuit you love in order to do what is 'right' or expedient and then end with such a feeling of dissatisfaction.

Although I continue to pursue art at several angles it is the acting that always feels like a let down. I always felt as if I were trying in a vacuum, as if everyone else out there knew just what to do to 'make it'. And I always felt there was a lack of support from my family - not that they weren't obstensively enthusiastic (families mostly tell you what you want to hear), they were. But there was something under the surface - skepticism, perhaps. I am entirely too sensitive not to have absorbed this and taken it to heart. Which leads me to my title, the only thing that really trickles down is attitude. We are all willing to share our opinions and energy with each other, no matter how destructive they may be. I guess there was not much support in my family for me to become a 'crazy actress' as I remember my Grandfather once saying.

Little This, Little That

2007-12-28T14:21:00.000-08:00

I've never done an end of the year roundup (that I can recall, lest someone unearth one) for the masses - the masses being my family and friends that I might send a Christmas letter or New Year's letter - which I would prefer having many non-Christian and non-religious friends, and so I just don't have any experience with it. So, apologies if it is clunky.

The Good, The Bad, and The It Is What It Iss

I began the year writing my first play, a one-woman show for myself to perform. I had high hopes for the play and my performance and, as you can't really help, how it might change my future. The play by the new year was already in pretty good form and almost done. I spent the first four months of the year then rewriting and rehearsing, peforming my first, of twelve eventual performances over the course of the year, in April. It got reviewed very well. Many friends and family came to see the play and liked it.

It was a mixed bag overall though. I feel proud of meeting the incredible challange and pushing on despite all the road blocks that kept falling into my path, it seemed all along the way. I think I did it well and professionally and with a certain amount of grace despite not getting the numbers of butts in seats I would have wished for. I found publicity a constant, uphill and in some respects invisible battle - you never know who what and/or how you've hit, if at all.

My Grandmother passed away in February. She was in her early 90s and so had had a long life. I don't know if she got everything out of her life she would have wanted, or if in the end she was satisfied with the life she had led... I wish I had asked her, though I am not altogether sure if she would have been able to hear the question if even answer it. I loved her dearly.

S.O. and I celebrated ten years of marriage in May. I had wanted us to take a trip together somewhere since we never had a honeymoon - we went to Universal Studios the day after our wedding with 11 of our family and guests of our wedding, which was an amazingly fun day, so I can't completely complain. I would never characterize it as romanitic though. We didn't get to take the trip but on our anniversary, as we were getting ready to go out to dinner with the kids, the phone rang. It was the middle-income housing program we had gotten into and were waiting for a house (we were in the 3rd and last phase of building, almost last in line) calling to say that a family had fallen out and needed to shift to the 3rd phase would we want the house. We moved in this July, almost 2 months to the day we got the call. Incidentally, as of this writing the 3rd Phase of building is complete but owners have not yet moved in.

Over the course of the year we have had our down moments, S.O. and I have had some marital struggles but we didn't get the 7 year itch so maybe we were due. It has been an opportunity more than a negative because it has put us into the position where it was logical and necessary to renegotiate our relationship, our marriage and our family life. I would recommend it to every married couple - voluntarily of course. I don't wish strife on anyone, though I hate to say I think it's inevitable.

S.O.v.1 started kindergarten this September and was immediately smitten. Where earlier in the year we showed him the school and he thought it was too big and daunting, now he is exceedingly proud to be a student and particularly at his school. It really has changed him leaps and bounds in small ways, but significant nonetheless.

S.O. (if you read his blog you already know) lost his job in November, just before Thanksgiving. That in itself has been a mixed bag. There is the stress of less income and higher expenses than we are yet used to because of the new house. But it beats the hell out of the stress that his crazy schedule was putting on the kids and me. During the off-season he was home all the time, worried about hours, raises, promotions that alternately would and wouldn't be forthcoming. During the season he would work so much that after about a week of his absence the kids would stop asking "Where's Daddy?". I would worry about the toll the work would take on his body. He'd be so tired he could hardly function and many a night he had very few hours of sleep and then turn around and go lift heavy objects again for many hours. I worried that he would get hurt, everyone was so tired and volatile on the job that an accident seemed inevitable. Or a heart attack, or a car crash on the way home from work at some late hour after 16 hours of heavy lifting...

No job visible yet on the horizon but it is the holidays and so things tend to slow down. We hope there will be prospects in the new year.

I have had projects bloom and fade this year, some still in growth mode. I've gotten a couple of assignments for a local magazine, one where I got to stay at a Moroccan themed spa hotel for a night. That was hard, yeah, real hard. I am very close to finishing a novel which is an accomplishment in itself.

I guess this year has been one of three steps forward, two steps back. New house but job loss halted decorating and landscaping progress. Got projects off the ground only for them to fall apart. Did my play but not enough audience to cause momentum... a mixed bag as I say. But I suppose if you look back at any block of time there would be ups and downs. The ups are grand of course but they wouldn't look that way without the downs.

Happy New Year everyone!

The Toothbrush Tragedy, a deux

2007-12-16T00:17:00.000-08:00

So, ya know, you try at this time of the year not to give in to the demands, nay almost blackmail, your children give you for toys and things using the excuse that soon it will be Christmas and thus no presents are forthcoming today.

But then there are 3 year olds, who are not really aware of the date let alone are they capable of working their minds around "a couple of days" let alone "Santa will bring it for you on Christmas" as I have found out this week.

It was a practical stop at Target, not meant to include any sort of toy or gify buying. Little did I know that an automatic Hello Kitty Toothbrush and Toothpaste combo would be so appealing. I thought I had dodged the bullet by saying that Santa would bring it to her on Christmas. Little did I know that S.O.v.2 couldn't concieve quite yet that Christmas was more than a week away and she would have to wait that long. She thought I meant Santa would bring it to her before it was time to brush her teeth that night!

I had completely forgotten about the toothbrush when bedtime came and it took a good long while of fuss and crying before I got her to tell me that Santa had disappointed her. Reason not being very effective on toddlers either, she was not calmed at the prospect of me promising to go get the toothbrush "tomorrow". She kept insisting that she wanted Santa to bring it on Christmas, believing that was actually before tomorrow. There's that whole problem with the time space continuum again. I get that too though, especially around my birthday when it just doesn't feel possible that I turned WHAT! age again?!

This morning I went back to Target again, this time for Christmas shopping - ick on a Satuday, what am I insane!? - and promised I would bring home aforementioned Hello Kitty Toothbrush. Well of course you can't bring home for one and not the other. S.O.v.1 needed a new toothbrush anyway so... but they didn't have any Cars automatic toothbrushes so I figured I'd just get a Cars regular toothbrush and look in another store later for an automatic one - afterall we got Cars toothpaste for him yesterday, which was why I was in the oral hygene aisle to begin with! He won't mind, he'll understand, he's 5!

OK, so as teeth brushing commences with one happy toddler whirring away I notice S.O.v.2 holding his new toothbrush, neat little cylinder of brand new toothpaste, not brushing looking sad. And all over again...

Of course the larger problem is really that their world has kind of turned upside down. S.O. has recently been fired from his overworking underappreciating underpaying company and is now home all the time. I on the other hand have been working more with new projects coming online, writing assignments and my company making a film, so I am home way less than I used to be. I finally worked it out of S.O.v.1 that he is really missing the routine he'd become accustomed to, and was feeling that when I am home I am too busy with chores (listen up ladies, just because he's home all the time doesn't mean he's doing all the housework, as if!).

Man... what are ya gonna do? Well, I guess the bathroom can wait... the babies can't, not really.

Disection of a Run - or alternately - If You Build It and They DON'T Come Does It Actually Exist

2007-11-28T14:40:00.000-08:00

I've been mulling the experience I have had this year of doing my original play, "4 at 40: Mothers' Letters To Their Daughters" in an art gallery for a performing space. It was a first experiment for the gallery in theatre and as first experiments go it was a mixed bag.

But we will slog on and take what we have learned hopefully and be able to apply it to the next play which will start in Feb. at the odd run, but much shorter than my own, of two performances a month for five months. I performed my play two performances a month this year in April, May, June, September, October and November. Each month it was a new struggle to get publicity and listings in the local weekly. Unhelpfully the weekly did not publish our listing - one month printing absolutely no local listings at all and the following month randomly selecting listings. That did nothing for our audience turnout let me tell you. On my second to last performance my brother-in-law was the only one in the audience who hadn't seen it already....

Which brings me to my semi-point. If you are talented for no one are you really? If I give a brilliant performances in the mirror, am I still brilliant? For years I had struggled the actor's struggle that is if you have no venue, no play, no audience you have no performance, you only have you being ridiculous in afforementioned mirror. I suppose musicians are largely in the same boat. You could be a brilliant songwriter but if no one ever hears your songs then you are what? Without recognition and the ever so important audience, are you really a performance or just a fool?

And then there are those performances where you feel like so much a trained monkey for an audience that you know is not so much valuing you as being patronizingly charmed by you. There have been some nights on stage where I have almost expected coins to come hurling my way.

This is an odd inner struggle. On the one hand I dread the prospect of there being an audience at all. On the other hand I feel foolish if there is not one, or rather not enough of one to give them and yourself the distance of anonymity. If there are too many of the audience they feel safe their laugh or cry will not be singled out for ridicule and likewise if you are performing in front of a happy and appreciative audience then one is certainly enough - but you can't get passed the odds game - more audience members, more likely to be a good audience.

Sean Penn so succinctly described this strange state of the performer when he said in a recent Iconoclasts that he tries to hide from the rest of the crew on a movie set how much he really dreads performing. And yet he still does it. On a much smaller scale, of course, I feel the same. I dread performing and I am compelled to do it. And then there are times when it is joyful and times when that slides toward trained monkey.

I've been trying to figure out the lessons in this experience. One is that when I do my own projects in my own way I feel successful. I feel proud of myself. Whether "4 at 40" was a success depends upon how it is judged. We sold out the house only once to a private audience, which was great. We got good turnout about half the time and little turnout the rest. It was reviewed glowingly but the review gave us very little by way in bump in sales. Every audience member who stayed after to speak with me was thrilled and moved to have seen the show. And that was probably half at least... so it's really six of one, half a dozen of the other.

I guess it is good that I just did it. I proved to myself that I could take on the whole thing. I would have loved for the audience to have been full every night - and we certainly would have been much fuller each night if all those who had promised to attend had. But at the same time I know what we are trying to do is, in this place, unprecidented. If we were in LA or SF or NY or even Seattle or Chicago people would have just scoffed "What, theatrical performance in a gallery space, how droll, how yesteryear, how been there done that!" But in Palm Springs people just really can't wrap their minds around it.

What we have out here is solidly and proudly 'community theatre' and what we are trying to do is professional theatre in a very small space, with original plays, with high performance level... one wouldn't think that would be a stretch of the imagination but I get the sense that people don't really believe it's real yet.

Ah, life and career. Again and probably over and over I will wonder, does my best work go unseen? Is it ME who fails to attract and audience? Do I just not know HOW to work the publicity machine? If an actor falls off stage but no one is in the audience, does he make a sound as he hits the front row seats?

Crunch Time

2007-11-21T12:06:00.000-08:00

SO, I am working on thisradio show demo for a spiritual advisor and trying to find ways to reach potential callers and have gotten exactly... 3. Half of what I need.

So here is my plea to you blogosphere - if you would like to speak to a spiritual advisor, or know someone who might, about any ole thing: say, you can't stop biting your fingernails and you don't know why (if only she took 3 year olds!) or just broke up with someone and can't get over it, or have some sort of recurring illness and you want to know what in the bloody hell it all means - please let me know.

Taping will take place on November 29, 2007 between 12:30 pm and 3:30 pm (that's Pacific/California time). We can call anywhere in the US, no problem. Just post a comment here with an email address (if I don't have it) and I will get in touch with you.

Let me know soon, as ah time is ah tickin'. Eeeeek! Crunch!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Tell Me Why I Don't Like Wednesdays...

2007-11-14T11:24:00.000-08:00

...tell me whaa ah don' lawk weddd-days, tell me whaa...

Oh well, doesn't go as well as 'Mondays' but you get the idea.
Boomtown Rats everyone.... prescient...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POl4vFp-5os

Aaaaaanyway, not as dramatic as all that but I do seem to have tough Wednesdays... I've been thinking about writing this blog for several weeks and it seems I keep having news things to complain about each Wednesday that passes (to be clear this is a bitching monoblog so stop reading if too irritating).

Most people are likely to suffer from heart attacks on Mondays - or so I have heard research has shown - we can infer from the day of the week because they don't want to go to their jobs... But I relish getting out of the house and to the distraction of the job on Wednesdays.

Number One: Wednesdays are early days for S.O.v.1 at kindergarten. All the kindergarten classes start at 8:20 am on Wednedays. As S.O.v.1 is in the afternoon class we are accustomed to leisurely making our way out of the house to school. But Wednesdays mean I have to wake up at 6:30 am which means I have just gotten back to sleep since the last time I woke up in the middle of the night either to get milk for S.O.v.2, to quell a nightmare, or the ever popular just because. I never feel as if I have gotten enough sleep anyway so 6:30 just seems insulting.

Then because we have to hustle there is usually a fuss from S.O.v.2. It is generally a shoe issue but sometimes it involves a snack or clothing choice or fuss over what to eat - or eating at all which if she wins means even bigger fuss as her blood sugar plunges. I get irritated, S.O.v.1 gets irritated because he hates to be late to school (lest he be the one to screw up the all present and on time popsicle party offered for every class with perfect attendance at the end of the month), S.O.v.2 is already irritated and probably dirty at this point from flinging herself to the ground and tear stained... oh wait, that part's usually me.... It all usually ends with the mommy-handling of the girl as I wrestle her into her car seat because if we don't leave NOW then there is no way to be on time... Strapped in, mad dash to school with some questionable driving and then a run to the school from our hard won parking spot way too far away from the gate. Then after S.O.v.1 is safely ensconced in his classroom there is some more fuss from S.O.v.2 because she hasn't had a chance to play on the playground. Then there is the public humiliation of picking up a kicking and screaming 3 year old from the ground and me trying to calmly explain that if she had just put on what I chose for her to wear, since she decided that mama should choose this morning, then we would have gotten here in time for her to play... hahahahahahahaaaaaa! Reasoning with a 3 year old, that's funny.

Then last Wednesday, S.O. got let go from his job. We are trying to avoid saying the F word, especially around the house. We are saying "Daddy isn't working at his old job anymore and is looking for a new one" because the stress freaks out the kids and then they misbehave. They are like little canaries aren't they? You can tell when you have been snipping at each other too much when your children start misbehaving!

So that was a pretty stressful day. But he got some severence and will get unemployment and silly me thought, "Oh well he'll be around to help me more with the kids for a while". And to be fair he did take them to sitter and school this Mon and Tues but come this morning S.O. has a migraine - his body obviously battling the sick all of us have experienced these past few days. But since he does not now have a job to go to, he was free to sleep until his meds kicked in whist I, sick, head congested, snuffly, spacy have had to slog myself to the one job we still have despite feeling lousy to get in as many hours as possible. I mean, we always did have to be careful about taking days off for sick or whatever because it does affect the family finances - ah the glory of working for an hourly wage (why can't we put congress or the President on an hourly wage with no time off for sick days or overtime or vacation days?) - but now it is even more stark.

So I've been coughing and sneezing all over my phone, keyboard, desk, trash filled with tissues. Luckily I am the only one in the office at the moment as the boss is shooting a film in FL at the moment. But you know, it was just a sock you in the face moment. The Gods or fate or kismet or the universe or whoever is in charge going "Na na na na na na" at me.

Now, tell me again why I don't like Wednesdays? I'll take a Monday any day...

Sleep, Interrupted

2007-10-23T11:22:00.000-07:00

Just after S.O.v.1 was born D-Doll and WGD were over for a visit. I remember asking them at what point you got to sleep through the night again. WGD said "We'll let you know"... I believe their boy was about 2 1/2 at that point... oi.

I thought of that at about 3am last night as S.O.v.2 woke me up yet again for milk or being cold or bad dream... Not that I was sleeping that well anyway. My seestor and her family were evacuated from their home in Rancho Bernardo in San Diego yesterday morning. The fire creeps ever closer to my mom's home where they all are. It could be engulfing her grocery store as I write this and I just got an email from one of my best friends who is being evacuated from her home in El Cajon area now....

And I just found out from Oprah the other day (where else would one learn things?) that I am probably experiencing perimenopause. Of course my mother had been telling me this the past two years but I was in denial. And who believes their mother anyway? It's just not done! So that is probably contributing to my sleepless nights (and also my sadness in understanding that even if I could get S.O. to agree to it, I'll probably never have another baby. But I should beware of what I say never to - I said I'd never live in this desert. Oooooo! I'll never lose this last baby weight! I'll never be wildly successful in my career! My children will never talk to me when they're teenagers! I'll never live to 100... maybe it'll work).

But I would really like to sleep. I have always had what one would call a difficult relationship with sleep. I sort of envy my seestor and mom, they can really sleep and love to. I have not been a great lover of sleep so much either. Though I do love the nap genre of sleep and can usually without much trouble. Maybe I am kind of an Einstein and have been resisting. Maybe I need spurts that add up to 7 or 8 hours and not all of them in a row. It's all of them in a row that I have real problems with.

And stress doesn't help. I first came to realize I had a sleeping problem when my mother was ill. I was 19 and when she was in the hospital I just was not sleeping much at all. It began to worry my then boyfriend and I went to the doc and got some 'sleep aids'. But then I'd have the sleep aid hangover, which if you've never experienced it, really rivals a tequilla hangover. I understand they are better now but... Thank goodness for melatonin. Even if it doesn't help keep me asleep I wake up less tired than without it.

So maybe my best strategy at this point is to embrace the "Sleep when you're dead!" attitude... if only I never had to be anywhere on time, that might be the perfect solution...

More Disappointment Machine

2007-09-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

I have come to realize that you need to tell children what you can and cannot accomplish... not that this makes any difference to S.O.v.s.1 & 2... Here's the problem. They want all of you, meaning all plus more. They want milk and you to change the channel and to look all at once. Of course we try but it doesn't seem to quite work. Something gets missed, milk gets spilled and then someone is disappointed. Even the husband can get his share of it when something is forgotten at the grocery store or the proper socks are not clean. They try not to act disappointed but...

I often wondered what the meaning of the housewife song in the musical "Working" was. OK, let me fess, I didn't really wonder at the age of 16, I was pretty obnoxious thinking "Number one, I will never be a housewife and number two if I am I certainly won't be that kind of housewife!" - Never say never. Actually not a full time housewife, I'm a part-time employee, part-time housewife. For those of you who have never had the chance to see the musical which you should if you can, no doubt it is relevant today and quite beautiful, the housewife sings, "All I am is just a housewife" in melancholy tones. I realize what that means more now. You never intend to be something that can so easily be taken advantage of, dismissed, disappoint... You imagine that your house will be clean and tidy and your children just so too. That everyone will be happy and there will be time for a quiet cup of tea as the little ones are playing in the backyard nicely or napping.... You never imagine that the constant drudgery of things getting dirty, cleaning bathrooms, toys laying around and no one but yourself seemingly bothered by it enough to pick them up... You never imagine that you will feel as if you are working... for them and that your interests seem somehow subverted.

It's the same with any occupation of course. We are very few of us fully appreciated for what we can do but soundly reprimanded for what we might mistake. I suspect that with our society's rabid obsession with celebrity and grand accomplishments cleaning both bathrooms in the same day or totally reorganizing the company's rolodex to be more efficient seem somehow petty compared to birthing Brad Pitt's child, winning enough money in the lottery to be able to hire a nanny or your startup company ending up on the Fortune 500 list in its first year of existence.

Even my love, my acting, has at time felt.... well, there was one recent performance where the thought popped into my mind, "I am nothing but a trained monkey". So I think nothing is totally satisfactory - only in the final cut - we take out all the disappointment and boredom and neglect in the editing and life on the other side looks grand...

Speaking of hiring a nanny. There is no bed of roses either. If you are relegated to hiring a nanny it means you are working too much probably and dont' get to see your kids enough... but if you want them to have a good education, be in the good school neighborhood you'd better keep working... And if we as women have to admit we need help we have on some level disappointed our sex. You can see it in the eyes of your elders and your peers. It even disappoints to not have 'married well' enough to be able to be a stay at home mom, I have noticed at S.O.v.1's school. They are slight, the sidelong pitying looks and subtle but they are there. "Oh, your husband doesn't earn enough for you to stay at home? That must be so humiliating" they seem to say though they would never say it out loud certainly.

Any way you slice it something falls by the wayside and someone is disappointed. And forget being sick. Unless you remind your kids 12 times before breakfast that you don't feel well they will expect the perky and if you don't have it to give up there it is, the disappointment. Today, I feel like crap, so instead of dusting and vacuuming the sand out of the window wells I will play as vigourously as I can with my kids... at least that way I only disappoint myself.

Tell someone today you appreciate the little things they do... we all forget.

Random Minor Irritations

2007-09-26T10:24:00.000-07:00

You know, I now - though I did not previously - understand why mothers choose to homeschool (or maybe just one of the myriad reasons)... because of the mommie politics. Even peripherally on the fray I already feel victim to them. There is a distinct seperation between Working Mommy and Stay at Home Mommy. SAHMs definitely rule the school and all school functions. WMs are second tier, adjunct unfortunate necessities because of their spawn and "we love the kids of course" but the WMs just don't 'participate' as they should. And I'm not even a full-time WM!

There is no overt commentary of course, there is only the, well, high schoolesque shunning and looks and... can we just all remember back to high school where there are clicks and rivalries and no one has to say word one you just know because you KNOW! Back when we were all less kind and forgiving and more attuned to the energy people throw off. You just knew cutie girl suzy was after your boyfriend because you knew! No one had to discover them making out in the gym. Well, Seestor and I have been exchanging shunning experiences since our 5 year olds have started kindergarten this year.

One would think that since there are so many more WMs that the playing field would even out. But what we must remember people is that there can only be so many cheerleaders! And if you are not one of them.... (ironic since both Seestor and I were cheerleaders in school... but this is a whole 'nother playground!)

Had more play performances last week. Friday, great audience. Saturday, miniscule and tough. It's so hard to keep just a few people with you, you have to work and work and as it is a solo performance there is no one to lean on or gaff with backstage and complain about the dud of an audience. Not that they didn't appreciate it... it just felt like they were holding their breath the entire time... didn't feel comfortable enough to react... As a result I was completely knackered on Sunday and have not really recovered since.

I was talking briefly the other night to S.O. about what a difficult juggle being a woman is. I mean the potential of becoming a disappointment machine is great. Women need to be good, first and foremost and not bitchy (although I am trying to help S.O.v.2 retain her inner bitch without being a complete one because I think it's always helpful to have her in reserve), sexy but not slutty, a good mommy without being fanatical or overbearing, a good friend without being nosy or uninvolved, a good sister without being nosy or meddling, a good worker without losing your own hopes and dreams, a good cook, homemaker, dresser, cheerful, clean, upbeat and sweet... and I am sure I have missed many, many things on that list. Whereas a man's item agenda involves mostly manly things (much to their own psychological and emotional detriment I'm sure) that are all, well, manly. The definitions of what a good father, brother, worker, husband, lover, etc. all look pretty much the same. The downside for men is that they all look pretty much the same... Women's definitions run to the schizophrenic however. It is a matter of switching gears on a dime and when you are tired or distracted or compromised emotionally the gears can get jammed up. Then you just don't function well and things get dropped... like the kids' dentist appointment that was supposed to be last week... or, oh, meals...

It's just not possible for a woman to be effectively tired. There is just no outlet. Vegging in front of the TV or football or golf with the guys is the purview of men. They need to be a guy with guys sometimes. I don't know why, I just know it works. It always makes them better at everything when they come back from 'guy time'. But as a woman, even when you get 'gal time' you can't really let go... maybe because for men all the gears are closer together. For a woman it's 0 to 60 is sixty seconds or something gets left behind....

The Biological Sound Barrier

2007-09-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

I just watched "Venus" yesterday at work. I had absolutely nothing to do and couldn't bring myself to surf the web any longer or read another movie making magazine and I was being held hostage by the clock. I remembered we had a couple of screeners so...

There is one very lovely scene where Maurice (the Peter O'Toole character) and the young girl, Jesse, are in a museum and looking at a painting of the goddess Venus (spoiler alert). He says to her the the female body is perhaps the most beautiful thing men ever lay eyes on (pressumably his is only talking about heterosexual men, I would guess gay men would beg to differ). She asks what is the most beautiful this a woman lays eyes on. He says her first born child. You can tell by her reaction that instinctually she knows this to be true and will never be able to lay eyes on her first born, technically speaking (a pain women who have had abortions or miscarriages of their first conception no doubt on some level share). Whether this is politically correct or not it seems to me inherently true, and something mankind collectively has always understood.

It makes it obvious why men try to keep getting that 'first look' by being horn dogs and why women always want another baby. OK, before you all go getting your knickers in a twist I am talking in GROSS generalizations leaving the possibility and inevitability for a wild range of differences from this. But it also makes me wonder, if we understand this collectively, why do we fail to apply this understanding to our relationships. Any woman who has children knows that you are so in love with them that it is very easy to neglect the husband for weeks whilst steeped in the cocoon of children's love. And men, well they have these things called 'needs' which is really another way of saying "I want you to want me" Cheap Trick was so wise.

But yet we still fail to see each other's perspectives... but then we fail to see each other's perspectives on a lot of things. Maybe to be human is essentially to be hedonistic and selfish. We fight those tendencies because we are civilized... but we don't always win over our nature.

Hip Kids

2007-09-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

What a day.

First thing this morning the kids and I went to a composting class in Palm Springs. We have a completely blank slate in our backyard, all sand with a few tumbleweeds. I have tried and failed at it before so I figured... I thought it would be taught outside, but alas, it was inside a classroom at the Police Academy. The kids did get to see live worms in the vermiculture display. They always like that.

Then it was off to downtown to get a cup of coffee and a pastry before heading off to pick up one of the owners of the art gallery where I perform my play to go off and do a local radio program. The kids came with us into the studio and did an excellent job at being quiet while we were on the air. S.O.v.1 did have to go pee pee pee right at the beginning so we had a rush business and then back to stump the play.

Then to the toy store for a reward for being so well behaved (or a bribe depending how you look at it!) then to lunch. By this time we were all quite knackered and so it was a long sleepy nap next.

Then after S.O. got home we all dressed up and went off to the art gallery's season opening show. They loved looking at all the paintings. They even requested to go see the art in the other gallery's in the building who were also open.

Wow. I certainly hope they will be as well rounded as it seems like they are already!

They Still Don't Get It

2007-09-08T00:34:00.000-07:00

They, men, still don't get it how easy it is for them to walk out the front door. I am speaking in general terms here, of course. I mean, they don't understand how loose their responsibilities hang on them.

S.O.v.1 started school this week. It's a big time for him... and for me. Probably more for me than him. It means one of my responsibilities hangs just a little farther from me and in good, capable hands for a time during the day. Most of those hands feminine.

As liberated as we are women still bear the brunt of the responsibility for all things house and children. If a man leaves a thing undone he knows with some unconscious certainty that it will get done, somehow, and by whom is not his place to wonder or know. At appropriate times they of course protest this fact and take reigns and Lord knows we appreciate it mightily, any sort of backup we can get.

But if you look around a school, and especially a parent meeting, what you largely see is women. This at least gives me some relief that I am not in the least liberated relationship - and I thought I was doing pretty good - in town. We are all smart and capable and worthy women, and what we are bound to is to take care of the babies no matter where else our strengths may lie.

I realized this week for the first time that women with children think not in terms of goals for the future reaching 1 year or 5 year milestones even. We look to when school starts, when our children's milestones of independence are met and so then we can loose the bonds just ever so slightly to say, take more time for ourselves, to reach our own goals. It is endemic. It's not just me. For that small comfort I am grateful.

Because when I think of my work life, my 'career', it is not in terms of what I might be able to accomplish but where my children are in their need for my care and attention. Men don't get this. Of course they don't live this so how could they know and if they cared to know they might feel badly, and then that does no one any good. Because of course we all know, whether we care to admit it or not, being a mother is a very particular bond and responsibility, one which being a father does not even come close to matching in its scope. Fathers are necessary but mothers are vital. Perhaps if men actually realized that - maybe if they all paid attention to who all the knumbnuts on TV say hi to when they get caught in the Jumbo Cam - there might actually be a Single Mother tax break, or a Mother Trying to Work But Her Child is Home Sick With Daddy Lunch Break, or a Sports Widow Vacation Allowance - really, that one is really necessary for a lot of women, thankfully not me.

The point is, as my mother reminds me often, the childen are attached to the mommy by a cord, an invisible cord that ties them to you until they no longer need you. A time which we all conversely dread and anticipate with relish. It is in a way a beautiful prison. Someone has done the walls up real nice and the guards are just lovely company, but you ain't getting out until it's time and there is no parole board. Fathers may be able to give us a break every once in a while but the babies will need their mommies until they don't, and that is just all there is to that. Might as well do good, honest time.

tagged

2007-08-13T23:49:00.000-07:00

The Rules:
A)We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
B)Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
C)People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
D)At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.And here we go:

1. I am secretly lazy, even though I present as an A, ok well, B+ Type.
2. I still have ambitions to do something with my career (children not included, they are already something and unlike celebrities, I consider them personal, not career moves)
3. I still don't know how to post pictures on my blog and barely know how to post them on myspace... even though I am generally 'good at computers'
4. I secretly harbor the wish to have another baby, even though Al Gore convinced me I shouldn't.
5. I am secretly proud of being able to tolerate 'difficult' bosses, even though this makes my life intermittantly miserable.
6. I am wishing now that there were only 5 facts to have to convey.
7. I am writing a novel.
8. I am still, after many years, embarassed to say, want to be or admit that I am an actor before and more than anything else. I think I think it makes me seem desperate or less than serious or ridiculous - that's the worst. I never want to seem ridiculous even though I am convinced it is a permanent part of the human condition.

OK, Matt, Mommasita (I know you read my blog, so now you have to email me your 8), Seestor same with you), Arianna, Kate, Cynthia (if you have time, I know, baby, hard), Rick, Krishanti, Kadi

S.O.v.2 asserts herself... and loses

2007-08-10T23:22:00.000-07:00

...for her own good though, of course. Miss decided that she didn't wish to wear clothes today. A notion that we normally indulge. But this morning there were workmen coming - new house: so, electricians to install the fans (it's the desert, you NEED moving air), painters to fix the chip on the entry and other things, yet another electrician from the warranty company to repair a buzzing light switch (you really don't want your light switches or any kind of electrical equipment to be buzzing or, sparking or speaking to you in any manner, that is decidedly bad), delivery men to deliver replacement dishes and a laptop messenger bag for me to hold my new laptop that S.O. bought me (to make up for a lot of bad Octobers in a row where we were too skint most times to even go out to dinner, let alone present) which I now write this blog entry on... aaaaaaanyway, she din' wan' no clothes. So, I told her, "Look baby, you should feel lucky that you have a daddy in your life to be careful of these things. You can't go around in just a diaper today, no way. Daddy would not allow it, no way, no how, not in your lifetime will he allow you to go around half clothed in front of strange men". She understood.

I always think it must be nice, to have a daddy consistently in your life for your childhood. I had no daddy in my baby and toddler years and I had a daddy in my adolesence but none in my teenage years. I can't think, now that I have a daughter of my own, which are the most important years. I am grateful for my father though (stepfather in legality sense, real father in spirit and substance) who gave me a sense that I was an important and valuable person in the world. I think that, in many ways, saved me and probably my sister too from many of the pitfalls of being a woman who was raised without a father.

But S.O.v.2's innocent request got me to thinking about women in society today and how there are no more protections for us, as a class. If there ever really were. Men used to make all sorts of verbal and physical protestations to the 'protection of their women' and we used to believe them. But that all started to errode with the start of the last century and especially at the onset of the industrial age. It's a sticky wicket. The more independence from men and male society we acquired, the more men left off the sense that propriety should win and the more advantage women were taken of.

I have no doubt that by the time the women's movement came about it was in no small part born of the understanding that society and men, collectively, were no longer going to be taking care of them... in any way. And men's response to the women's movement has been a passive agressive "screw you" to women. "OK, fine. You wanna make your own money, feel your own independence, pursue your own interests, go right on ahead honey" and then proceeded to let every gratuity towards women slide. No doors opened, no 'ma'am' or 'miss', no even buying on the first date! For you doubters out there I just have few things to say; "Girls Gone Wild", Internet porn, and .76 cents to a man's dollar - almost 40 years after the women's movement began. OK, you argue, "Those women in porn are consenting..."... ah duh, because they no longer have the option of a man taking care of them.... Any woman who has been a single mom can no doubt attest to the fact that men do not have the same sense of responsibility that they might have many decades ago. Empirical evidence does not recount the statistical evidence of women - and their children - living in poverty in embarassingly large numbers.

So, yes, when Daddy warns S.O.v.2 about men in any way shape or form I'm listening and encourging her to as well. Sure, my teenage self would have balked but I was naive and didn't know what I know now. As mothers of daughters, we used to worry about raising 'nice' girls. I propose that that is no longer necessary nor warranted. No one in taking care of a nice girl. No man is looking out for your 'nice' daughter anymore. Except her daddy if she has an active one... No, women, girls, are taken advantage of these days. Let them be bitchy. Every woman needs a little inner bitch in order to look out for herself these days... because Daddy won't be around forever.

And to those of you mothers raising sons, make sure they are good guys. I always tell S.O.v.1 that he should never tell a girl he is going to call when he isn't really... of course he is only 5 but you can't start too early.

Tick Tah-owk!

2007-08-01T20:45:00.000-07:00

S.O. has been gone since early Sunday morning, to work in Santa Barbara - lucky him, 75 there 108 here. And I have been manning the fort although I could really use reinforcements. S.O. is due back NOW, about an hour ago and I need the relief. I need a shower. I need to stop saying "Don't fight/argue/hit/take things from each other or I'll... do something". And love them as I do I am tired of sharing the bed with two toddlers. I'm also tired of the tears for missing Daddy. It's hard and I am so thankful that he'll be here in just a few minutes... mostly for the kids because he makes them so happy. But for me because of afforementioned needed break...

This is nothing though, last summer he was gone for about 3 weeks total and I really began to appreciate what my mother did and why she said so often "Stop whining!"

Ah, tick tock, dude. I'm getting stinky!

You forget...

2007-07-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

When you move to a new home there are several things you forget.

You forget how much everything costs to set up and forget the fact that you have been a customer for decades they will extract that $30 set up fee!

You forget that you still have things in boxes from the last time you moved and you forgot what all was in there. Oh! That's where that went!

You forget that when you move to a new home it takes time to get the layout and the navigation skills to get around it. I have so many bruises on my legs. And it doesn't help that boxes keep getting moved around. Poor S.O.v.2 ran into the door the other day!

You forget about the new sounds and the first and probably through to the fifth time you hear them they freak you out.

You forget how much fun it is to be in a new place and all the dreams you have of making it pretty or functional or cool or all of the above and you wonder why you didn't do it with your last home?

And then finally, you forget where the hell you put the extra toilet paper!

Moving Day(s)

2007-07-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

You never really know how much stuff you have... until you move.

Ah, boxes boxes. At first it looks like so many. But as you begin to pack and pack and pack and the dust and the sneezing - hey, didn't I just clean under here, yeah like last year! - and then you look around and it looks like you have done nuh-thing at all... then you look at your supply of boxes rapidly dwindling. Oi!

But this moving day reminds me of our last moving day. Moving days when you were a DINK or a SINK (that's single income no kids, not a slur) are not memorable anymore. The only good thing about packing up is the anticipation of the new house. And in this case it is actually new and actually ours. I thought at times we would never own a home and look at us now! But I still have a little melancholy. I am remembering as I pack all the very helpful girlfriends of mine who came and watched S.O.v.1 when he was a baby so I could pack up our Hollywood apartment to move out here. I thought of Demondoll putting her own little one - probably on her hip most of the way - and S.O.v.1 in the stroller and going up the hill by our house in Hollywood. About Cynthia watching him while the movers took all the boxes and furniture away. I remember going down into the courtyard and seeing her sitting there with him sleeping on her shoulder. And she, a normally Type A personality with an equal mix of hippy, who always looks happy to be where she is but ready to get to the next place, looked totally contented and not eager to get anywhere at all. I remember thinking that she looked really good holding a baby. Now she has her own little 5 month old tyke and I am so glad for her and her hubby.

I remember the lovely, bubbly Krishanti looking after S.O.v.1 and that laugh of hers every time he would do something cute. She looks really good with a baby too. Something about a woman laughing and smiling with a baby makes them so beautiful.

This move makes me melancholy because it also means we are staying in the desert for the foreseeable future. As much as I love my life here I miss LA and my friends there. A part of me really hoped that we would be buying a house there for the first time. A large part of me wishes it wasn't so hard to get back there more often. Thank goodness Shrub got on the phone to jawbone those oil barrens he's so close to or gas prices would be impossible, not nearly impossible like they are now.

But the packing reminds me too of just how endless stuff is and I kind of wish we had less of it. I have been trying to purge the stuff as much as possible and yet the pull to keep things... for sentimental reasons, for just in case reasons, for unknown reasons... I am having a hard time ridding myself of certain baby items. The wedge I made for S.O.v.1 for when he slept in our bed and had a stuffy nose, which he did often. My breast pump (stop it! don't be gross) just in case... and the co-sleeper that S.O.v.2 slept in not so often but would catch her in case she rolled off the bed sleeping next to me most of her babyhood. I know this irritates S.O. to no end because he really is done-done having children whereas I would, if he changed his mind, have another in a red hot second (stop it!) and although I do owe it to Al Gore for convincing me that there is no real need for me to populate the planet with more people just like me, and it would be for selfish reasons, I still can't bring myself to part with these things... Just in case. I give myself credit for purging most (if not totally all) baby clothes though. We can't say the same for S.O.'s ancient and smelly T-shirt collection however...

Blohg blohg blohg

2007-07-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

You know, it's been a while... I've been writing blog entries in my mind... does that count? You know, and then you get to the computer and poof! Blank. Funny that.

It's bloody hot. And I've been putting out fires. At work, at extracurricular work (freelance writing job) at home (computer problems again)... and so my mind is filled with all the little details that have to be accomplished so that problems don't flare up... and I get in trouble, see really there's the truth. I just don't want to get in trouble! Not that I've done anything wrong but anyone who has now or has ever (or who ever will shall soon find out) had a job knows you don't have to actually do anything wrong to get in trouble.

But the worst of course is getting in trouble with yourself, when something screws up because you forgot to do some little thing. Or when you forgot to do something you promised your kids you would do. Ouch.

And then of course there is the detail laden outer world where people screw you up (and you get in trouble or things delay) because they failed to accomplish some detail... oi. Example, our house, which technically we should be in already but documents got lost, funds got depleated and our file sat on a desk for too long before phone calls were made. Oi.

What can you do? Doesn't anyone believe in being organized, doing it right the first time anymore? Or are we all just too overwhelmed?

Reviewed

2007-06-17T17:52:00.000-07:00

Click the link to see the very nice write up I got for my play.

http://www.thedesertsun.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007706140323

OK, here's the deal...

2007-06-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

I usually leave the political outrage to S.O. (see http://www.matthewfeath.blogspot.com/) but I just read an article about Hillary Clinton in Newsweek and they ask a couple of really stupid rhetorical questions (rhetorical because I can't really believe they don't know the answers, they just don't want to be the ones to say in print).

They wonder why, after 30 years in public life, people still seem to dislike Hillary Clinton. Duh, I think they answered their own question when they say the Clintons made a 'miscalculation' in in assuming that "America was ready for a new kind of empowered, ambitious political spouse..." (June 18, 2007 issue), except that they clearly misprinted (accidentally on purpose so as to remain PC) when they put in 'spouse' instead of 'wife'.

To steal some early Clinton rhetoric, "It's the gender stupid". Come on, if it walks like a duck... Can we just say it out loud. We, America, are not ready for a female president. We are just not. There are thousands of board rooms and conference rooms where women are leading the meeting as we speak that can attest to this fact. As long as they (the women leaders) are being nice and encouraging all the men in the room get that nice gushy feeling inside (and some might even be feeling so gushy they are also thinking, "I could do her") but the minute she-leader starts to exude some power, some influence, some dissatisfaction all the men and probably many of the women in the room are reduced to 4 year olds and their jockey shorts suddenly feel three sizes too small. Men hate this. Ladies, try it with your own husbands and see if you get laid later. It doesn't work.

We've so disconnected men from their feelings and so indoctrinated women to the religion of self loathing that we can't really get outside the 'traditional roles', particularly on a large scale, i.e. an election. Currently we, as a society, pretty much have women where we want them; Paris Hilton in jail (how many porn fantasies in how many guys' minds across the country is that illiciting! Can we say, sexy, dumb, rich and now totally controlled by men in uniforms?), women at work and still doing the bulk of the housework and childcare (yippee for men, Monday Night Football lives!), and a self-loathing so strong and entrenched that there is not really much hope of it ever going away (exhibit Vogue).

It's not that we don't think a woman can't do the job, I mean come on, seriously. And conservatives know that we are so precariously emotionally positioned as a society when it comes to women in power (can we remember Martha Stewart, speedy trial, did jail time; Enron broke 2001, Ken Lay wasn't found guilty until 2006) we can easily be tipped even on suspicions of misconduct or harpy-ism. (Remember the old jokes, "What happens to Russia if the (female) president is on her period?" hahahahahahahahaha) We just really don't want to get in trouble with mom.

Why do the conservatives still hate the Clintons. Uh, easy, because any conservative with half a brain (and I'm not saying that there are many) knows that 'liberal politics' such as those applied to the country during the Clinton administration actually work on a lot of levels for many kinds of Americans. Conservatism works only for the most wealthy, i.e. campaign contributors. If you gave a conservative some truth serum and started questioning them they'd tell you that they are actually pretty liberally minded and did pretty well in the 90s. We all are more liberal than we want to admit because you can't admit to being a caring human being and then vote for the dude you really want to have a beer with.

But my biggest beef with our inability to face the fact that we are not ready for a female president (I'm not even going to get into Barak Obama, seriously if we aren't yet comfortable with women in power...) is that means there is a chance Hillary will be on the Democratic ticket for '08. And you know what that means! Can we all sing "Hail to the Chief" for President Fred Thompson, and Vice President Ruddy Guliani? And you thought Ronald Regan and George Jr. were bad?

Tagged

2007-05-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

OK, so if your name is at the end then you have been tagged and you have to do as I will do following. Seven random 'facts' about yourself and then you must tag seven people.

1. I have been married 3 times, never thought I would be married before I was 30 as a kid but actually was married 3 times by then... go figure (I also said I would never live in the desert so maybe I should be saying I'll never be successful and have tons of money too!)

2. I have bunions - they are not what you think, they are misdirected bone growth, not like corns and can't be treated any way but to cut the bone and reset it in place - my bunions hurt a lot less when I heard that! Seems a little unfair since I was never much of a highheel wearer.

3. I've never seen the Grand Canyon or most of the United States but have seen almost all of California.

4. Despite years of singing lessons I still can't sing a whole song without losing a note. Although my only singing audience - my kids - do not seem to mind.

5. I grew an inch and a half between the ages of 19 and 26. Although my military ID says I am an inch taller than I actually am.

6. This is hard... um... I went to 'junior college' before going to 'real' college and that is where I met some of the best friends I ever had (i.e. Demondoll, Tony) and had some of the best academic experiences I ever had (Religion as mythology class, ISLS course).

7. Ah... mmmm... having trouble thinking of one more... hmmm... well, I've never been arrested though that is surprising considering I have nearly been about 3 times - and not for innocuous civil disobedience either, nope, I was involved in some shenanigans in my youth that are best left for my autobiography!

OK, you are tagged:

Matt
Demondoll
Cynthia
Kate
Arianna
Whitney
Mommasita

Oh Merciful Flu

2007-05-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago on a Wednesday S.O.v.1 complained that his tummy hurt. He said it was because he ate too much lunch at school, but knowing him I thought that sounded fishy. Of course, being the skeptic and probably a little bit merciless mother I suspected candy overdose. But nope, 'round about bedtime he was looking pretty miserable. It is that particular sound in their voice when they yell "Mama" that you just know means serious ick. So he booted and then quickly fell asleep. He was up the next morning and pretty OK, except for a small appetite. One down.

Then the following Monday night my stomach felt a little wonkey. But I just chalked it up to too much comfort food (Rice-a-Roni counts, doesn't it?) which I am not used to eating. Then the sweats. Consequently I spent the night laying on the bathroom floor with a problem too gross to mention but which you can probably guess at. Finally at about 3:30 in the morning I booted. For hours before that I felt sure I would but having been historically a 'non-thrower-upper' my body has become accustomed to resisting. It goes back to all the binge drinking in college and the years immediately after (well and a few years immediately before too, to be honest), which of course we didn't call 'binge drinking', that sounds oh so judgemental. We just called it fun. But I always thought the puking afterwards was unseemly and lacking in a certain dignity so I forced myself to endure the room spining and racous hangovers for years. Between moving to the desert (which has the most gawd-awful flu bugs that no person, practiced or not, can withstand and keep it down) and before that living in the Bay Area - a span of about 8 or 9 years I had not thrown up. That last time was a particularly bad night of homemade pizza - which, don't get my wrong, was great, it wasn't the pizza's fault - the red wine, the real culprit I suspect, and a few starter gin martinis. I decided that I'd never do THAT again! (Not the drinking part silly, the barfing part)

But picture me at the porceline, you know whatever, last Monday begging my body to stop resisting and get it over with... for about 5 hours... then finally. Whew. Two down. I spent the next day in bed, feeling mostly fine but making up for the lost sleep.

Then that Thursday S.O.v.2 was not eating her rice. I should have immediately suspected something because she is, afterall, the Rice Baby. But I was silly, I didn't catch on until literally seconds before, even with the large hint of icky diaper. She was in bed and I was just about to move her to own bed (she usually falls asleep in big bed and then we move her to own bed) when she said "Mama I cold" and fussed. Then urp. Ick. Three down.

That was last week and we all seemed fine and recovered which I was thankful for as I had two shows to do on the weekend. But last night S.O. finally caught up. He now is fine but spending the day in bed making up for the lost sleep he spent instead... well you get the picture. Whew. Four down.

Let's hope for no relapse and be thankful it was a merciful 24 hour flu!

Ups and Downs

2007-05-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

Let me just start with the down, ya know, just get it out of the way.

The day after a show is always a low energy, crabby day for me. Exhibit A: After spending the last month being calm and consciously letting little things go I snap at S.O. for some driving (in my irritable opinion) snafu. The little S.O.s were irritating me with their non-listening, non-compliance behavior too. On normal days I just deal with it and move on, but on crabby days it sticks with me till quiet time (i.e. nap). I was really tired too. I guess I didn't really realize how much energy I expend doing the show.

I was slightly disappointed that more of my friends did not come out to support the show. But I imagine they will come next month... or eventually.

Ups

I did two shows over the weekend of "4 at 40". Friday night the house was bought by a friend and colleague for a private party. They were a splendid audience, memorable. They were ready to laugh and be moved and it was really fun to perform for them. I met some wonderful people after - not all of whose names I can recall unfortunately! And got some wonderful comments. I cannot recall how many times I heard the word 'amazing'. It was the kind of performance that keeps you out at the cast party till way too late on an adrenaline high. Luckily I am the cast and so got home at a decent hour. S.O. was kind enough to retrieve the kids from the sitter so I could stay and schmooze for a bit at the reception after the show.

The Saturday audience were smaller and more subdued. You must work harder when they are a small audience, harder to get them absorbed and on board so they won't feel self-conscious and can just experience the play. I learned an interesting and valuable lesson about contrast in performance - and that you need to bring the audience with you but you have to be flexible enough to give them what they need, to respond to their energy and not just run away from them with the show.

On our 10 year anniversary last week S.O. and I got a call from the housing program we'd signed up for to purchase an affordable house in our town. We were set for a house in the 3rd Phase - hadn't been built yet, hadn't even laid the foundation yet, but we had our lot. So the call was a shock. "Do you want a house now?" she said. So, sometime soon we should know when the close of escrow is and we will be home owners. Yeah! Eeek! Wow! Yikes! What are we thinking! This is so great! and all those other emotions that go along with it... panic and joy living side by side.

I knock around work for one more week like a single marble in the trunk of your car. All that space and just a tiny object to fill it. All this time and just a few undoubtably crap scripts to read. Well, can't be busy always, especially not out here, unless it is busy of one's own making. But I should luxuriate in it nonetheless.

Added Performances of "4 at 40: Mothers' Letters to Their Daughters"

2007-05-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

Blog-'o-land,

We've added dates for my show. Yippee!

PRESS RELEASE

"Daniela Ryan... she's definitely an actor that we're going to hear more from. She displays a great range of passionate emotion in both her acting and her writing"
- Jack Lyons of “The Desert Scene”, K-News Radio 1140AM

What: Live Theatre at the Gallery
"4 at 40: Mothers’ Letters to Their Daughters”

When: Friday, May 18, 2007 – SOLD OUT
Saturday, May 19, 2007 – 4:00 pm

Friday, June 22, 2007 – 7:30 pm
Saturday, June 23, 2007 – 7:30 pm
Tickets available at the door - $12.00

Further dates to be announced.

Where: Dezart One Gallery
2688 Cherokee Way
Palm Springs, CA 92264
(760) 328-1440

The story spans five generations of women in one California family, from the first settler to a modern day mother. Each mother desperately reaches out to her daughter through a family tradition. On the mother’s 40th birthday, she writes a letter to her daughter in an attempt to bridge the generation gap between them, passing on valued lessons learned from her journey in life. The family’s history is, in essence, California’s own, from stoic determination to take the land, to prosperity, to the comforts and uncertainties of modern day life. Each mother learns something about herself as she shares her story with her daughter. For those who have a mother and/or a sister or daughter, you will relate to the characters as they capture the intimate portrait of relationships between women and their daughters and the generational and historical influence on those bonds.

Daniela Ryan is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Theatre Arts. In addition, she has a Masters degree in Film and Television from San Diego State University. Ms. Ryan has worked in the film industry for the past 10 years. She began acting at the age of 7, performing in local and community theatre throughout California. In Los Angeles, she co-wrote and performed in Demeter Theatre’s acclaimed play “Speaking of Evil”, the story of an ambivalent Nazi, Kurt Gerstein. She is a writer and associate producer of film, working with a local independent film production company. A fourth generation Californian, Ms. Ryan resides in the desert with her husband and two children.

But It's A Good Tired

2007-04-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about what I would say about my show... I just don't have super extreme emotions about it... there were less people in the audience than there were seats. But my attitude is I do this performance for these people and don't worry about the ones who didn't show up. Those that came had the experience they were looking for I hope. That is, afterall, the goal.

My family made the trip which was such an honor. It is always great to have people that love you in the audience. I pretty much guaranteed that anyway though having S.O. be my show tech. But it was great that my Dad and his S.O. made the trip and that my Mom and my Sis and her S.O. made the trip as well. I felt supported and valued, which is what being a star is, really. So for a few days I was a star and by Sunday I was back to cleaning the toilet and clipping coupons. I suppose what goes wrong with 'stars' is that if you get too much of it it no longer feels good. But shockingly enough if you get to be a star for a bit then the cleaning the toilet part doesn't feel so bad. Everyone should get to be a star a couple times a month at least!

But mostly what I felt was home. I was nervous, excited, sure; worried I'd forget lines (there are 25 pages of dialogue in my show), I did; worried people wouldn't get it or wouldn't care - they did and they did. Many audience members stayed after to talk to me and that is always an honor. I know that many were moved and I was glad of that. It was almost like that feeling you get when you get to the end of your busy day and there is just enough time to slip into the hot tub for a few minutes - except instead of quieting my body, performing quiets my soul.

My Mom said when she left, "Thank you for performing again. Everyone feels better when you are performing because it really comes naturally to you, you were just born to do it" I think that perty much sums it up.

IT HAS GOT TO STOP NOW!

2007-04-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

In just 24 hours I can go from feeling sublime to reewee reewee (as S.O.v.2 says) angee... we actually more like irritated.

OK, this whole password thing has just got to stop. Can we please? I mean, come on! Seriously! And don't write them down, what are you insane? How much time do I want to stay on hold with tech support!

You can no longer do anything 'online' oh so simple without setting up a descreet username and password! I've had it! Enough I say. Can we come up with a better solution please... you can't order a book anymore, register for an event that you will never ever in the history of you ever ever attend again without setting up a ^#(&$%)*#(&#@*&$@%%%% user bloody name and password!

OK smarty pants, I just use my mother's maiden name plus my cat's birthday for ALL mine, person! If you hadn't noticed that is not possible because sometimes they let you choose your own username - if it's not taken already so you have to be Yella167 or some such ridiculousness - and some want your email (then you have to remember which email you did it under, (for those of us that have work emails, family emails, etc.) then your password has to include at least one digit and be at least characters long and sometimes case sensitive and sometimes they won't let you use an ampersand and sometimes they only want 4 digits only, no letters and sometimes at least one letter HAS to be capitalized or they will eat your first born.

UUUUUUUUUUUUUGH! Had it!

The Orchid

2007-04-16T13:57:00.000-07:00

My son was sad yesterday. He is 4, nearly 5 and he misses dearly his babysitter of 3 years who moved to the other side of the country last year about this time. We were playing his USA puzzle and when we came to South Carolina he started thinking about Abida. But this is nothing new. Sometimes he thinks of her out of the blue, without warning and a little melancholy comes to his face.

We often dismiss these subtle emotions in children I think. Because they are not entirely comfortable. They are not entirely solveable, which I think can cause parents to try and dismiss them. There is no real explanation for them either. It is just in the air or something brings to mind something that makes you sad or worried or fearful. Same happens with happiness and laughter - as in dreams, or rather watching a dreaming child as I did S.O.v.2 last night. She suddenly from peaceful countenance laughed. Then it was gone.

We forget that emotions themselves are not bad or grand or useful or good or anything at all except just a color of life to be experienced. Maybe because of their remembering their beloved babysitter (I miss her too, it's hard to describe the fondness you have for the person who lovingly cares for your children) or maybe mine came first but I was missing my grandparents and my uncle - who all passed away in the last 3 years (Abida is not gone, just moved to SC, to be clear!) - I was sad. It came in waves, like grief does....

But isn't it funny how we allow these little flits of emotions to touch us when 'something has happened', like grieving a loss or breaking up with a boyfriend, but when 'nothing is wrong' somehow we think we are supposed to be happy, up, smiley without fail? But that is often not the case, the world is a gloomy place today - because of the news, because of the weather, because of the war. But surely there is great joy blended in with all that sorrow. In the fleeting laugh of S.O.v.2 in her sleep last night my heart lept with glee, joy to be her mother. And in the next moment I shed a tear and a laugh myself as I remember how in my whole life my grandmother never pronounced my name correctly. I was her Da-nella and there was no changing that.

Life and emotions are often categorized as shades of gray. But it's not gray - it's colors, all blended together often in the same moment, like an impossibly colored orchid that is both brown and red and yellow at the same time in almost the same spot. Perhaps that is why my grandmother and uncle loved orchids so much, even as they could not express in words the impossible combinations of emotions of life, they could appreciate it in an orchid.

I have nothing to say

2007-04-11T22:41:00.000-07:00

It's true. I don't. Odd really. I have just been tired... allergy-y, cold-y and then on Easter I burnt the hell out of my arm and leg with hot oil. Not recommended. Peeling now, reeeeeally not recommended. Probably should have gone to the Urgent Care but hey, there was a pork roast to finish.

I'm sitting here at work, at 10:45 pm waiting to call Dubai. My show's first performances are in two weeks and I am not really nervous but I am feeling a little like walking into the void. Strangly enough that is one of the themes of my play. I can see the future but I just don't know how it will all work.

Leave that up to the universe I guess they say in "The Secret". I have always had trouble letting go of dreams to the point where I can't sort out whether it is a real dream anymore or just a habit. Working on it...

Crushes and Crushing Headache

2007-03-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

The strangest thing... I have started having crushes again! How weird is that... Is this some odd hormonal phenomenon, or perhaps some psychological response to nearing *gulp* perimenopause (I'm so thankful they created this starter menopause, get you used to the idea before you actually take off, sort of like a menopause tricycle). I haven't had a crush since I was in elementary school. I didn't 'do' crushes (of celebrity/notable/famous people) when I was in high school (only the more dangerous i.e. obtainable local boys - which, in retrospect I realize, can get you into a lot more trouble) because I was, yes, just that cool. I thought they were REEEDIC-U-LOUS! How pathetic, I thought to myself, spending so much emotion on someone you'll never have!

But now my perspective is slightly less obnoxious and stuck up. Now I just figure, oh what the hell, who'm I hurtin'? (Except maybe the feelings of S.O. just slightely, but he knows I only have eyes for him so... get over it babe - he reads the blog)

Celebrity Crush: Leonardo DiCaprio - now who would have thought? I would never stoop to a crush that everyone else had! How proletariat! (My crushes in elementary were the Monkees - yes, several years AFTER their series, not even contemporary, Sandy - Lemur, will remember that - sorry, inside joke) But he's gettin' some gravitas on him. Blood Diamond anyone?

Brain Crush: Craig Ferguson - now I know this sounds odd but I just read his first novel... I'd heard an interview with him on The Treatment (thank you podcasts) and was struck by how similar we thought about the world. I'd never heard anyone articulate so well how they think, and I just kept saying to myself, I think just like that! Although, if we ever had a conversation we might well bore each other to tears.

Bad Boy Crush: Denis Leary - I have always had this theory that liking the bad boy, for women, is never really about the bad boy - it is about how cool am I to be the one that he settles down with! But I like Denis Leary's bad boy image on his show Rescue Me because it is bad and also three dimensional - he plays the bad boy we all (those of us who have dabbled in the bad boy dating scheme) knew was there deep down inside but that they just couldn't articulate (and ok marrying, yes, marrying scheme too...).

Crushing Headache: Yesterday, I started in on a, what promises to be a 24 hour plus, migraine round about 2pm. I've seen The Secret - yes I have and I'll admit it! - (or as we say around our house in faux Australian accent Tha Sak-rut) and have been doing my affirmations and trying to look on the bright side and all that. And yes, naysayers, I do feel better about myself and my life and really, if nothing else like, say incredible prosperity, riches beyond my wildest dreams, etc. comes of it, isn't that really enough? Anyway, those negative voices just begin to get, as S.O.v.2 says when S.O.v.1 pisses her off "reeewee reewee an-gee!", and then they fight with the positive thinking you've been doing and oh the battle!

I blame that in-fighting for the migraine. But then when I looked in the mirror this morning and realized my skin is clearing up (see post several weeks back - means I've ovulating probably) I realized it was probably a migraine brought on by hormones. Or maybe my affirmation "I'm so grateful to have beautiful skin" is taking affect... who knows... it's all bigger than myself and I release control over it, over it all! I'm even sitting here slack jawed... well, that may just be because my head hurts less when I do that... My mother did tell me the other weekend that I am not letting go enough. And she is probably right. I do have a tendency to over think - and face it folks if you're thinking about it, you're trying to control it! This is why I have stopped trying to fix the movie Flags of Our Fathers - a passtime S.O. and I enjoy after seeing a bad or film that didn't quite work. Makes for interesting conversation... but right now... my head hurts...

2007-03-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

PRESS RELEASE

What: “Live Theatre at the Gallery”
"4 at 40: Mothers’ Letters to Their Daughters”

When: April 26, 2007 - 7:30 pm Press Preview
April 27, 2007 - 7:30 pm - $12.00 Tickets at the door

Where: Dezart One Gallery
2688 Cherokee Way Palm Springs, CA 92264 (760) 328-1440

Dezart One Gallery proudly debuts "Live Theatre at the Gallery", with an original play written and performed by Daniela Ryan, “4 at 40: Mothers’ Letters to Their Daughters”. The story spans five generations of women in one California family, from the first settler, to a modern day mother. Each mother desperately reaches out to her daughter through a family tradition. On the mother’s 40th birthday, she writes a letter to her daughter in an attempt to bridge the generation gap between them, passing on valued lessons learned from her journey in life. The family’s history is, in essence, California’s own, from stoic determination to take the land, to prosperity, to the comforts and uncertainties of modern day life. Each mother learns something about herself as she shares her story with her daughter. For those who have a mother and/or a sister or daughter, you will relate to the characters as they capture the intimate portrait of relationships between women and their daughters and the generational and historical influence on those bonds.

Daniela Ryan is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Theatre Arts. In addition, she has a Masters degree in Film and Television from San Diego State University. Ms. Ryan has worked in the film industry for the past 10 years. She began acting at the age of 7, performing in local and community theatre throughout California. In Los Angeles, she co-wrote and performed in Demeter Theatre’s acclaimed play “Speaking of Evil”, the story of an ambivalent Nazi, Kurt Gerstein. She is a writer and associate producer of film, working with a local independent film production company. A fourth generation Californian, Ms. Ryan resides in the desert with her husband and two children.

Military Fatigue

2007-03-07T11:08:00.000-08:00

I have had a persistant interest in the war in Iraq since 2003. I started working for a company called Basra Entertainment, yes named after the city in Iraq, in June of 2003, for an expat Iraqi. One of the first projects we took on was a documentary project about Iraqi women and their plight under Saddam Hussein and after (never realized because of the situation in Iraq). Being the Associate Producer of the company I dove into the research. What I learned was shocking - Saddam Hussein was as much of a monster as any dictator there has ever been. The case for deposing him, simply because of his cruelty towards his own people, was strong. I wondered why the Administration didn't pull out this argument along side the WMD bogus one. Perhaps they considered Americans more self interested than they actually are. Claim, that if we don't invade, there will be a mushroom cloud spouting from our soil imminently and this will convince them. But claim the moral authority to depose a despot and they think it won't fly.

Tell the American people after 9/11 that what they can meaningfully do to 'help' the country is to shop. Ask them to sacrifice, to contribute to the war effort - like the American public was asked to do during WWII - and the Administration thinks it won't fly. Oddly enough, I believe, that had they asked for some sort of sacrifice instead of asking for consummerism the war would be more popular now, no matter the outcome. I think we can safely surmise that Karl Rove knows politics but knows sadly little about human nature... makes one wonder if he actually is...

Last night we watched "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib". Painful to watch and embarassing to say the least. "Proud to be an American" just does not hum itself in one's head after watching that. I have watched a number of documentaries on Iraq to this point and more in my Netflix cue to come. Our current project is a screenplay following two pre-teen boys in their lives in Iraq from late 2003 to 2006. The writing is hard. It is not a pleasant experience, but something about it feels also important. It is a little message but one that if we can convey may make us all feel just a little bit like a contributor instead of simply an observer.

Which brings me to my title. In this war, I've no doubt like in any, it is difficult to even be an observer. There have even been some documentaries about conspiracy theories which I have stopped watching in the middle or refused to watch at all, much to S.O.'s disgust. (Think he thinks I am trying to hide my head in the sand) But as a mother I do have to draw my line in the sand at exactly the place whereby if I cross it I will go into despair. It is not my children's fault this war is happening and they should not have to pay the price of a destraught mother. We all have to put up the wall at the boundary just before where we can continue to function. I feel like I have a pretty wide boundary, but there was a long period of several months where neither myself nor the President of our company could really continue to talk about Iraq as we did regularly. This screenplay has forced me to return to immersion in the subject and I am feeling fatigued. It is that fatigue that the MPs in the "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" speak of that once you get there you either break down or detach.

I don't blame anyone for not wanting to look at this war. Especially when we are stuck with an atrocious Administration who have usurped our Constitution in countless ways known and, certainly, unknown. It feels hopeless. The best we can do is hold our breath and wait for Nov. 2008 to roll around and then again for Jan. 2009. It is a long time to wait and we have to carry on. I have to continue to research, watch documentaries, write painful scenes of death and despair and hope that I can keep myself from slipping in so that I can continue to raise happy children.

Can any of us imagine ourselves in the place that families of wounded soldiers, Marines and sailors have found themselves in? Denial is a lifesaver for human beings. It most certainly has been for the families of military and the men and women during their service in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. But we must draw the line at institutional denial... and I think this is what we have seen for the past 6 years. Maybe now is the time for those who haven't yet, stand up and yell.

Why?

2007-02-14T12:30:00.000-08:00

Why do I have to move to a Google account on blogger... why have I been tagged... oh, alright...

ABC's About Me- a Lesson in Survey Tagging
A=Available - Nope
B=Best friend - sister, mama, S.O.
C=Cake or Pie- Well, that all depends doesn't it, on mood, on the baker, on the season... one can't just make blanket statements like that! What if they never let you have the other because you expressed a preference for one?
D=Drink- coffee in the morning, white wine at night
E=Essential item you use everyday- eye glasses
F=Favorite color - violet
G=Google your name (first), my IMDb page
H=Hometown- Hayweird
I-Indulgences- chocolate, white wine
J=January or February - Feb. because then it really feels like the new year has started in earnest
K=Kids- two lovelies
L=Life- is not a platitude
M=Marriage date- May 10, 1997
N=Number of siblings- 1 sister
O=Opinion (state one)- Everyone is scared of something, we are not kind enough about that
P=Phobias or Fears- dying before my children no longer need me, snakes, saying what you want to happen out loud
Q=Quote- I can't think of any! How lame am I? No wait, my favorite, from "The Secret Garden" (movie) "All will come to pass"
R=Reason to smile- when S.O.v.2 says "Oh my goss"
S=Season- What's a season?
T=Tag 3 or 4 peeps- ? Sister, Kate, Kimbaya, Arianna, Jane...
U=Unknown fact about you- When I was 18 I committed a robbery
V=Vegetable you don't like- haven't met one yet
W=Worst habit- picking my face, not standing up for myself - which is probably at the heart of it the same thing
X=Xrays- teeth, have them all
Y=Youth (a memory)- Chasing my sister in anger down the hallway, she closing the door just as I haul out and punch her, putting my fist through the door and both of us immediately teaming up to figure out how to prevent my mom from finding out... she didn't till years later because we put a white sheet of paper over the door and painted it...
Z=Zodiac sign- Libra

Driven by Hormones

2007-02-13T11:23:00.000-08:00

I am full of love today.

Which can only mean one thing (or maybe two: S.O.v.2 behaved very well this morning and that always starts the day out right!) - that tomorrow I will be an onery cuss. And being an onery cuss can only mean one thing - that I will be starting my period on the following day.

I realize how un-PC it is to admit that women have *gulp* hormones and that they *double gulp* influence how you feel and *yikes* behave, but I find it to be true. The older I get the more distinctly I can feel the daily hormonal shifts. Not all of them obviously. Or maybe it is having been pregnant that makes you more aware of your body. I dunno. But I do now notice patterns that I would have vehemently denied in younger incarnations of myself. Note above pattern.

Maybe it is my body saying "Hey you have only a few more years of this 'normal' hormone routine so you'd better appreciate it before the hot flashes come"... or maybe that was the pharmaceutical industry talking...

The one area where these patterns are most evident and irritating - literally, figuratively and any other kind of ly, is in my face. Just after the end of a cycle my face starts clearing up, softening up, gets nicer. Probably all those same hormones that made my skin so lovely when I was pregnant. I get a little glow, I'm a little sweet, a little cuddly. Then after ovulating and no fertilizing that angry egg sends a message to my face. "OK. Fine! You don't want to fertilize me. Look at this each morning for the next 2 1/2 weeks! Ha!" Unfertilized eggs are really mean.

And indeed my face becomes irritated. Itchy. Angry. Red. Breaking out. Throbbing mean pick at me zits.

And then it starts all over again... Sheesh!

Passing

2007-02-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

My grandmother died on Thursday of last week. She was 91.

It doesn't seem to matter how old someone is when they go, it still hurts. I feel tremendously sad that I was unable to make my grandparents more proud of me and my accomplishments. There is so much that I wanted to impress them with. But in the end the things they were proud of are the things that define me more than any performance or award or publishing contract could have.

And my grandma did get to read some of my short stories and enjoyed them. She had been telling me since I was able to write what a good writer I am. I was glad that I was able to share with her something other than a personal letter, although those were probably the most enjoyable for her.

And I was glad that she was able to read a story I wrote just for her, an attempt to tell her how much she has meant to me and my growth as a person. That story follows if anyone is interested...

What I Learned From My Grandma

When I was a young girl, just starting junior college, and starting on the path to my adult life, though still living at home, my mother became sick. She contracted a rare form of leukemia. The kind children get. Most adults, when they get it, don’t survive. But she had total faith in her doctor and when he said to her, We are going to take you to the very brink of death and then bring you back, she said, OK.
Because I was not even 20 and my mother barely 20 years older than me it was a shock when she got sick. No one was prepared. She was too young to be so sick. My mother had chemotherapy treatments for almost a year. Few days of chemo, hospital stay, then several weeks of recovery only to do the whole thing all over again. And then remission. The whole thing lasted a year and a half before it was all deemed ‘over’. But it seemed like an eternity.
At the beginning of my mother’s illness my sister left to go to college at UC Berkeley, only 30 miles away from where we lived; and later my mother’s boyfriend left her. I was left to deal with daily living, paying bills, cooking, cleaning and seeing to all the little details that are requisite to a life. Whenever someone would come to visit it was like they were dazed. I remember my favorite uncle coming to visit while my mother was in the hospital and coming into my room late at night and just crying and crying. I was still at the point in youth when being alone with adults was uncomfortable and strange. Here I was in our house with my uncle whom I loved so much, and he was so bereft that all he wanted to do was hold someone, for me to give him a hug and yet I couldn’t do it.
It was an odd time for me. I couldn’t sleep for weeks on end and finally I went to some quack doctor in Castro Valley for a prescription for sleeping pills. It was the first and last time I ever tried them. I felt like a fuzzy cucumber in the morning, all stiff and cold and no focus. I broke up with a boyfriend whom I loved terribly because I was so distracted by my mother’s illness that intimacy was difficult. Relating to my friends seemed weird and inconsequential. Though one weekend, probably in desperation to do something that felt even slightly normal, I stole my mother’s boyfriend’s car with two friends and drove down to Hollywood over Easter break. Just for three days, pretending there were no such things as IVs or chemo or parents even felt wonderfully freeing. We saw Pierce Brosnan in the Thrifty’s on Easter Sunday buying his two young children Easter baskets. I always liked him after that because somehow it seemed so human and not star-like for him to have forgotten baskets until the morning of. We met some people who worked in a restaurant on Hollywood Blvd. and spent our last night there on the floor of the manager’s apartment up the street. He seemed nice enough but made me nervous. When we got home I found out why. He called me several times, saying how much he loved me and wanted to be with me and the fact that he was a good 20 years older than me made no difference to him. I was thankful I hadn’t given him my address.
And I regularly took the keys to my mother’s brown Porsche 944 and drove it around with some friend or other. The nurses had insisted we take away her keys when she checked in to the hospital. I got away with it actually. No one, except my sister, of course, realized that I had driven the thing and she was primarily jealous that she didn’t have the opportunity to drive it. I even went to my mother’s boat sometimes and just sat there on the bow or slept there overnight and then drove to the hospital in the morning. All these things added up to odd behavior and had someone been keeping a tally they would have worried about me. At the time these activities made me feel somewhat better.
It was just my way, I suppose, of dealing with the fact that my mother might be dead before I even turned 20. Strangely enough it was my mother who kept me on course. She insisted, in a drug addled stupor one of her first nights on chemotherapy, that I should continue school, continue plays and continue work. If I hadn’t gotten that message from her my odd behavior might have slipped into the realm of dangerous.
Finally, when my mother was declared to be in remission from the leukemia we all heaved a sigh of relief and everyone went back to life as normal. Except me. Probably it didn’t seem normal to my mother or my sister either. At the time, I was just finishing my junior college requirements and had just been accepted into UC Berkeley. My mother was now back home, but I still felt funny, at odds inside my skin. I couldn’t put it into words then and even now an exact description eludes me. I was, of course, as excited as any college student starting their first semester of university. I experienced all the hope and self confidence of any young student, yes, but underlying it all was stark panic and confusion. My mother had been gravely ill and now she was fine. I was just supposed to go on with life as if it had never happened. No one ever talked about it except to say things like, Oh good, and, Well, let’s hope she doesn’t relapse, and things like that. But nobody ever said anything about what affect it all had on me or anyone else for that matter. Maybe I am selfish to think that someone might have done so, and I certainly was too intimidated to reach out to anyone and say, Hey, I’m still struggling here, Can someone help me parse this out and figure out how I get on with life? So, I did what I suppose anyone does in those situations, I just moved awkwardly forward.
The first weeks of a new school year are a flurry. Classes to register for, student loans to apply for, books to buy and various other details to be sorted. And most importantly for me, auditions for the semester’s plays. Since we lived just a few cities away I decided that I would stay at home for at least the first semester. Thoughts of doing otherwise brought the panic I had felt during my mother’s illness back to the surface; and images of my mother lying dead on the bathroom floor, gathering flies, haunted my mind. When I told my mother I was planning on living at home for a while, I think she was grateful and relieved too. She had been lonely in the hospital and when she was home, in between treatments, it was just the two of us. When chemo made her lose all her hair, I had started to rub her head each night and we’d make up little chants for it to grow back curly and really blonde. Then when she started to lose muscle mass and be in pain all over I would massage her whole body. It made her sleep better, I think, and it made me feel better being able to do something that helped. When she was in the hospital, also, I brought her macrobiotic food, which I had just discovered, whenever I could. I would wake up early, cook her food for the day, drive to San Francisco to the hospital to be there before breakfast, leave all her food in the refrigerator with instructions for the nurses to give her that instead of the regular hospital food and then be to school for my morning classes or rehearsals or whatever. That made me feel better too.
Now that she was in remission yet not quite back to normal, my need to do something to make her feel better was no less. Sure, I wanted to go straight to the dorms like my sister had done. And I envied her that experience. But who else was going to stay with my mother if not I?
When I was cast in a good roll in a graduate student directed play that first semester I felt vindicated in a way. I felt this was a bigger pond than the one I had been feeding in. I had never had any problems getting cast in plays, managing to get a role in almost everything I tried out for but it was all high school and community theatre and small summer stock in my hometown. If I got a role at Berkeley I reasoned, that proved that I was a good actress. Back then my identity was almost 100% Actor and the thought of maybe someday having a professional career as such made me happier than anything ever had. The role, a middle-aged woman, with a child, held captive in Harold Pinter’s “One For The Road”, made me almost feel as if my future was assured. And at that point in my life I needed assurances.
At first it all seemed to go well. I would wake up early and take the BART to school, attend my classes, study and knock around campus until rehearsals and then take the last BART train home at night. I loved those first weeks, feeling probably for the first time, independent and almost adult. Reading and dozing near the bridge that led to the Theatre Department offices on the bank of Strawberry Creek was nearly sublime. My classes were stimulating and the coffee houses in Berkeley – before there was ever generic Starbucks – were always abuzz and endlessly fascinating with all kinds of people coming in and out. People watching alone I could waste three, four hours.
But after a few weeks of this schedule, and add to that working as a waitress on the weekends, I was beat. I also came very close to missing the last BART train out of the Berkeley station on several occasions. I would get out of rehearsals at around 10 or 10:30 p.m. and run my ass off, knapsack full of books and all, the twelve or so blocks from campus to the station, hurdle myself dangerously down the stairs and slip in through the closing doors, sweaty and exhausted. God help me if I needed to stop at the machine and get a ticket! If I missed the connecting train in Oakland, which did happen a couple of times, I would have to catch a bus the rest of the way home, making the normally one hour trip over two. This would put me home and in bed well after midnight and up again at 6am to do the whole thing all over again. Even at the age of 20 I couldn’t keep it up and something had to give.
In the summer before I started Berkeley I had performed in a musical on the campus of my junior college. “Over Here” it was called and I had a good role, lots of dancing and singing. My dancing partner hated me for some reason, maybe because I was fat or not pretty enough, or maybe because I had rebuffed his amorous advances a few times, but probably the former. Anyway, he thought he was too good. His bad behavior did endear me to others in the cast and I became fast friends with all the girls around my same age. Two of the girls, Amy and Eva, were also starting Berkeley in the Fall and we made plans to meet up. Walking across campus one day I ran into Eva. She had decided to give up theatre and go into the sciences so all her classes were on the other side of the campus so seeing her was a happy surprise. We laughed and bounced and screamed when we ran into each other, all the things that teen girls do. Over a latte – which, back then was quite cool and exotic – I found out that she was living in a house owned by her brother-in-law and was looking for roommates. This put a bug in my ear. We exchanged numbers. Later that night the last BART train was late getting into Berkeley station and caused me to miss my connecting train. As I sat on that bus, watching Oakland pass by, all I could think about were those banners you see on huge apartment buildings facing freeways and busy avenues, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now”. If I lived in Berkeley, I’d be home by now.
I didn’t want to tell my mom I had to move out. But I couldn’t figure how else I could go on. I worked up a fight in my head where my mother would tell me that I should quit the play. I would get indignant in this imaginary fight, as if she had just told me to stop breathing. But when the conversation actually happened what she did say was, If you move out then that’s it, you can never come back.
It wasn’t what I expected but it was a blow nonetheless. Of course, now, in hindsight and with an adult perspective I can see what she was really saying. She was telling me, in her way, that she didn’t want me to move out, maybe she wasn’t really ready after her illness to be left alone in the house. But she was also trying to convey to me the seriousness of my decision, that I was taking a step into adulthood and she wanted me to be sure I was ready. I didn’t get any of that message at the time though.
My rent was $200.00 a month. It seemed like so much at the time and I was to share the big room, which was really the living room, of the house. In college life every possible space is squeezed for accommodations to lower the rent for everyone. Or in this case, to make as much money for the landlord as possible. At first, I had the living room all to myself with my friend Eva in the ‘real’ bedroom, which was actually dining room, and another girl out in a little cottage in the back. Later in the year, in a relieving turn of events, my sister would move in and share the big room with me.
I kept my job, so, I was still home on the weekends mostly. But I felt that my mother was annoyed with my presence there. So, in short order, instead of taking the BART I started driving my car to and from Berkeley. Which, in Berkeley, meant having to move it every morning and night so that I wouldn’t get parking tickets. This was a huge hassle and the reason I hadn’t brought it with me to begin with. The first month went fine. I bought my books, paid my rent, bought food. But by the second month, things started to go wrong. I got several parking tickets at $25.00 a pop. Traffic enforcement has the whole town locked up so that getting them is really unavoidable if you spend much time there at all. Great earner for the city of Berkeley, but to a college student a distressful event. In subsequent years living in and around Berkeley I threw up my hands and simply began budgeting in parking tickets in my monthly expenses. If I ever got less than one a week it was like getting a bonus.
Then there was an additional book to buy for some class, though I don’t remember which. It was a doozy of a book at $50.00 and not knowing any better I went right out and bought it. Turned out I didn’t even need it until very late into the semester. But to my mind this was an urgent need. You didn’t get caught without a book in your fist semester at Berkeley! I was already struggling with ‘smart-issues’ as it was. My sister, who was also still attending Berkeley was always the smart one in the family. I was always the ‘creative one’ or worse, the ‘dramatic one’, which in my mind meant I was not very bright but somewhat entertaining. The idea of not having a book on the syllabus sent me into absolute idiot-panic. For sure, someone would suddenly notice me in the room, go back to my college application and realize a terrible, terrible mistake had been made in admitting me.
I was despairing one night at the hostess stand at the restaurant where I worked weekends, trying to surreptitiously beg for tables, (I didn’t even have enough self regard at that point to openly beg!) when one of the line cooks, Will, I think was his name, came up and joined the conversation. It was getting late and it still hadn’t picked up on a Friday night and I was lamenting the fact that I would probably not make any money. The conversation came around to my imminent rent and my skimpy bank account and Will offered to lend me the money. Really?, I said, overwhelmed with relief. I’ll pay you back in a month, I promised, and he whipped out the cash right there.
My rent was paid and I went back to stressing about all the normal college things, grades, boss, friends, etc. I paid Will back just as planned. Right after my play finished with rehearsals I picked up some extra shifts and actually made some extra money. I was feeling pretty good about myself. So when Will came to me and asked to borrow money, with some story that his little girl’s mother’s car broke down, or something, I said, Sure. I felt confident that since I had paid him back on time he would return the favor. But he did no such thing. I never saw a penny from him and, in fact, he disappeared. He just stopped showing up for work or answering his phone a couple weeks later and I was completely rooked. Humiliated, and embarrassed I dared not tell anyone about the whole business. But, here was the beginning of the month coming and rent due and once again I was short.
I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t think of what else to do. I called my mom. Too bad, I told you, you were on your own, she said and went on to change the subject like I had just called to chat. My sister didn’t have any money either and I couldn’t think of anyone else to call. So, I called my Grandma.
By the time I talked to her, I must have worked myself up into a frenzy. All I could imagine was me being kicked out of my room for not paying the rent. SInce I couldn’t stay with my sister, because she lived in the dorms, I pictured me banging on the front door of my childhood home, the locks having been changed, rain pouring down and my mother peeking through the curtains mouthing ‘go away’. This didn’t happen, of course, because my Grandma said of course she would send me money as long as I needed, till I could get my finances sorted out. We talked a little about how I had gotten into this situation. I don’t know if I confessed my bad loan, I may have, but I don’t remember. She talked to me a little about budgeting and advised that next semester I go to my professors to find out what books I might need right away and what others I might be able to get later. Just tell them you are on a tight budget and paying your own way through school, they’ll understand, she’d said.
My Grandma has always been a calming, happy influence in my life. My sister remembers distinctly my Grandma being a speed demon behind the wheel of a car. I don’t remember this, but certainly it was only because I trusted her completely and it would never have occurred to me that she could falter and crash the car. And she never got angry with me but once that I can remember. I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, probably fiddling with something I wasn’t supposed to, and got caught. She raised her voice and for an hour I hid in my uncle’s room, sure that I would never feel good again.
My mother used to put my sister and I on a plane to Los Angeles to visit my grandparents over the summer. I cried the way down, already missing my mother, but I would sob and sob on the way home knowing that it would be months until I could see my Grandma and Grandpa again. When we would arrive at the house there would always be a little brass canister of pennies on the dresser. We would count up all the pennies and wrap them in paper. Sometimes there would be $2 or maybe $3 and we were allowed to keep this. On a couple of occasions Grandma took us in the bank to cash them in. That was my first lesson that if you save your pennies they really add up. I always considered very carefully how I would spend my special dollar.
Inevitably on these visits my Grandma would be sewing something, either for us or herself. Back then it really was more economical to sew yourself a new dress or skirt than to buy store bought. I learned the basics standing alongside her and her Singer humming away. She made it all seem so easy that I was emboldened to try. I sewed lots of things over the years; a prom dress, Halloween costumes, shirts and slacks. I even sewed matching outfits for myself, my sister and our ‘sister’ Angela, who was a foreign exchange student from Colombia in our high school come to live with us when her original host family had more ideas for her about house cleaning and babysitting than schooling. We wore those outfits over a long weekend sailing out to Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. They were aqua-marine shirts and stripped white and blue pants. They didn’t last a summer of wear. But I still get a little slush of pride when I look at pictures of the three of us in those outfits.
I also watched my Grandma cook meal after meal when we visited. She made a good many holiday meals that were memorable too. Her food was pretty typical American cuisine but I always looked forward to her cooking. My mother herself was an OK cook but I think she looked at it rather as a burden than as a creative pursuit so sometimes we would have a bland ham steak with unsalted mashed potatoes or boiled ocre (though to her credit I think she only did that once, it was just that awful that I remember it so well). My mother, being a baby boomer and a working woman of keen intelligence felt undermined, I think, in some regard by the daily grind of preparing meals on top of having worked a full day. It certainly was not her most favorite thing to do. But I think I absorbed some of my Grandma’s love for cooking by osmosis if not by direct teaching. The whole house was her domain, of course, but the kitchen seemed to be her special place of peace and calm. Here, you came and went at her discretion, and I remember my uncles and Grandpa being shooed out on occasion. To me she seemed happiest in the kitchen, that is to say the activity of cooking made her focused and steady and there was an air of assurance about her that I longed for. I share that assurance in the kitchen now though I am not so deft at keeping my own children and husband out of it. My own mother did come around a few years after my sister and I left home, when cooking finally ceased being a necessary chore and could enter the realm of recreation. After some nearly 70 years of cooking, I think, my Grandma now looks at it less as fun and more as a necessary chore. The arthritis in her hands makes it difficult and no doubt the pain and lack of strength makes it a weary task for her.
One of the genuine treasures my Grandma gave me in the cooking arena is her cheesecake recipe. She claims to have gotten it originally out of some magazine or cookbook or other and not to have created it herself. But years of adjusting and transcribing the recipe from one soiled recipe card to another have made it uniquely hers. And to her credit has made me quite famous with my friends. I am a great lover of cheesecake and have tried all kinds but none quite like my Grandma’s recipe. I suspect its not so much the combination of ingredients as the preparation that makes it so delicious. Don’t completely blend the cream cheese mixture, its better when a little lumpy; It cooks better on a cool day; Leave it in the refrigerator two days before eating. I have myself doubled the recipe and added extra vanilla. But the accolades and smiles I have gotten from Grandma’s cheesecake are definitely due to her refinements, not mine.
My Grandma sent me $200 a month for three months that fall. Let me know when you are on your feet, she’d said. When I called her to tell her to stop sending the checks, that I was fine now, she practically insisted on continuing to send them, worried I suppose that I would falter again and trying to allay that possibility. I declined though and offered to pay her back at which she firmly pishawed me. Its not that those $200 made such a difference as such, though they did pay my rent during those months. It was a sort of culmination of all her lessons, those intentional and not; years of standing and watching my Grandma do her daily routine; and finally the unyielding kindness and gentleness with which she always dealt with me that finally put it all together for me. From that fall forward I was always able to make whatever I had go as far as it needed. I was able to spot a deal as well as figure out how to make it from scratch if that was going to be cheaper or better. And able to spot the moment when a splurge is in order, like a great huge slice of creamy cheesecake.
My natural frugality was enhanced by all of my Grandma’s lessons too, and has made me self reliant in a day and age of convenience foods, ready made drinks, store bought cheap clothes etc. It makes me confident that, if, say, I should be transported back in time 100 years somehow, I would not starve, nor be bored by my own food. I’d be able to make a dress and balance a budget. I also wouldn’t be afraid or intimidated by food or house and hearth. I know so many women who look at a recipe as a foreign language and carry it as a badge of honor that the only thing they can make is an espresso. Not to mention many, many men.
They may not seem much in cosmopolitan times, the domestic arts, despite the Food Channel and Martha Stuart influences, but it is as much a level of self reliance and confidence to be able to navigate a cookbook or a sewing machine as it is to be able to balance a checkbook or invest wisely. In either case, if you can’t do it yourself or at least figure out how it all works, you have necessarily beholdened yourself to the kindness and sincerity of others. That is not a bad thing if you can absolutely trust those who are taking care of your affairs and your needs just the way you like them. But as women’s lib moved women into the workplace it made the kitchen and the more domestic activities seem anathema to a liberated life.
But what my Grandma really gave me when she helped me that semester was a little perspective. And with perspective comes the ability to think ahead and plan. And that is really all cooking, cleaning, sewing, budgeting and all the other crafty pursuits that necessarily come along with having a life, need to do them well. We all have to do it and one way or the other we will. She gave me a little advice, a little skill, a little help and then a lot of love and faith and that soup made me more capable to take care of myself, come what may. Since college I have had times that have been flush and times that have been lean and in either case I have been able to cull together the lessons from my Grandma and get by and even treat myself. Because there really is nothing more comforting than a nice slice of cheesecake.

Dates

2007-01-30T14:16:00.000-08:00

My play, "4 at 40" which I wrote and will perform, now has dates.

Thursday, April 26, 2007 7:30 pm Press Preview
Friday, April 27, 2007 7:30 pm Performance, Tickets $12.00 at the door.

Location:
Dezart One Gallery
2688 Cherokee Way
Palm Springs, CA 92264
(760) 328-1440

If these performances go well then we will add, probably two per month, for the next several months until summer - wherein it will be too hot and anyone with sense and/or money flees the desert.

Only A Moment Away

2007-01-23T14:35:00.000-08:00

Oh, it's coming. It may seem like just a small thing but it will irritate you to no end. It already irritates me in its first incarnation I've heard.

And that is "blog about us!" Some I'm-so-clever Adman or woman will someday be saying this to Taco Bell executives and Fruit of the Loom marketing departments and retailers of all stripes... Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are already half there. It is the new version of "tell your friends about it" that marketers have been attempting for years.

They and we know word of mouth is extremely rampant and always has been. I mean don't you find, "Oh yeah, I tried that burrito. It was great" more convincing than any way they can possibly photograph beans spilling from a tortilla. They say a picture tells a thousand words... how does that go? But your friends are way more convincing...

It will not be very much longer now till the marketing world is trying to convince you to extend your mouth to your keyboard and will be begging you to "blog about it". It's annoying already, isn't it?

Thank you KCRW for introducing me to this new slogan that I am sure I can look forward to ruining my day for years to come!

Passing of a President

2007-01-03T14:25:00.000-08:00

I have held my keyboard tongue for a week and now I just have to blog about it.

Former President Gerald Ford died last week. A sad event, no doubt. He was a resident of our area and there was a service and he lay in the church up the street from our house to be recieved by the public for 24 hours. He was, by all accounts, a good man. And everyone has to appreciate that his position gave his wife, Betty Ford, the platform to bring drug abuse and, importantly, recovery to the fore for this nation like it never had before. For that alone we should all be grateful that he was president.

But what I kept hearing last week was that news agencies were having to search the archives for SOMETHING to say about his presidency and what they came up with was: the pardoning of Nixon.

Now, I had never really known what pardoning Nixon was or was not to have supposed to do until Ford's death last week. Afterall, I was a little kid during Watergate and the aftermath... even Chevy Chase's Ford impersonation was only caught by me in reruns of Saturday Night Live several years later. So, I was a little surprised when I heard Ford's explanation for pardoning Nixon was that 'the country would not have been able to focus on the President nor any other matter at hand if Nixon was being dragged from courtroom to courtroom'. OK. I get it.

Surprising though, was the UTTER lack of irony with which Republican and Republican-leaning newscasters and pundits explained this! No one dared reflect on the irony of Republicans prefering that one of their own - who'd been caught in the act - be pardoned so that 'the country could move on' when the instant the very next DEMOCRATIC President was elected into office, what did they do!? Impeach him!

Hypocracy seems to run rampant amongst the dogmatically Republican, neocon, conservative and religious right. All those people who shed tears of gratitude for what Ford saved the country from jumped right on the bandwagon, frothing at mouth, when a Republican Congress bullied the country into the very same, albeit unwarranted, mess! For nothing, to boot!

I wish someone last week had had the balls to at least say to the American people, "too bad the Republican Party didn't spare us the impeachment of an innocent President"... Well, I am saying it to the few Americans who read my blog, and perhaps a few foreigners among them.

And the more ironic, though I haven't actually heard anyone say it explicitly yet, is the notion that the current President Bush shouldn't be impeached for his lies and the many deaths they have caused simply to 'spare the nation' the pain it would cause to see the President impeached, and Oh the slow down of the workings of Congress. Why nothing would get done if Bush were to be impeached!

I suppose to be a Republican you have to believe that causing the country pain and bringing the goverment to a grinding halt is only worthwhile if it's not 'actual' pain but concocted out of malice.... Real pain, like admitting that our President has caused the loss of massive numbers of American and Iraqi lives, and changed lifes through disability and trauma beyond recognition, and also lost of Billions of dollars through mismanagement and fraud perpetrated by the Friends of the Administration and/or out of plain stupidity, which our children and their children will have to pay back, is just too... Oh, how you say? Painful? Oh, that damn reality. It's so harsh, isn't it?

Street Crud-ier

2006-12-20T11:34:00.000-08:00

It's nice to have little ones. They care. Even if they are not exactly sure what that means, or the reason they care is because they need you to take care of them... still, it's nice.

I was up all night sick. S.O. got it, then S.O.v.1 got it, then S.O.v.2 got it... Sometimes I dodge the bullet but in this case, nope. But S.O.v.2 woke up with me several times as I rushed to the bathroom. When I said, "Mama is feeling sick". She just said "Oh" in her sweet little way and held my hand back to bed. When you're sick, you always want your mama... but when you're the mama sometimes it's good to have your baby.

Too Scary Ah Me

2006-12-19T13:38:00.000-08:00

...as S.O.v.2 says when something scares her. Well, we watched "An Inconvenient Truth" last night and that's what I say!

Save our planet... I don't care if you take the pledge just that you do these things...
http://www.treasureourplanet.org/pledge_now.htm

Street Crud

2006-12-12T13:33:00.000-08:00

I have been mildly sick for the past couple of weeks. What S.O. calls 'the crud'. It is very annoying and is only aggravated by things such as lame and slow computer repairmen that are holding up my edit; the utter lack of a suitable holiday party wardrobe and the necessity of *gulp* having to SHOP!; and mucky weather that will neither sunshine nor rain.

After hearing that my play is a go I had a head full of steam to edit. However, I have been slowed to an almost complete halt, except my brain which keeps editing and rehearsing all by itself. It's nice to know that my brain still works the same way. When I was regularly involved in plays (i.e. BC - before children) my brain would absorb the play and whether I be in math class, on the freeway, at work serving a shrimp cocktail to a wanna be pimp (I'm thinking of working in restaurants in Oakland... now there are wanna be pimps everywhere... and we used to be special), my brain was thinking how to deliver a line or trying to make connections between what other characters said about mine and what my motivation was, and what the meaning of the whole play was, etc. etc. Even in my dreams. I would often dream of rehearsing or performing, seeing myself performing the way I believed I could or discovering new ways to approach a scene. It was all very helpful... in the midst of rehearsals! Now that I am stimied it doesn't feel so much helpful as it does aggravating.

So, needless to say, despite the fact that I probably will not have my computer back yet and Christmas (i.e. shopping, wrapping, hiding presents from curious toddlers and baking) will be crunching upon me, I will start to rehearse anyway. I will just take what I have and mess around with it on my makeshift stage in my boss' back office and see what comes up.

And hopefully by then my 'crud' will be finished... blasted nose and sore throat!

Let Us Play

2006-12-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

I had my presentation to the art gallery on Thursday of last week and have been basking in the potential for the past 24 hours. I got a message on my machine at work saying they want to pursue. I won't mention that they said they were "blown away" by my presentation, because I don't want to seem conceited... but that was my favorite part of the message.

I don't care what anyone says, a little validation is always good. And even though during my rehearsals for the presentation I knew I was doing good work I can't say as I felt totally 'on' during the performance. I was mostly relaxed but there is a portion of you that is just pretending to be relaxed when you perform. If you are too relaxed you run the risk of being boring, and/or missing what is going on. I felt like I could have done so much better, which makes the gallery's comments that much more validating. Oh just wait till they see me actually on!

But I am not resting on my laurels. By no means! I am ready now to get down and work on the play, parring it down to a manageable size. My self-imposed moratorium on working on the play has now been extended as our computer just went into Geek Squad for repair... and that'll take about a week! (They're so slow!) Then in January I start the work of rehearsal and producing. Yep, it's a one-woman show in more ways than one! Although they are providing the space, which is great, and a posting on their website and no doubt will help me in other ways as well, it is all up to me to bring in the audience! Marketing. Yikes! It doesn't feel so daunting though as I had always assumed. Or maybe I am just more confident now... that age thing helps sometimes!

But probably the best part about this whole experience so far is chosing material that I am just as thrilled about now as when I first had that 'aha' moment a few months ago. It makes the work a joy rather than a chore. Who knows where that sort of inspiration comes from. All I hope, at the moment, is that I continue to do good work and enjoy the process and that the audience that finds me/I find enjoys the play as much as I do!

Addendum to 8/29/06

2006-12-04T15:23:00.000-08:00

S.O. has very graciously pointed out that I failed to mention this in my "Now it's time to stop" entry of 8/29/06 this one:

The OhMiBod personal vibrator that you hook up to your iPod... because you didn't know you needed it, did you?

http://www.ohmibod.com/overview.html

I would say "only in America" but can I just point out the iGallup? Only in America, or Japan...

Guug

2006-11-27T14:30:00.000-08:00

It is one of those melancholy days... who knows why, although the Monday after a holiday, wherein fun was had, is always a bit of a let down.

Or maybe it's just my negative voices getting the better of me. I am trying to ignore them. I've made committments (only to myself, but those are the ones you beat yourself up for the most) to write/perform a play and to write a novel. Here is where my years in Hollywood-baby (S.O. taught S.O.v.1 to say "LA baby" while on our way there the other weekend) failures kick in... It is the same conversation that comes up in my head over and over. If you already failed at something what makes you think it will be any different this time? It is hard to get around all the 'no's. Nos for acting, nos for improv, nos for scripts - even to read them!, nos for gainful employment in the Industry, nos for 'gainful' employment in any industry (although I've always been wildly successful at getting those barely-scrapin'-by jobs) - someone at a temp agency once told me, "Ms. Ryan, you're really ONLY qualified to work in the entertainment industry so we can't really send you out on anything else" - because my BRAIN stops FUNCTIONING when I step into a doctor's office or real estate office of course!

So the negative voices in my head challange me with all this imperical evidence that has been logged for the past 20 years and all I have to combat it with when they say, "Why should you succeed in anything when you haven't so far?" is "'Cause I wanna. So there. Nana-na-nana". This is where some religion might come in handy, I suppose. But since I don't really want to take sides in the spiritual wars, nor do the research to find the one best suited to my disposition, or to just leap into the path of least resistance (i.e. the ones my family members practice/have practiced), I'm pretty much on my own. S.O. looks at me like a deer caught in headlights when I complain about this sort of thing (the inner voices thing, not the religion thing) and doesn't know what to say. I, frankly, wouldn't know what to say to myself either if I was complaining to me about my uncertainties - OK wait I am talking to me about... but I'm not... never mind.

The tacit impulse is to just crawl under a rock, or a corner and rock, or listen to loud rock... and weep, "I can't do it". But I have also made a committment to myself to not let my negative voices get the better of me.

On days like this it is dangerous to get back to work. As anyone who has tried to create something when you are having a bad day knows it can be a disaster. If I went to my writing today the negative voices would just start picking on specifics and that's never good. And then you make bad choices and screw things up that you just have to fix later... hell, it's not even a good idea to make dinner when you're in a bad mood.

Perhaps the only thing to do is to try and deflect. Work on something else, start a pretend project my negative voices can tell me I'll never succeed at, practice my guitar - 'cause I already KNOW I suck at that, go to the gym, get them to criticize my appearance! and then when they are on a roll I can work again... yeah, that's right negative voices, my thighs ARE abominably large!

I Love LA

2006-11-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

I love LA like you love an ex-boyfriend, maybe even like a bad ex-boyfriend. You broke up for a damn good reason, but everytime you see each other again, you just can't remember why. Face it, you know that even entertaining the idea of getting back together is probably not good for you, good for your loved ones... You've changed but really, has he? You know that jumping back into that old relationship will screw up everything you have now... but still... you just can't stop yourself from wondering.

And LA feels like home still. Not that here doesn't. It's just that LA is more like the 'life' you see on TV (is it any wonder) - full of interesting things to do, interesting people, interesting possibilities. In LA you know that life could change at any moment - for better or worse. It is like perpetually holding a lottery ticket that only 100 other people bought into. If you met the right people, got the right job, the planets aligned just so.

Life in a suburb is essentially the antithisis of this. It is predictable, secure, safe(r). And our suburb in particular, because it is a vacation destination and retirement town - read: the company business is waiting to relax and waiting to die, which for some people may be the same thing - so it is not just teaming with possibilities. Face it, nothing spectacular or unexpected is likely to happen here. The population just doesn't want it to. But the payoff is time. Time to relax, time to contemplate, time to create. Less time in the car certainly.

But still... he does look really good in those jeans....

Really Modified Mat

2006-11-09T16:57:00.000-08:00

Some days you just want to knock around the house, do some laundry, hang with the kids... you know, NOT drive a car... and especially wrangle children, scratch that, toddlers around public spaces. There were plenty of things we could have done and in fact I had sort of suggested a visit to the park's playground last night. So instead we played outside, freesbie and took some indoor toys outside for fun. But after naptime I was feeling a little bit guilty for not going to the gym.

So Mama says "Who wants to go inside and do pilates with me?" Of course, all takers so off we go, lay the mats in the living room in front of the TV and turn on the DVD.

Except S.O.v.2 who is now 2 1/2 and probably close to 30lbs decides that I am not allowed to be on HER mat. There are only two so, S.O.v.1 and his sister each get one and I end up on the carpet. Not three moves in S.O.v.2 decides that she wants to do pilates with me. Not on her mat - ON ME. So now my "powa-haus" is much heavier and bulkier... I bet there's not a DVD for that. But what's worse we are not allowed to do the ex-a-ciz-ess (in my DVD the chicky's giving the class are Australian) ON her mat! So I remain on the carpet, toddler on me... Where is the photographer when you need them?

Must Be Genetic

2006-10-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

I have observed in my own little significant others that some behaviors seem to be just... well, genetic. We know that boys are different from girls, of course, in the obvious physical ways. They have an entirely different way of concentrating and thinking and working things out as we know from our own relationships. But I have noticed a disturbing trend...

S.O.v.1 was heard the other day in his room with his sister to say "You go ask Mama for moie wader". That being bad enough, she did it! She is a love and a sweet little girl, but she is no pushover, ooooohoohoo no! She has her own mind and she will exercise it by whatever means possible. But when it comes to doing things for her brother she just... does it! What gets me, more than her compliance, is his lack of chagrin in asking.

Many a time when I have been picking up toys I have tried to bribe, cajoll, entice, force him to pick up toys. Most of the time he won't do much, if anything at all. But when he says, "No tanks, Mama. You do it" my blood nearly boils! Those are the moments when you want to run out of the house screaming "There's no hope!"

We women have been accused for years of remaining willfully ignorant to tasks we wished to avoid; lawn mowing, tire changing, checkbook balancing. But I propose men do this too. My S.O. is befuddled by toilet cleaning, cooking and organizing and putting away child clothing. And why is that, when he is a champion diaper changer, dishwasher and laundry doer (without the actual putting away of the clean clothes), because he does not want to do these things. He perceives these things as tasks he would not like to accomplish, that he would find no scrap of pleasure in, that he would not be allowed to become so absorbed in (like dishwashing) that we would all leave him alone for a time.

So, is S.O.v.1 just following Daddy's example? Not that S.O. actually has ever said to me "No thanks, hon. You can do it" for obvious reasons. And is S.O.v.2 just following Mama's lead in picking up because if she doesn't it will be there tomorrow, and next week, and next month? Except she doesn't roll her eyes and sigh in exasperation.

The other day - we've been on the go for the past several weeks with a visit from S.O.'s mom, a vacation to Big Bear, a conference weekend for me and a camping weekend - first for the kids actually - and so, routines being disrupted many tasks fall by the wayside. I was scrubbing the tub needless to say why, the other day, and I found it strangely satisfying. It was a relief to be back in our routine but it was not just that. Dare I say, lest this come back to haunt me someday which is probably will, it was enjoyable a task in and of itself. I understand why some women find pleasure in housekeeping, over and above the pleasure one finds in a task accomplished. There was something simple and fundamental, maybe even nurturing, in making it nice for myself and my family. That was Thursday. By Sunday I was ready to get back to work and out of the house. I am a liberal and a feminist you know, just 'cause I like a clean bathroom doesn't make me Phyllis Schlafly! (Why didn't anyone every make fun of her name anyway?)

American Marketing: Finding Exciting New Ways to Give You Less For More!

2006-10-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

Now I know you have all heard about and probably so far experienced Starbucks price hike. The company said it would be no big deal "just a nickle" what harm could that do, right? And Stephen Colbert belittled the discontented murmur on The Colbert Report, teasing that the increase will cost him all of a nominal $8.00 over the course of the year.

Price increase, smice increase I say. Why? My standard order, Mocha Frappacino Tall no whip, went up to $3.15. OK, fine, I say. I want it anyway. But when I got the cup holding that delicious cooling wakeup juice what did I behold but the cup is smaller! Ever so slightly so you might not notice. Which is most likely the objective. And if you were a w/ whip person rather than a sans whip like myself you really would not notice.

But I did! I have slugged a good many into my car's cup holder and continued on my driving around town errands for work. Normally the cup, condensation and all, fit nice and snug. Now I know my car is deteriorating, ever so slowly, and who isn't frankly. But not so that a cup would now have room to spare! I picked up the cup to take that first sip at the next stoplight and it felt different even. I took a good long look at the cup, looked back to my sense memory of the last Mocha Frappacino no whip I'd had and the cup is shorter and slightly skinnier.

Not that anyone in America really needs the few extra calories you'll now miss in your smaller more expensive Starbucks. I certainly don't. It's just a little underhanded and unseemly. Remember the Andy Rooney segment on 60 Minutes where he complains that the volumn in a can of coffee is ever shrinking? Well, they do it to us at every turn and at the same time announce "New and Improved!".

Despite the enthusiastic protestations of the Founder and CEO of Starbucks claiming love of the product and committment to quality, and health insurance to his employees, it seems he also has a healthy dose of committment his bottom line as well. More fleecing... oi.

Long

2006-09-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

I wish I had read the memo (the one I wish someone had written me about 20 years ago) that said "Happiness does not mean the absence of longing".

I long for somethings that are, probably, completely out of reach, and for some that are possible with hard work, maybe.

I long for a career as an actor. A pursuit tried and not won. Not everyone can be the king...

I long to perform and I long to be on stage. Oddly, I feel most myself when I am performing. I feel all the vital parts of me come to the surface and my doubts subside. There is nothing I do better, in my own estimation. But, like space travel, it's a skill I rarely use... I'm sure Buzz Aldridge can relate.

I long for more laughing and fun in my relationship. It is the thing that brings you close together. Now that the 'season' of work has started for S.O. we are like ships that pass, "See ya round the other side of the world".

I long for my writing to find a home, an audience, readers, viewers, to be acknowledged.

I long to direct, to create an experience like the ones I so love. I directed three films in grad school, each one challanging and exhilarating, each taxed me in every way. But I loved it.

I long for the community of my friends, in the flesh. I have this community only electronically now, except for short visits here and there, one way or the other. The upside of an electronic community is that you can create new friends in places you might never physically get to. I have now new friends in Iraq and Romania. It's amazing when you think about it. And I continue to bridge the gap via emails with old friends in England, Pennsylvania, Washington, New York... My community is now a spiderweb across the globe.

I long for all these things and yet I am happy. I will remember in about 16 years to write a memo to my kids, to make sure they know not to put off being happy just because your heart wants more.

Pockets of Peace

2006-09-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

There are really far too many things to worry about these days. And like most worriesome things they are largely out of our control. Modern life is clearly full of too much information, too many goods and services, too much technology and time-saving products to be completely comfortable anymore. Ironically most of these 'modern' conveniences are supposed to make us more comfortable.

We travelled to the mountains this past weekend for a four day family vacation. Just the four of us, no visiting friends, no visiting family, just relaxing in the woods, feeding the ducks on the lake. On the drive I got a lot of time to think, as you do... I noticed I did a lot more thinking on the way there than on the way back. Funny that. But it means the 'vacation' part worked. For a few days I got to not feel guilty or take sides, donate money or worry about what was going wrong in the country, and in the world.

In my think on the way to I thought a lot about my father. Not my real father (i.e. my dad, stepfather who chose to be our dad) but my biological father. He has been absent from my and my Genetic Twin's (sister) lives since I was about S.O.v.1's age and she was five. I thought mostly about what his absence means. Not that I particularly miss him - I never knew him really - but I used to feel that there was a hole of sorts, a chunk of something gone. I thought about what it means to me now, to not have his presence in my life or even know anything significant about him. The Female Parental Unit (mom) doesn't talk about him so we have very little information. When I see some of S.O. in our kids and even get little glimpses of myself in them it sometimes makes me wonder what I have of him.

My GT and I used to occasionally muse about finding him, but haven't for years. At this point, I have sealed up that hole. I don't really want to go in the hatch. I don't necessarily consider it part of my destiny (come on people, "Lost" anyone?) and believe that it would bring possibly only grievance or at best indifference if we were to 'find him', or find out anything about him even. So, I let it go. I moved on and deal with the present. The past may have created the who I am now but it won't control me.

But the past does control many people. Worse it controls whole populations of people. Part of the struggles of the Middle East, no doubt, are past-ridden. To look back and find something about who you are, as a human being, or as a culture, as a country is to be respectful and have reverence for those who have gone before. But to look to the past for how to manage the present is insanity. To do that is to not recognize that you can't change the past or even make up for what has been lost. What is gone is gone is gone is gone and there ain't no getting it back, no how. But yet the past is invoked time and again to justify present actions. We were supposed to have moved beyond that behavior when we advanced to the 7th grade, weren't we? "Well he stole my cookie from my lunch tray so I took his milk"... "and vengence is MINE!" Come on! We know psychologically speaking that if, say, I continued to try and 'make up' for the loss of a father year after year after year I would be spinning my wheels, being self destructive and miserable. Because you cannot get back what is no longer there. So any substitute, be it a fatherly boyfriend, or reunification with your ancesteral home will not put your psyche together again. It might be nifty for a time, but you will go right back to vengeful behavior if you keep looking backwards. Notice how it's not called "Look Now in Anger"?

So, after four days of unscheduled time, a couple of hikes and time with The Adorables I had very little brain action on the drive home. I had, for a time, a little pocket of peace. I had it because for those four days I was not trying to finish anything or start anything or create anything or destroy anything. I was only experiencing the present. And I discovered that in the here and now the past doesn't feel so uncomfortable. And the future doesn't seem so daunting. The people before you are just as wonderful, if not more, when you are peaceful inside yourself enough to see and hear them clearly.

Random Thoughts

2006-09-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

The problem with random thoughts is that you never know where to start...

I had had cause to think about something I'd believed for a long time recently; that every woman marries below her. That is not to say men are bad, just that women are smarter, more able to multi-task, more compassionate, more expressive, more patient and the whole package makes it just easier for us to run a life which we all must do on one level or another. Even if you are single with no kids you are still running your own life and keeping your toilet fairly clean (except for the odd woman who revels in being laise fair about housecleaning, fine if only she has to live in it). But any woman who has children and/or is married is running more than one and that becomes difficult.

Men have an uncanny ability to focus on one thing for long periods of time, which is why we have disciplines like engineering and science and space travel. When they are using their powers for good instead of evil they are in that regard better than women. But doing one thing alone well does not exactly make one able to run a life successfully. And hey, if you are a single guy, who cares if your toilet is clean. When men are 'envolved' with other human beings they must strive to use their powers not for evil to, say, focus on figuring out how to do the least amount of work possible or how to use their powers of concentration to effectively ignore their people, but for good, as in focusing on how to contribute or be more compassionate.

S.O. and I have had many a skirmish over the subject of 'running the life' of our family. Our finally conclusion of the matter of running the life was to conclude that he is not, or we should not say, he's 'helping me' get the various chores done. That is condescending and I think implies that the whole kit and kaboodle is MY responsibility and mine alone and somehow he is doing me a favor by doing dishes or putting his shoes away instead of leaving them in the middle of the living room for me to pick up. So, women's lib did what again? Made it possible for women to have two jobs and men to continue to sit on the sofa and watch their shows while we take care of the kids?

I saw a young woman bopping along, coming out of the local college, this morning, talking on her cell phone. She had a lovely look on her face, one vaguely familiar and melancholy to me. It's that expression you see only on very young women and very old - but well balanced and grateful - women. It is the look of running only your own life and doing as you please. It is the look of being carefree. My perspective now makes all my worries as a young woman, even as a young married woman without children seem petty. Not that that young woman has no worries or troubles. It just strikes me how much easier troubles are when they are only your very own. As psychologists and wanna be therapists like to say to us over and over again from their TV pulpits, you can only change yourself. Great concept in theory, except it ignores the reality of most women who are managing someone else's life including their own. Sure, you can't theoretically control someone else but if you are running their life it is decidely more difficult to do if you aren't also controlling what they do... and thus why marriage is so difficult!

It is so easy to be empassioned with something new; new love, new school, new baby, new job. And doesn't society and talk show hosts tell us all the time that we should recapture our 'inner child' - that enthusiasm, that discovery, that passion for life. But doing something for the first time or having something new is always easy and exciting. I'm a little sick of this whole idea of 'finding your passion' because, frankly, it is not the way the world or a life works. It is great when someone is enthusiastic about something new, you love to hear about it. And we run to our loved one's side when they are feeling down or in need. But all the mediocre stuff in between is where life really lies. Why is it not ok to just be ok with how things are going? Why does every morning have to have the sparkle of potential? Isn't not expecting something to happen, i.e. expecting a regular day, and it turning out spectacular just the best? But if you are every day living your passion, grabbing, eating life, consumming with passion... when the hell do you rest? Besides unrealistic it sounds just tiring to me. I am happy with making methodical progress forward and not knowing when the spectacular may happen. Besides, isn't all this 'passion stuff' just starting to smack plasticy?

We are heading up to the mountains for a few days tomorrow. Our first family vacation that is not also a visit friends and family vacation. As much as I love my friends and family it's just not the same. I realize that we are lucky. Many do not ever get a family vacation and as much as I am compelled to complain that this is essentially the first since having our children, that thought keeps popping into my head. Many get outrageous vacations where they don't life a finger, except maybe to purchase expensive gifts for themselves or to haul themselves on to the massage table, and get to have an exceptional relaxing time. We fall somewhere on the lower end of that scale just into the priveledged enough to get a vacation at all section. For that I am grateful. But it will not be totally relaxing because there are still responsibilities that will follow me up the mountain - diapering, bathing, clothing, feeding, cooking, organizing... but maybe if I am really nice to him (wink wink) S.O. will allow me to sleep a couple times.