multitudes

As I hit "publish" on my last post, I thought, "that may have been too personal." I was right. While it provoked more comments than any other post I've made to date, I wrote it when I was feeling vulnerable, and I don't think "raw vulnerability" is among the feelings I'm comfortable sharing here. Raw joy, perhaps, or raw frustration...but vulnerability is an emotion better dealt with in private and shared only after it's passed, when it can be shared with perspective.

A quick note about the 3 comments that were posted in response: to the reader who encouraged me to help others when I'm feeling that way, thank you... this is good advice, and it was my new year's resolution to start volunteering...this is something I really want to do.

To the person who suggested that if I really had self-esteem, I wouldn't need to "shout about it to the rafters" -- I think we have different notions of shouting. Yes, of course, if a person needs to talk about how confident they are all the time, it makes you wonder. I don't think that's what I was doing. I was saying, I've always prided myself on a certain quality, so it hurts to feel like that quality's weakening. Like someone who always had good handwriting and realizes that it's gotten messier recently. I don't think there's anything wrong with acknowledging my strengths, whether in the context of a discussion of my weaknesses or otherwise. Why is it that it's more socially acceptable to yammer on about your shortcomings than to talk about what you're capable of? I have a great sense of direction, I'm lousy at parking in parking garages, I'm impatient with details that don't interest me but capable of being very detail-oriented when I need to be. We're all experts and novices, superstars and average Joes - what's wrong with admitting that?

Anyway, I've been going through a rough time lately, but I'm back, and ready to get back into a rhythm of daily, or almost daily, postings... so stay tuned.

I'm drinking Earl Grey de la Creme tea, the leaves of which were purchased in a store in Greenwich Village, NYC. The first time I tasted it I said it was like drinking gold - the flavor was that perfect, strong dark tea mixed with vanilla. Now I drink it when I want to feel luxurious. The tin lamp I inherited when my grandmother passed away is glowing across the room, beneath it the little succulent plant I bought for my husband a few months back. XM radio is playing (ok, so the tower of electronica isn't all bad), and the music is just right for this moment, on the cusp of a Saturday night, after a day of hard work -- building three new bookcases. I realize that for most people in the world a day of hard work is much harder than bookcases. But I feel a sense of accomplishment, of having used my body, and now it is warm and resting and a night out will feel good, like the perfect cap to a day well-lived.

Lately I've been stuck on the thought I expressed here a week or so back, that when you don't get to do the thing you're good at, you end up feeling pretty bad about yourself. This is a new feeling for me - I have always had strong self-esteem. I remember once talking to a friend who was in a relationship with someone self-destructive, and I said, "I guess after a while I'd just get angry," and she said, "of course you would, you have high self-esteem." I have always treasured this about myself - it's not about thinking I'm great, it's about demanding to be treated with respect...feeling I deserve that. Respecting myself. Lately, I feel that crumbling, mostly because I've been stuck in the middle of so many decisions for so long, with no visible progress...still at the same job, in the same apartment... it wears you down after a while. I find myself wondering, what's wrong with me? Why can't I just make choices?

Which is why I think a day spent building bookcases feels as good as it does. And then I remind myself - I have made progress in one area of my life, in giving art a more central role....writing every morning, rearranging my hours at work to accomodate that...improv... this blog. 2 years ago I wasn't aware of how important this all was to me. But instead of feeling satisfied, I feel greedy: I want more room for art, more hours of a day spent doing things that matter to me, that feel connected to who I really am. I want a house with room to luxuriate in - no more artful arranging of things into too-small spaces, no more "one ass kitchen" (as my husband calls it)...space to cook, rest, work, entertain, play. And a chance to design spaces from scratch - a fresh start. In college I used to rearrange my furniture at least twice a year, dye my hair -- changes to the external that left the internal refreshed. I need that.

There's a new song on XM, too loud, too chaotic - the spell is broken. But I still feel a sense of possibility. Off to get ready.

I woke up to rain this morning. It was exactly what I needed; it's exactly what I need. I was in a car accident yesterday - I'm fine, but I hurt my hand and my neck is stiff and these kinds of things always put you into a bit of a state of shock, so a cozy day like this one feels much easier to slip into than a day full of harsh sun.

I realized I've never described my environment to you. I'm reminded of the episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" in which Larry declines to take the tour of his friend Jeff's new house ("Hey, let me give you the tour" - "Oh, no thanks, that's ok"), and Jeff's wife is outraged, deeply offended. If you don't want "the tour," then by all means, decline, and I will not be offended. :) But I picked up "The Right to Write" yesterday, a book I think I've mentioned here before, and it talked about the importance of describing your setting, as a way of allowing readers to get to know you...so here goes.

Right now I see: full red tulips craning out of a tight turquoise vase, which sits on the coffee table I got for $20 from an ad in the City Paper almost 8 years ago. I got the tulips for $9 at the grocery store last weekend. The table sits on the chenille area rug my husband and I bought on a whim one afternoon in Ellicott City - squares of navy, periwinkle, gray. I am sitting on a navy futon with red and purple throw pillows, including the big red handwoven pillow that I bought in Old Town, Alexandria on my lunch hour once. We have had this futon for around 4 years and lately when you sit on it it sometimes creaks and cracks; it's time to upgrade to a couch. I want one of the ones that extends like a chaise at one end - I always want to put my legs up.

Our living room is busy (the bedroom is the room of calm -- cool colors, more sparsely decorated), so there's too much to describe in the time I have, but a quick tour: green houseplant in a ceramic red bowl, growing like jungle, long vines hanging down over the edge of the armoire where it's perched; a long, thin, framed Simpsons cell; a wine rack recently restocked; a matted photograph of Mount Timpanagos, from Sundance; a small white vase with orange, pink and yellow stripes, a gift from my friend Lauren, the last time she visited; and then, of course, what I've been avoiding -- the tower of electronica. TV, VCR, DVD player, stereo components, Tivo... I cannot wait until we have more space and can have a living room that doesn't center around this stuff...a room where the furniture is arranged to encourage views out the window, or conversation.

On the wall behind me: a framed New Yorker cover from my grandfather; a big painting of an underwater scene that I gave my husband for his birthday last year (it looks almost like an 8-year-old made it: big blocky shapes, jagged lines, bright colors); and, 2 recent additions, framed album covers: The Who's Tommy, and Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the corner, a tall silver magazine rack, filled with old copies of the New Yorker (we finally cancelled our subscription - couldn't keep up), New York Review of Books (we had a free trial at some point, that ran out), Harpers (just renewed), Utne (I love the idea of it), and Wired (another free trial).

And, now, my dog, sitting on the futon beside me, waiting patiently for his dad to take him on his morning walk. Little does he know it's raining -- he hates the rain.

The other night we decided to walk our dog after dinner, something we never do, but which seemed that night like something that needed doing. At the edge of the dog park we ran into Jason, who works for a neighborhood dogwalking company, and sometimes walks our dog, and has even boarded him a couple of times when we've gone out of town. My dog went crazy, dancing and jumping, and then another dog came over, and it turns out this dog is our dog's walking partner much of the time, so more jumping and exuberant running. We felt like we were discovering our dog's secret life.

We held off on hiring a dogwalker for a long time - it felt like crossing a line, like soon we'd be buying him sweaters and feeding him a gourmet diet. But as our workdays got a little longer we decided to give it a shot, and met with Pete, the godfather of the neighborhood dog community - who, confusingly, runs a company called David's Dog Walking (he inherited it from David and didn't want to change the name, in case clients who'd moved away came back into town). Pete is like a horse whisperer, but with dogs - the first time our dog met him, his eyes got this swoony look, and he was drawn to Pete like a magnet. So now he gets two walks a week, sometimes more depending on our schedules, and when we go out of town he sometimes stays with one of Pete's employees, like Jason.

So at the dog park that night we started talking to the other dog's owner, and we learned that Sid, the owner of Comet Liquors on Columbia Road, had passed away a few days before. The Post wrote a story about it... Sid was a neighborhood institution, and while we weren't personally close, we shopped at Comet frequently (not just for booze but for H&H bagels, sometimes turkey, sometimes lox), and we definitely appreciated the role he played in the neighborhood. Hearing the news of his death was like hearing about a dear but distant relative's passing, the one who always danced up a storm at weddings and told you stories about when your parents were kids. The woman, the dog owner, who shared the news with us, said the funeral had been lovely, and that neighbors were thinking of forming a co-op to keep the store from being replaced by a chain.

Yesterday I was walking my dog again, our typical morning route, which takes us past Comet. The storefront was a shrine of rememberance - yellow lilies and bouquets from Safeway in plastic wrapping, small plants, candles glowing in glass jars, hand-made notes and signs stuck to the glass, under the neon glow of the sign that said, mistakenly, "open." I stood there with my dog, and others stood next to us, and I felt a community I hadn't known existed.

I'd like to join the co-op they're starting.

I just spent about 40 minutes writing today's post and then inadvertently closed the browser without saving.

AAAAGH!

I don't have time to recreate it, so for now, I will just offer a link to this site about outsider art, or art made by people without any formal training. The site includes a "create your own backyard paradise" feature; here are 2 of the paradises I created:

-Trying
-Dreamer

The site was produced by the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD; I've never been, but I've heard it's wonderful.

Ok, well, off to work. Oh, by the way - I finally replaced my ID and garage pass yesterday. When I got upstairs to my desk afterwards, I was looking for something in my bag, and found...my old garage pass.

And so it goes.

Yesterday morning I lit incense, and as I watched the smoke curl and dance I was reminded of a poem I wrote in college that began, "Incense becomes smoke becomes air I breathe like you, I breathe you." I am tempted to apologize for this sounding too much like a poem written in college, for it being pretentious, or -- but I'm not going to, because, to be honest, I always loved that line.

I didn't actually write the poem myself - that line, yes, but it was part of a poem I wrote with a friend of mine when I was visiting her at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut. I remember being so inspired there - it seemed everyone was immersed in a creative project of some sort...making a film, costuming a show, playing music. I considered transferring (this was during my leave of absence from my own school, the University of Pennsylvania), but decided against it - I thought Wesleyan, with a student body of something like 1,500, would be too much like summer camp. That I was better off staying at Penn, a school connected to a city and to the "real world."

First - looking back almost 10 years later, I think, how sad that at age 20 I thought summer camp was something to avoid.

Second, a slightly-off-topic-rant: Oh how I wish colleges, parents, "the man," didn't perpetuate this notion that what awaits students following graduation is "the real world" - meaning that life before graduation is....what, exactly? I understand the idea is that once you're responsible for yourself financially, you're forced to grow up in new ways and take on certain obligations, but is all this more "real" than things you do in college and for the 18 years before it? Learning, making art, building friendships - this somehow counts less? If I sound like a hippie here - oh well, I guess I'm a hippie.

Anyway, back to my decision to stay at Penn...I've always been drawn to cities, to the sense of connection they give you to a world beyond yourself. And yet, what good is being surrounded by a volume of people if, in the middle of it, you feel alone? By contrast, at Wesleyan I could have had a creative community...and I'm increasingly realizing how rare it is to find such a thing. I wonder how much cities really provide us with. Living in Northwest D.C., I don't experience the cultural diversity that makes cities theoretically important or appealing. Yes, I'm surrounded by more people - when I walk my dog I pass more people than I would if I was walking him in the suburbs, but how meaningful is this, really? Especially considering the ethnic diversity of so many suburbs in the D.C. area. At this point, the main benefit I see to city life is being able to access so much without getting into my car. Which is important, but which is fundamentally a matter of convenience, not connection. The deepest connection I've felt to D.C. came after I discovered two communities - Tranquil Space yoga, and Washington Improv Theater. I was talking to a friend the other day about my experiences with WIT, and she said, "It sounds like you found your tribe." It's about time.

My work ID has not turned up, nor has my garage pass. I alternate between illegal street parking and playing it safe in the pay garage. It's weird when you already feel like you aren't yourself at work, and then you keep losing your ID...if it was fiction, you'd say the symbolism was too obvious. We try to be so subtle in our art and sometimes life is just that obvious.

Earlier I read a piece in Salon about a woman with a personal blog, about how she became addicted to it and started revealing more and more - from mundane details like what her children ate for dinner, to a thinly veiled plea for help as she contemplated suicide. She wrote,

In the introduction to the collection of her New York Times columns, Anna Quindlen wrote about the challenges of "Living Out Loud," writing life as it is happening. If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs.

I don't buy that the rate at which you write about yourself implies the intensity with which you live - the intensity with which you think, perhaps, but thinking isn't living. Recently I heard a quote - that while the unexamined life may not be worth living, the unlived life isn't worth examining. If I could only begin to live the way I write, or the way I am in improv - no gap between what's real inside me and what I present. That would be living loud.

Leaving yoga earlier tonight I was struck by how much clearer the world looked, how much fuller it felt, than it had when I'd rushed to the studio an hour earlier. The world gets so thin sometimes. At the beginning of my yoga practice I felt stiff, my thoughts richoceting like lotto balls around the inside of my head. As I breathed my way into pose after pose, some pushing me to the limits of my strength, others stretching me deeply, I began to inhabit my body again, began to inhabit the world.

Which makes me think that maybe sometimes in life, meaning comes from just going through the motions. And so I write this blog. And so I wash the dishes. And so I have faith - when I can muster it - that meaning will seep in between these activities, and one day it will just be obvious.

Last night my husband and I watched Some Kind of Monster, the documentary about Metallica that came out last year. It would be an understatement to say that I am not a fan of the band or of heavy metal in general, and yet, I found the film engrossing. It was less about the band, or the group therapy they undergo, than it was about the creative process... or, as a critic from the Village Voice put it, creative torture. For more information and to see clips from the film, go here.

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted something. I've been writing my screenplay, and it's too hard to write in my journal, write my screenplay and post something here every day. I had forgotten how much fun screenwriting is. It's similar to the joy of improv -- the playful creativity of bringing characters to life. So much easier these days to express myself through someone other than myself. Parts of me are in every character I create, of course, but it's freeing to invent names and personalities and styles, gestures, dialogue -- all with no rules. I have a notecard in my living room that says, "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." But creating yourself is a slow and arduous process. It takes a lifetime. Creating someone else - that's easy.

I started working on my screenplay again this week after a long hiatus. I don't think I've ever mentioned my screenplay here before. I started working on it last year, and for a while there I was working on it every day, but then I shared it with my husband, and even though he was incredibly supportive, it shut me down for a while. He just had very different reactions to my characters than what I was expecting; namely, he wasn't that interested in my main character, and he really liked her roommate, who I was trying to paint as the antagonist for much of the story. Not good.

Of course, part of what appeals to me about screenwriting is that you're writing a blueprint for other artists to interpret -- so in theory, the fact that my husband interpreted it differently than how I intended shouldn't have been surprising, or depressing. But it made me rethink how I was bringing my characters to life - in particular, my main character is an introvert, so I started wondering the best way to offer a window into her inner life without making her overly talkative, and in a way that made her interesting...

I got scared off for a while - I think sharing a draft somehow broke the spell I'd been under. But for the past few weeks I've been itching to get back to it. This is the first thing I've ever written where I actually live with the characters in my head. Fiction writers I've known have always talked about having their characters in their heads and I couldn't imagine what that would be like; now I think about my characters all the time, about what they need, what they feel, what they should do. Improv has given me a lot of inspiration, because it makes me think about the dynamic of a scene -- the status of the characters, their motivations -- and about the dialogue (one character makes an "offer," or injects information...another character "accepts," or validates what the first character says and establishes his/her own character with his/her response).

Anyway, I picked up my screenplay for the first time in a while earlier in the week, and I'm trying to write a page a day - so far so good, and it's good to be back...screenwriting is by far the most enjoyable kind of writing I've ever done. Other kinds of writing are satisfying, or fulfilling, but this is *fun*.