Street Shock

As we approach the small intersection where we will turn right, Scott and I pass a tall skinny white man with a long dark ponytail. From the sidewalk, the sullen stranger looks at me; lifts his right hand and adjusts his long fingers into the shape of a pistol. As we pass him, rolling toward the red light, he pulls the trigger of his middle finger and says, "yeah, ya freak." The yeah stretches between us as if he expects me to agree with him. Ya is plain and painfully general. Freak sticks into the air like a real bullet might. I stare at the man from inside a voiceless shock. I want to yell out my window that he is the freak. That he needs a haircut. That he can go fuck himself. But I can't. I am nauseous, numb and dumb. I look to Scott. He laughs. He probably mistook us for someone else, he says, but the gunman looked right at me for four or five full seconds, I tell him. Later, Scott retells the story to our roommates. "The guy was clearly crazy." He says and I laugh along while sharp shrapnel sinks into my flimsy skin. I am free of physical harm, but this particular brand of verbal violence lingers like a wet scab. 

It reminds me of a day in the year we lived in New York City.  I went to cross a street in midtown. I didn't have the walk signal, but there were no cars coming so I did what I always did and began to cross. When I reached a quarter of the way to the other side of this massive street, I noticed a yellow taxi driving toward me. It'll slow down, I thought to myself, but it didn't and after two more timid steps, I began to retreat, turning and running back to the curb. Once safely on the sidewalk, I watched the cab speed by. There was no time to give the driver my favorite finger gesture, only fleeting eye contact. As he passed by, the driver glared at me, grimaced even. He wanted to strike me dead in the middle of the street, I knew. He wanted hit me and drive away, aiming his wheels to squish my skin and crunch my bones into the hot mid-afternoon city cement. As my body laid flat and bloodied, my guts torn out by black rubber tires and plastic windshield wipers, the driver would successfully flee the scene (for a yellow taxi in New York City is like a blond in Los Angeles: they are everywhere and they all look the same.) Shame on me. Such unessessary judgement against a particularly pretty demographic. But my shallow aggression toward blonds derives entirely from dull, imature insecurities where big boobied blond Barbies stand on the tip toes of my childhood bedrooms anxiously waiting for their next costume change, haircut, or private make-out session with Ken. It is nothing compared to the contageous hatred that festers in the puckered eyes of these grown men. 


Was the driver's day so bad, filled with so many mindless jaywalkers that he just wanted to hit one of them to revenge himself against every person who had ever caused him to tap his break pedal since the day he started driving the New York City's streets for tips? Was he caught inside the enchanting thrill of a death threat? At the time, I couldn't help but think the dark skinned taxi driver wanted to hit me because he saw me as a self-entitled white girl tramping across the street like a glutonous Goldilocks, trespassing and stealing the property of strangers, but that's racist to think and embarrassing to admit. Besides, my locks, as I have previously implied, are not gold. Was the man with the imaginary gun angry because we were driving an old beige Toyota Camry? Was he jealous of how openly we flaunt our fortune?  I knew we never should have gotten those spinning diamond rims, gold leafed license plates or that slammin' sound system. 



Perhaps the problem is that most of us fill our bellies with 20 ounce bottles of carbonated anger and any one little thing can tip them over, causing enormous amounts of emotion to spew out of us in unexpecteded explosions. I think that probably was the case of the cab driver. Yet when it comes to the man on the side of the road, I am still somewhat speechless. I have decided that he is crazy. Yet the real scary thing is that this man might be eligible to purchase a real weapon one day. Actually, he might already own one. The cab driver had a weapon, his yellow taxi. When his bottles tipped and broke, he tried to kill me with his car, or at least that's what it felt like. What if the man with the ponytail is packing a real pistol one day and I pass him again and for some reason my eye contact causes some kind of chemical reaction in his body and he draws a real gun on me and all I can do is stare back at him in a silent shock? 

Corned Beef, Cabbage and The Apocalypse

Corned beef and cabbage sits simmering on the stove. The smell wraps us in warm beefy blankets as we set the table and talk. Around 8:00 p.m., Amy's two friends, Tyler and Katie, arrive with beer and a garden salad. By 9:30, six of us sit for a late night Irish feast.

By midnight, our bellies brim over our buckled belts. I sit slightly slumped as the dining room spins from the beer I've drunk. In the kitchen, Mark mixes, bakes, and slices brownies. I stay seated, picking out chunks of cold soft carrots to eat with my fingers from the nearly naked serving bowl before me. Then the conversation turns from light cordial chatter to a discussion about current international news. Japan's earthquake shakes and sinks onto the chests of our newly leaden bodies and our voices shift into new tones. We trade what we know about the tsunami damage and ongoing fires at the nuclear power plant. Radiation levels are rising, I learn, spreading like the cancer it will cause.  Tyler says she's read about world wide radiation levels taken during different times of nuclear testing. It spreads, she tells us. It cannot truly be contained. She then tells us about a memoir she's read about a tragic town where nearly every citizen, except for the lactose intolerant author, is diagnosed with cancer. Radiation from a nearby nuclear plant seeped into the water and into the grass that the local dairy cows ate. Because nearly everyone in the town drank the milk, they all, cows included, digested radiation regularly.

"Why would anyone want to have children these days?" I ask.  "The world is probably going to end soon, right? Isn't it really only a matter of time?" Katie needs another drink. I feel doll size and lifeless. Scott says he thinks it'd be cool to have kids who are among the last humans. I suppose there were probably pregnancies during the Cuban Missile Crisis, World War I and II, The Great Depression, The American Civil War and even during the times of Small Pox and the Plague. I must remember perspective. There is, has always been and will always be threat.

This is when we all notice how visibly exhilarated Mark is by the prospect of living in a world much like his post-apocalyptic video games where every moment stands on a wobbly balance beam between life and death. Where every character carries massive machetes and stolen rations, stalking the barren wastelands of Earth, killing to survive.

Katie says she'd rather everyone died at once, like in a flash. Taken by surprise, she says. It would be much too terrifying to hear about different parts of the world blowing up or melting or evaporating, she says. She doesn't want to sit around waiting for death. Scott disagrees. He would prefer a heads up. To know he only had a week, day, or hour to live. It'd give him time to tie up loose ends, he explains, say good bye to people, eat some really good food.

I can't decide what I'd prefer. I guess if everything went dark, if the electricity we so depend on suddenly went dead one day and we heard rumors that throughout the world communities were being targeted and eaten up by radiation, cannibalistic terrorists or a vengeful God's wrath, I'd want to see how long I could survive. Perhaps I would go find my family. Bike the hundred miles of back roads between my apartment and my parents' front door. Along the way, I could stay out of sight, hoping, praying and wishing that the authorities I have voted for and the armed forces I have hid behind will step up and save me. I could paint my face with green and brown stage makeup and sleep under leaves in the woods. Hunt down abandoned grocery marts and liquor stores. Stitch blankets out of found roadkill fur. Get really good at climbing trees. Finally lose those stubborn seven pounds. Really, it does sound like quite the adventure, certainly something to write about, but it does not give me the glee that it gives Mark. The end of the world and/or the end of humanity would devastate me. For as much as I criticize people's ways, I do agree with what Anne Frank wrote. "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."

We, civilized humans, have done an incredible amount of development. This history we have made and the relics we use to preserve the old: books, films, newspapers, libraries and museums. When stretched before you in an organized fashion, it's inspiring to see our progression. From candles to light bulbs. Caves to huts to houses. From feather pens to letter presses to typewriters and to laptop computers. From airplanes to rocket ships. From corn to pop corn to corn syrup. It is the result of uninhibited determination for the development of science, societal progression, and individual betterment.

This celebratory boiled feast we have just enjoyed in a warm, furnished apartment is all thanks to history, to years of infamous potato famines, long boat rides across the Atlantic Ocean, oppression. And the preservation of this history is thanks to years of corn beef and cabbage dinners and drunken parades of Irish pride, hand waving girl scouts, leprechauns and tacky paper mache

Maybe we will have the opportunity to join as humans and fight for the future of people on this planet. If that's the case, I wonder how humans will do.  It has been a very long time since we developed our instincts for fight or flight. We aren't cavemen anymore, most of us. Back then, the weak died quickly. Today we have them hooked up to heart monitors, feeding tubes and on prescriptions of permanent bed rest. We no longer need to be healthy to survive. We just need to sign the right waver and have decent health insurance. We no longer need to run from dinosaurs, cheetahs or woolly mammoths. We don't need to hunt buffalo or farm fields. We can sit in wide rolly chairs all day every day, typing numbers, sending emails, and talking our way through meetings. We have a new way of hunting. Instead of spears, fishing poles or guns, we have credit cards to gather food from grocery stores, restaurants, donut shops and pizza parlors. We've developed so far intellectually that we no longer need to have bodies that are physically strong. As long as we're breathing and drugged up enough to not feel the pain of our neglect, everything is fine. Perhaps this is the downfall of our development.

Currently fighting the war on fat is a widespread revolution in fitness and health. Folks everywhere are joining gyms; running on sidewalks; hiking mountain trails; taking yoga classes and seeking out organic produce and meat. Quite conceivably the fitness gurus and healthy eaters will be the ones to survive, starting the human race over again with the fittest men and women alive. My brother works in fitness now and is big. Muscly, I mean. He and his workout buddies pick up tires and put them back down again. They run with parachutes and friends strapped to their backs. They jump over wooden boxes and can clap between push ups. It is an intense club of muscled meat eaters. One day I asked my big big brother what he and his friends were all doing with their muscles. What good were they? One can be healthy without bulging biceps and thick necks, I told him. He didn't really have an answer, but now I do. If the day comes that the human race has been threatened with extinction, these buff babes will stop lifting tires and start ripping trees from their roots to rebuild houses and bridges. They will tackle deer, ducks and cows when they are hungry. They will dive into oceans, gathering lobsters and salmon to eat and whales to turn into peppermint scented candles for the newly built toilet huts. And while they are grunting, swearing and sweating through their labor, my yoga friends and I will be meditating in the nearest meadow. When we're done with our sun salutations, gentle back bends and peaceful warrior poses, we'll gather wild berries, nuts and edible leaves for the evening's salad. Then I'd ask my brother to pass the bear meat.

Tonight, when we all decide we're too tired to go on discussing such sad and enormous matters, Katie and Tyler say goodnight. After they leave, my roommates and I go into the kitchen. There we see that the sink is clogged. We'll fix it in the morning, we say, leaving plates in piles and pots in stacks. It can all wait until morning.

My God

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I was raised by smart, strong-minded folks who took me to a Roman Catholic Church with baggies of Cheerios when I was a girl. Told me to sit tight and listen. I would. I remember watching my father charismatically project the Old and New Testaments from the lectern, his slight Boston accent peeking through his diction.  I remember the veteran in the parking lot who sold Tootsie Rolls for $1 after mass. I remember running across the parking lot to the parish hall for free fruit punch and glazed doughnuts.  When the public schools went to shit in my town, I remember my parents gathering all the money they could to enroll my three siblings and I in a small Catholic grade School. Twenty years later, I cannot help but believe that God is out there or in here or everywhere and I just need to look a little harder.

This past Christmas Eve, I went to church with my family. It was the first mass I had attended since the previous Christmas Eve. I went for tradition and I went in hope of finding peace and/or truth. Within the privacy of my pressed palms, I did find peace, but never much truth. Instead I felt like an impostor, an outsider, silently refusing to accept the common Catholic vows extended and reminded to me by the robed priest on his decorated altar. At the last minute, I even decided to stay seated beside my Jewish husband during Communion, which caused my sister to cast strange looks upon me as she climbed over my knees to reach the aisle.

The little truth I did find was in the brief moment of Peace (the part of mass when everyone in the congregation is instructed to turn toward one another with extended hands and say, "Peace be with you.") When this happened on Christmas Eve, everyone in the church suddenly awoke from their nearly sleeping states and began to look around them. Fathers began kissing the foreheads and cheeks of their daughters, children sillily shook the hands of other children, and elders gently clasped hands with other elders. But then, as quickly as the energy entered the church, it escaped. The entire congregation returned their bodies to stiff solitude, looking to the man on the altar for his next instruction to sit, stand, kneel or pray. 

That spark is all I care to study and experience. My God is that fading spark, those invisible strings, that human connection that ties us all together. For what, if not human connection, is more invasive and more vital to humans than air? I fear I live in a world of belligerently selfish zombies where fried food, hallucinogenic drugs and cheap alcohol are taking the place of real relationships. Glazed eyes, drowning livers, and hardening hearts are steering the barely living into ditches of dazed existences leaving me surrounded by holes. My moments pile and topple around me, filling my heart with memories of emotions that feel more real than buildings, armies and screaming teapots. And I know that if everyone could clearly see the moments that become their lives, which in turn become their human contribution to the atmosphere's emotional layer (which is perhaps the most holey of all layers), everyone would all feel an incredible obligation to wake up and contribute to the human race rather than continue to separate themselves from it.  

For thousands of years people have been classifying themselves through religion, occupation, family name, nationality, race and/or political stance. With our intelligent feelings, we want to understand our life and we often start by trying to understand and organize our personal traits. I believe this is all quite natural. Or at least, I hope it is, for as you can see I write memoir essays and would classify myself as a continuously curious self-classifier. In fact, I've attempted to know myself so much that I can no longer attempt classification because I know that it is all irrelevant unless I know the context, who my company is. For instance, in some company, I can be a boisterous comedian while in other company, I am a shy, shifty-eyed social diver. I don’t know where this urge comes from to simplify everything. To say who I am, how I am, or what I am. To put my poor personality quirks into categorized boxes like medical records or doughnuts. But I know that it is part of what makes me human. I went to church as a kid. That information goes in the box labeled FAITH. Many people had folks who took them to a Catholic Church as well, while many others were brought to a Mosque, Temple or to Grandmas for a weekly Sunday brunch. Everyone is on their own quest to know who their god is, if they want to believe in the presence of a higher power, and it is no one's place to convert anyone who is not looking to be converted. Besides your God is not my God and my God is most certainly not your God. This discussion isn't even something to be right about. It’s all so subjective. My God is made up of invisible ribbons. You can't tell me that isn't true. It's what I believe. And anyone’s accusations that someone is worshiping the "wrong" god is in need of a deep exploration of his or her own prejudices.

These days, I am rarely inside Roman Catholic Churches and yet I feel beholden to my parents for dressing me in those precious girly dresses and patent leather shoes, giving me bags of cereal and telling me to sit tight and listen. I did. I won’t forget. Maybe one day I’ll regret these hippy dippy religious bullshit words from my twenties, but for now and in this company, a hippy dippy bullshitter is how I want to classify myself. 

Peace be with you.

Bodies

After a local music show, my friends and I stand outside the club, crunching our shoulders in the cold and saying good-byes with high fives when a muscly meathead with a cigarette wedged within his mouth speedily swaggers by. Behind him, hobbling on high heels, a young woman hounds him. “Oh shit, you gonna do it?” She asks. “That’s my boy’s girl.” He says over his shoulder before descending upon two forty-something adults macking on one another. The meathead attacks, verbally, shouting, “Are you fuckin’ him? You fuckin’ him? You’re my boy’s girl and you’re fuckin’ him!” Yanked from the privacy of their plastered states, the man, a scrawny leather faced guy, backs away from the woman, a chub with black mascara smeared in circles beneath her eyes. Without waiting for any sort of response, for this performance was clearly all he wanted, the accuser turns and begins swaggering away. Then suddenly, behind him, his “boy’s girl” attacks the “oh shit, you gonna do it” girl, causing both sloshed sluts to crash clumsily to the cement. Then all four belligerent boneheads are rolling around on the sidewalk, bumping into parking meters and slurring nervous nonsense. Then the doors to the club open and three security guards rush out and pull apart the fight. My friends and I watch, stepping back slightly toward the curb. The security guards appear to know the man with the leather face and with the fury of fully extended arms, they scold him like a child. “Go home, Kenny! GO. HOME.” Once all four fighters are finally gone, the guards are blazing with the same self-importance that the swaggering meathead had.  Like somehow this all mattered: this drunken brawl outside a crappy club.

I currently cannot help but feel that life and the living of it is not much more than simply passing time surviving until our predestined deaths. It is a drab one-sided discussion, a temporary clarity that will soon fog with the fleeting distractions of laughter, trivial traffic aggravations and trips to the grocery store, but for now all I can see are bodies. Legs, livers, ears, eyes, mouths, genitalia and belly buttons, nipples, necks, toenails and knees, ankles and elbows. In one foreign city, there are protests, bodies screaming for citizen rights, cursing political leaders on cardboard and running from police brutality. In another foreign city, suicide bombers are blowing up the bodies of innocent bystanders. And in American cities, drive by gang shootings are terminating teenage bodies while heart disease murders everyone else. Rows of ribs, lined shoulders and hairlines, eyebrows and thumbs, cuticles and tongues. 

In the middle of my world, my body stands with the narrow end of a hollow cone up to my eye, pointing it up and out. Giraffish ankles stand atop the long crooked bones of my flat feet and toes and my reddened elephant skin knees swing my calves and shins forward and back while I walk and I run. Hidden beneath my underwear, I have my pink doughy thighs, a bristly black lap, a fleshy stomach and two little white wine water balloon breasts. A shallow shelf of shoulder bones is mounted below my rounded shoulder tops, while on my sides, long strong arms lead to fingers built for piano playing, but left, instead, to the typing of stories and thoughts onto computer keys. A slender neck with a pin-top freckle on its middle holds my head, which is covered with dark wavy hair and a pale pink face where my lips are like a peach colored pullout couch for my soft squishy tongue and pearly round teeth.  My body's skeleton of calcium and marrow matter is made like other bodies and my thin pale skin is freckled by the same sun, yet I am still myself unique. I may appear not much different from anyone else, but to me I am familiar and therefore complexly distinct.

My friends, Mark and Amy, my husband, Scott, and I recently moved into an apartment in a two-family house, taking the place of a quiet old woman and her cat. On our move-in day last week, the downstairs tenant, a single mother of a twelve-year old boy, meets us all in the back stairway to say, "Ahhh… so this is why he made me sign a four month lease." Referring to the landlord and his decision to allow us, four young adults, to move into the two-bedroom apartment above her. I’ve never felt so unwelcome. Even after she practically declares that our move into her territory will lead to the demise of her happiness, the four of us remain unrequitedly respectful. "I'd like the parking spot that Analee used because I'm the oldest." She says, dividing her from us like the big kid on the kickball field, spouting out made up rules and uneven team lineups. We, all still very excited to move into our new place, agree.

On our first trash day, two days after moving in, she comes up to our kitchen door. She doesn’t knock, but stares down at Penny, our dog, who barks at her scowling face through the door's glass. The barking brings me out of my bedroom, where I am dressing, and I grab Penny by the collar and tell her to be quiet. When I unlock and open the door, I say a friendly hello. "Do you live here now too?" She asks with a sharp smirk. "I met you the other day." I tell her. “I’m Rachel.” "Oh" she says, avoiding apologies, "I didn't recognize you." "I just took a shower." I explain, shuffling my bangs to convince her. The trash barrel needs to go out, she tells me. “We’ll take it out.” I tell her. “It needs to go out tonight and it's almost dark.” She says. Is the trash truck coming in the middle of the night? I wonder. Couldn’t this wait? We have to leave for rehearsal in ten minutes and my hair is still wet. Scott takes over, telling her we are going to do it later that night and that she can put her trash in the barrel and that we'd take it all out when we got home later. “But the trash needs to go out Monday night.” She repeats. Scott surrenders to their inability to communicate clearly and goes to the basement to fetch the woman her barrel.

On our drive up to Greenfield for dinner, I tell my roommates that this is what racism must feel like (on a supremely smaller scale). They laugh, but I mean it. We, young adults, move into this high-class neighborhood and instead of being welcomed with fruitcake and smiles, we are shunned, despised unnecessarily for our age. I feel like we're being blamed for this woman’s divorce. Like we’re the reason she has to pay rent instead of a monthly mortgage payment. 


The woman from downstairs is unfamiliar to me. A stranger leaving me contradictory sticky notes on the door to the basement. A stranger shutting her shades from the world around it, enclosing herself with blinds and cotton curtains so that no one can see that she knows vulnerability. Upstairs, Amy’s pretty positive Bill from across the street has already seen her boobs several times, but she just laughs about how awkward he was when she introduced herself to him at the end of our driveway. 

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It is difficult to feel remorse or any sort of emotion toward crowds or individual persons with unfamiliar faces because, I think, the soul is only visible when it is inside some sort of familiarity, causing the real struggle to be not judging strangers, not assuming others are meatheads, sluts or young irresponsible tenants who will probably scream profanities at dawn; vomit cheap beer on the front porch; host techno dance parties on Monday nights and invite drunken hobos to live in the entryway on cold and rainy nights. It is difficult to look past unfamiliar flesh, fingernails, eyeballs, noses and ears, hairstyles, legs and feet to something closer to souls. 


Scott suggests we have the woman and her son over for dinner. Amy and I refuse. “I don’t want to make her dinner just so that she can criticize my or Rachel’s cooking.” Amy says. “And I don’t want to spend an awkward evening with the woman.”  I say. “Yeah and her son creeps me out. He'll probably try to kill us.” Yet Scott is probably right. Having the woman over for dinner could reduce her judgments by making us familiar to her. However, it might also ripen her discrimination, giving her more material to hate us. Why do they have an anchor on the wall, a deer skull in a pretty serving bowl and a Muhammad Ali poster over the stove that reads, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”? What weirdos they are with their action figures posed on secondhand spice racks, comic books stacked behind the toilet bowl and was that Darth Vader climbing up the back of the knife block? Yes. 

But must familiarity be present to feel compassion or connection? Is it necessary in order for one to look at tragedy and actually see it? To look at a pile of naked skin and see souls. To look at a woman’s body and see a mother of three with green glassy eyes, endearingly crooked teeth, and a remarkable talent for making the neighborhood children laugh. To look at a man’s body and see the local pub's storyteller, an expert builder and a lover of many. To look at the body of a child and see an eight-year-old girl with dirty blond hair, fantastic cursive writing and a fear of loud sounds. What if the world were as small as many say it is after accidental meetings with old friends in unexpected places? Oh my, what a small world. Would the lady downstairs have given us a chance to show her how responsible and respectful we are? Would I not have immediately hated those drunken sidewalk fighters? I doubt it.

I sometimes feel damaged by my inability to think of life in simple terms. To look at white bread and not see its artificial coloring and forty count ingredient list. I can only wonder what it might be like to live without unending observations and assumptions about the meaning or lack of meaning in people, life and reproduction. To see Earth differently from an ant farm in a universe of giants. 


I have recently given up caffeine. Beautiful black cups of coffee and steamy chai tea lattes are the prime suspects to the recent murder of my clear skin, it seems, and until I can prove otherwise, caffeine is locked up in a cupboard. I say this because I believe this withdrawal is partially to blame for my recent lack of hope in humanity. It is also the dead of February and the ice and snow are conspiring, convincing me that spring and summer are just figments of my busy imagination. Tired and frozen, my body is learning how to generate organic optimism and until I catch up with this fleeing feeling, I am pounding computer keys like the nose of a mouse in a maze. 




I am not heartless, just unfamiliar to and from it all. 

Hungry for Help

Tonight I tripped into the most horrifically devastating, pitiful and yet self-empowering conclusion: the complimentary encouragement of others, while incredibly wonderful and, in my case, needed like breath and water, is deviously disguised inside a coating of doubtlessness, as if compliments were laws and facts that could somehow mold my future.   


Searching for gold with an ax and six dwarf brothers and later for the affections of Snow White in the creased curve of her red lips, Dopey and I are self-consciously the same. For so long, I see I, consciously as well as unconsciously, have wiggled my words into situations and conversations with the secret desperate hope that compliments would cover me in return. Mostly, I have clung to a twisted optimism that those I know and respect in the theater world would somehow steer me like a gang of tug boats, pulling my fat barge of an ass to the right dock. I'd send emails looking for advice, hoping compliments would be sprinkled into their returning messages like salt in a pot of spinach soup. Waiting for someone to outright say that my present employment bagging the groceries of strangers in a big scary city would one day be rewarded with something redeeming or at least something resembling promise. 


I should have listened to my mother. "We are born alone and we die alone."  She's said. Within the thin skin walls of our different bodies, we humans are all working toward our own self-pride and worth in this world. ...This entirely obvious realization has thrown me into a hole that literally feels six feet deep. Like I'm buried and layers of heavy sorrow stand on my skin, flattening the bones of my chest cavity, pushing my heart so deeply down that I feel it between the steps of my spine, and like maggots are crawling through the cracks beneath my fingernails, into my nostrils and over my earlobes to infest and ingest my intestines. I am lifeless, too stuck inside this stillness to move or scream. 


An actress, a writer, a person, I've grown dependent on the glances, castings, compliments and general commentary of others when it pertains to me, most particularly when it is by those I admire. And now, just now, I understand how unpredictable and even trivial it can all be later, or in this instance, now. This is the most vomit inducing life lesson I have ever attempted to swallow. We all want to be good at something. Most of us want to be damn near the best at our something and when our stars do not align, but spread into messy supernovas, we become discouraged and compliments become as necessary as practice. 


"If you can't remember if you wore that outfit two days ago, what makes you think anyone else will remember?"  My mother's way of telling me that the world does not revolve around me and my button down cardigans. Those whom I respect and wait for compliments from are not thinking about me. They have their own lives and careers to think about. Their own outfits to contemplate and coordinate. They are busy compiling the thoughts they think others have of them, others they respect, to wonder what little old me, a former student from years ago, is up to. And if they happened to be wondering about the progress of my life, their thoughts probably would not stray far from whether I am still hopelessly infatuated with their solidified confidences. 



Many people have heroes, but we all cannot expect to be saved in a dramatically cinematic flying sequence where we are plucked from a tumultuous train on a dead end career track, carried into the sky past swaying city skyscrapers and confused flocks of fat pigeons to a studio where we are starring in our own sitcoms where Diane Keaton is playing our aforementioned mothers.  Teachers and theater directors wear the tights and capes in my vocation fantasies where my inexhaustible imagination plays me weeping, thanking them all for their email responses full of flatteries and job offers in a Best-Actress Oscar speech. But tonight, I write this to remember how many of me there are. That these teachers have their own heroes to chase, children to support, tenure to obtain, their own careers to plan. They have hundreds of papers to grade, shows to direct, syllabi to type. They have their own imagined award speeches to write. 


This is like a hunk of steak that is too big and tough for me to chew through, but because it is already wedged between my teeth and cheeks, I must now spit it all out onto this white cloth napkin page. The celebrities of my life will not, can not and should not pave me a path to success. They have already given me the water, the shovel and the stones. The rest is up to me. It is time to be confident. There is no more room for awkward apologies and creepy shifting eyes. I must grab my whimsical life by its ear cartilage and pull myself to where I want to be. "Help is not on the way" my yoga teacher told my class last night while in a pose that stretched my hamstrings like gummy bacon. Compliments will not pay my wages. Sure they seem more valuable than my little sister's engagement ring, but they are mostly as intangible and as worthless as sympathy. Graciously receive them all, compliments, and store them for the days of hail storms and snake bites, but do not rely on them to hold your head up. The strength of your neck comes not from others but from the good nourishment you feed it. Do not wait for compliments and helping hands like scheduled buses and teeth cleaning appointments. They are as delicious as lemon frosting and my aunt's peanut butter balls, but compliments are not medicine. They are vitamins and they have brought me far enough. They have kept me writing, sincerely they have kept the keyboard under my fingertips. They have kept me auditioning when rejections for roles seem more plentiful than fruit flies on a bowl of peaches and blackened bananas in summertime. But now it is time to break from this self-induced confinement of uncertainty. It's time for me to stand tall and alone like a single birch tree in a field. 










I fear these previous pages are all just further attempts of my mind to manipulate my fingers into pressing for the compliments I still dreadfully crave. I would tell you that this was all unintentional, but I just don't know if it is. 

Freedom

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, The Right to Bear Arms was passed on December 15, 1791. Passed before the Wild West was explored and exploited; before film cameras were invented, before the Titanic was built. Before women were given ballots to vote and children books to read. At a time when the white man still feared Native American tribes, still enslaved Africans and still hung homosexuals.

Now, in the year 2011 when we, Americans, are not given the justice we think we deserve, we walk to Washington; we refuse to work and carry picket lines; we sue for millions and we holler for lawyers from the backseat of police cruisers.  

Before zippers, telephones and modern automobiles, before revolvers evolved into semiautomatic machine guns, our wig wearing Caucasian forefathers drafted The Constitution of the United States. These men, who fought off the red-coats and tossed their taxed tea into the Boston Harbor, declared that freedom was obtained through a strong defense. Only when we are safe can we be free. With muskets in hand, these men defended their farmland, cattle, children, wives and mothers. But today are we expecting to find that same freedom wedged beside the bullets of .50 caliber machine guns? Sure, when the American Revolutionary War decorated the colonies with pillaging soldiers and years later when cowboys road throughout the countryside, picking off banks and pirating railroads, would packing one's pockets with pistols be imperative to survival. But today? In a time of well trained police forces where detectives with plaid vests, tobacco pipes and monocles crack cases? I don't know. Honestly, I don't really know what the amendment or amendment to the amendment should be. I know I fear people who trade their souls in dark alleyways and at the open trunks of Grand Marquis for weapons of brash destruction. I know that this black market will exist until man shoots himself dead. I know that strangers with erratic violent histories can obtain these death certificate distributors legally. I know this makes me feel less free. 


I mean this out of no disrespect to my forefathers, for it was they who gave me this free speech I am so fond of, but out of fear that I will one day live in a country where I am expected to strap knives to my thighs and sling semiautomatic uzies over my shoulders for survival. Have we learned nothing from our dirt kicking westerns where paces were counted and men with handlebar mustaches and leather rimmed hats were mercilessly murdered by merciless murderers? Just imagine if these men of the wild west had machine guns, fast cars, crowded shopping malls and interstate highways? Oh. I suppose that would just be today's action movie. I am one for wanting the olden days of simplicity, of the plague, pennies and long cotton skirts, but times have changed. We live with minds and technologies that are far more advanced than those of the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries, yet still ingrained in our inherited skin follicles and stomach linings are the same human instincts of our forefathers and forecowboys: to fight for self importance, freedom and survival. Almost everything has advanced faster than man. Sure, our baby toes are disappearing, but not our commonality to use violence as a means for settling disagreements. Between the killing machines we mass manufacture and our correlation between freedom and fighting, I fear our country will soon metamorphose into the video games we still allow our children to play.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people (including the crack abusers, the undiagnosed mentally ill, the desperate, hopeless, the vengeful and the tragic) to keep and bear Arms (revolvers, assault rifles, and semiautomatic machine guns), shall not be infringed (unless the whole country goes to shit)." 




Can we at least add this last bit? As a backup? 

A Wife with a Life

photo by Christina Watka

I want to run my long flat feet through that grass over there where it is not only greener, but plush like body pillows, bunny rabbit stuffed animals and ball pits brimming with partially melted marshmallows. Here, my lower back bellows from walking barefoot on this harsh bald earth. I didn't get the part in that play. I can't spend every day in cafes writing about baristas and biscotti. I can't entertain every evening with stimulating theater rehearsals or inspiring yoga classes. I can't wait in anxious excitement for first kisses and timid touches of new lovers. My unfortunate self, surrounded by love and safety, secrets and intimacy, of promises that propose to stretch to the end of lifetimes.

My written woes are abundantly self-involved, but are not unaccompanied by perspective. When these temptations and complaints creep into my mouth, I squint through twisting kaleidoscopes to see. My brain deciphers the colors and shapes into ever altering images where my soft cover romance fantasies are as two dimensional and as thin as my skin. My heart sees that were it to leap for these painted lives, these mirages of mortal distraction, the aforementioned plushness would tip and fall flat and my old life (where a smart, sensitive, splendid husband holds me and kisses my cheeks; where I can audition ambitiously and write freely) suddenly expands like bathtub sponges. Blue, red and yellow squishy dinosaurs, sailboats and duckies grow up and out of the capsules I once mistook for gravel. My home, my old abandoned life, turns into a beautiful bay, a still Jurassic Park where ripples of soapy bath water rock my raft of stapled watercolor papers, anchoring me to a newly furnished swamp of black flies and incredible stench. Today, the kaleidoscope's colors and shapes evolved into white clarity when my heart and head collided into synchronicity and I saw myself searching for self esteem in the shallow flirtations of strangers and in the flowered flattery of friends and family.

I am not yet a successful actress. I tried, but stuck inside self-deprecation, decided I was not pretty enough and far too awkward for even my customer service jobs, let alone auditions for intimidating strangers in small black box theaters and atop massive proscenium stages. I have done nothing tremendous. I've discovered a slight knack for organizing words into selective soulful sentences and I've gotten married, but I still have not been cast in any enormous show nor written any sort of seller. This is not to say I've given up. I store hope, ambition and confidence in a safe place for every delicate day downed by rejections and flat broke failures. Then I swallow my misery like coarse vomit and remind myself that there is still time for me. That I don't need to write or say these types of things. I found love and married it, I can find success and bed it. I can draw my pictures on blank pages, rather than outlined coloring books, without fracturing my or my husband's heart.

Days are short, particularly these winter days when the sun rises at 6 and falls back down at 5 p.m. We stay up later, rebellious to the Earth's spinning threats, but this only makes the dark mornings ever more sudden when the alarm clock mheep, mheep, mheeps. Most mornings, my clock alarms me at 5 a.m. This is to get as many minutes as I can before this day is taken down below to a secretary who sits in my body's basement, surrounded by dusty filing cabinets, categorizing my days with all the ages I will never be again.

Today, I am ready to confront the dreams I once wedged and pushed into pipes. One can be a wife and pursue her own life. I don't know why I am only now understanding this concept. Next January, I will audition for one of the most prestigious Masters of Fine Arts acting programs in the country. For the next 365 days, I will prepare to stand onstage at the Yale School of Drama.