Beginnings

Two Different Places

2012-02-10T19:56:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine just told me that the heart and the mind exist independently of each other, and I agree...a little. In my crazy life, my heart and mind are in an eternal mosh pit, elbowing each other in the neck and insulting their mothers. I used to blame my acting training. I think that even the interest to act is a side effect of being me. Maybe my creative life is the only thing that keeps me sane. Maybe.

Right now, I feel crazy. Yes, first entry in a longer time than I care to measure, and I feel like I'm completely out of my element. Why? Is it because I haven't written in a long time and may be rusty? Is it because I'm halfway between being in love and seeing my career really take off? I'm constantly torn and stretched thin between where I need to be engaged and creative. A relationship? Completely foreign to me yet totally and overwhelmingly intriguing. Potential advancement at work? It's right there for me to grab. Creative fulfillment outside of work? It sits in the hands of the fickle creative community, but still I persevere.

The MOST difficult lesson to grasp is the act of being patient for one thing while staying busy with others. Where will my success and heart finally land?There's no definitive answer. I have absolutely NO flipping clue where I will be one year from now. One month ago, I felt unappreciated, determined to spend 90% of my time working and the other 10% sleeping, and hopeful to change my life in small increments. Today, it's as if I put on someone else's life for a trial run and it feels like I'm suddenly wearing big boy pants now. My job right now is to get busy doing and not spend any time wondering. For once in my life - the first time in decades - I know what I want and who I want it with, but am faced with the dilemma of that person not knowing it yet. Maybe this means I'm the only one who sees it. I don't know. I just don't know.

And you would think, at this ripe old age, that I would have some stuff figured out. Okay, yes I do, but there is always a blind spot. There will always be a blind spot, where the questions hang like dim light bulbs, with no switch or string to pull. They're supposed to be unanswered. Yes, they're also supposed to nag at my core for being unanswered. Wait. Be patient. That is the only instruction. Something will surely come.

Except...that's an inevitability, right? If you do nothing, something will come. If you do something, something will come. If you get busy doing something else, something will come while you're distracted.

Clearly I'm overthinking this.

And the answer will be, in hindsight, super simple.

Clearly the heart and mind are separated by language, by music, by logic, and I'm somewhere lost in the woods. I look forward to the moment when I figure it all out.

In My Life

2010-06-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

You stand alone at the beginning of each day, and the life you choose is all around you. You push off into automation, repeating the same steps as the day before, and pretty soon, you will convince yourself that this is the way things should be, for better or worse.

I tend to fall into these patterns, but I spent the summer of 2002 with change thrust upon me. I was laid off by a company I never totally felt at home in, and spent that year finding odd temp jobs, writing plays and spending more time in the theater, and generally doing a lot of spring cleaning on my whole life. I met a girl whom I spent time with, and some of that time was spent talking, some of it riding a wave of emotion, and some of it on a silent cloud of affection. The friendship bloomed in spring and summer and then faded in fall, and in the years since, I never lost hope that I would see her again. I even talked about her this week. It came two years and two months too late.

I have been agonizing over her suicide for days now, not able to function emotionally except for a profound sadness and emptiness. Even the anger over the circumstances that led her there is fleeting. I had hope. Hope was severed and abandoned. The lingering and very raw pain comes directly from the thread of love that still stretches from our last moment together. I sit here, helpless, with nowhere to tie it off to. I will never have the opportunity to feel her arms around me, to play with her hair, or hear her voice. No, it can't be true that she's gone. It just doesn't make sense that she no longer breathes, that her ashes have been scattered...that she simply does not exist any more. It's not possible.

She's gone. She's gone. I even say that in an attempt to imply that she has merely moved on to another place, but while that may be true, there's nothing I can do at this point to tell her how much I love her. There's nothing I can do to save her life. She slipped away the very second we released that last hug and kiss at the airport.

B: You saved moments of my life. You have to know you did that much.

I look around, and she's not in any of the familiar places. Not on my couch, not standing in front of my movie collection for a movie we're going to watch while we eat.

B: And I didn't slip away. I moved on, and moved on again, but I never forgot you.

Crazy as it might seem, I paced my apartment at night when I should have been sleeping and talked out loud to her, as if she could hear me .

B: I did hear you, and I need you to know that I feel your love now as much as I did then.

S: Then why didn't you come to me when you needed someone? Why was the only way out to end it all?

B: It's hard to say. I guess, sometimes as you journey through life, you get into some dense places that are so loud, that's all you can pay attention to. You...lose sight of shore...and the most persistent things become the most consistent, if that makes sense.

S: You knew you could always come back. Did I do anything that pushed you away?

B: No! No, not at all...I felt guilty sometimes because I felt like I always had so much to deal with, and I didn't want to dump it all on you. I know I overwhelmed you the last time we talked.

S: Yeah...sure, a little...but that's not a one-way ticket out of my life. I'm angry with you for not remembering to check in.

B: I'm sorry. I guess I was just more used to rejection and would not be able to take it if I really needed you and you, like so many others, would turn me away. I had great memories of you and didn't want to take anything away from that.

S: Did I ever give you any indication that I -

B: No, you didn't! I kind of expected it from everyone, though. If you only knew what I had to face....

S: I read some of it. The rest, your mother told me.

B: I don't want you to be angry with me. You have every right to be, but I don't want you to hold on to that.

S: It's not. Mostly, it's...I don't know how to describe it. It's a feeling of something that will never heal. The void will never be filled.

B: It'll get easier. This is very new news to you.

S: I can't reconcile it. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know where to put this.

B: Just sort through it and put things away. You'll see that the good things outnumber the bad. Do you remember our Thai food dinner? What movie did we see?

S: The one where you wore the...what was it, a bright yellow dress?

B: Yeah, that one. I think the movie was animated, and that you saw it once before.

S: I can't remember. I was distracted the whole time because you were so...I don't want to say that you were just happy, but you were actually radiating happiness. It might have been how bright your dress was.

B: I was really happy. Do you remember how I held onto your arm when we walked to and from the theater?

S: Yeah. I always thought we'd eventually come back to moments like that.

B: We didn't, and that's okay, you know. The important thing is that we had moments like that. Do you know how many truly relaxed and happy moments I had after that?

S: I'm going to guess there weren't many.

B: No, not like that. I had friends after that and felt love again, but what I did with you was unique to you, and that stayed with me.

S: So that's where it stays? I have to let go and let it be a memory?

B: Listen. This string of love that you talk about, the feelings that you can't put anywhere...you don't connect it to the next time you see me, because that won't happen for years. Hold on to it. And when you get restless or weak, let it go, and you'll see that I'm holding onto that same string from where I am. I may not be able to take my body with me where I am, but what I do take with me is the love. You, my friend, are shining it my way like a lighthouse, so how could I NOT notice and feel it? It's with me, right now.

All we have left are words, and simple gestures inspired by the experience of having known and loved someone. A great poet named David Harkins wrote:

"You can shed tears that she is gone,
or you can smile because she has lived.
You can close your eyes and pray that she'll come back,
or you can open your eyes and see all she's left.
Your heart can be empty because you can't see her,
or you can be full of the love you shared.
You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday,
or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.
You can remember her only that she is gone,
or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.
You can cry and close your mind,
be empty and turn your back.
Or you can do what she'd want:
smile, open your eyes, love and go on."

You stand alone at the end of each day, and the life you chose is all around you. You think about your decisions, the lives you touched and whether or not you made the day count. If you allowed yourself to be present and cherished every moment, if you dared to love with all your heart and celebrated being alive, you can remind yourself that this is the way things should be.

I'll see you again someday, my friend.

Seis de Mayo

2010-05-07T01:34:00.000-07:00

Holidays are often misinterpreted. I get pinched for not wearing green for St. Patty's day and enjoy telling the huffiest of pinchers that I'm not Irish, and neither was St. Patrick. Mexican independence day is actually September 16th. Jesus was actually born sometime in June. Holidays exist more in the present than the past. Valentine's Day. Lovers. Sillyness.

People are often misinterpreted, for that matter. The people who complain the loudest are often listened to, taken for face value, adn then eventually forgotten or avoided. The quietest peopl eoften do not defend themselves, and therefore allow themselves to seem guilty. A lot of people talk about what they want, but act on what they crave. Where does the truth lie in any of this?

The question lies in trying to rise above it all. Holidays? You should always celebrate the spirit of a good idea. People? Each person should be listened to and understood from where they stand, not where they tell you they are in relation to everyone else. Is there room for error? Huge. Spacious. I'm trying to rise above it all, but I do have distinct feelings about why a friend's butt thinks more about me than she does (she accidentally calls my cell phone once or twice a week but never actually calls me). I get pulled into dramatic black holes of confrontation way too easily (because I'm a Libra and always try to right an imbalance? Who knows.) I'm also shamelessly used to being alone, so given a chance to feel wrong in a group of people or right alone, I have a knee-jerk reaction. Give me a guitar, notebook, or camera, and I've got company for dinner, drinks at a bar, or conversation before a movie. I wish it was as simple as some of my friends put it when they want so much for me. Unfiltered, I love people and the connections we make. In reality, the people who don't like me don't just leave it at that, they're busy with the pointlessly important work of getting everyone else on board.

What gets lost in all of this, in all of the likes, comments, gossip, jealousy, and even the believability when I think a group of people or situation has been poisoned by misdirection, is the simplicity still at the heart of it. That's something to bank in your mind. Whatever you create, be it an honest intention towards someone, a song, a book, or even a thoughtful email, there is a simple truth behind it. No amount of snark or doubt can take anything away from it, and if it doesn't fit, there is a place somewhere that it does.

C: Wow, that sounded forceful.

S: Ooh, what brought this on?

C: What brought what on? My reaction?

S: No, you. You just popped up.

C: I thought I'd break in before you started playing a Sousa march and hoisting a huge flag behind you.

S: Was I going in that direction? I don't think so. I wanted to say something about independence.

C: Yeah, yeah, I know you're proud, but listen. The prevailing message from your friends this year is NOT that you should be celebrating your independence alone. You should share that with someone.

S: I -

C: No no no no. Don't make the face. Don't do the fake acknowledgement -

S: It's not fake! I get it...and yeah, I agree.

C: But....

S: But what?

C: Remember reading what "But" stands for? Behold the Underlying Truth. What's the deal? Why don't you just let it happen?

S: The question isn't why, really. It's who. And how.

C: Great. One waitress.

S: Ha ha - no. That's cute.

C: I brought it up for a reason.

S: Ugh. I give up. I don't know, really. When I'm just interested, person to person, it goes nowhere. For the most part, it's exhausting, you know?

C: Waitress?

S: Oh my god! That was a moment in time, then everything blew up and she became friends with...I can't compete with the poison. One person hates me. She gets others to agree that I'm not a good person. They avoid me. What can I do? Be hurt?

C: Well, yeah, it's hurtful. And I'm saying that it's hurtful to believe it, not so much that it's true. Your awkwardness might have inspired them to avoid you.

S: I just don't know what to do sometimes. It's too complicated. People are complicated.

C: Build some robots, then. Be a cat guy.

S: Both viable solutions.

C:What was it you said earlier? All you need is a guitar, a notebook, and a camera?

S: That's not my desert island answer, but...you know what - come to think of it, it might be my desert island answer. I would need extra strings...maybe a few notebooks.

C: Who are you creating for? I mean, what is the point of this whole creative life if you haven't given it to anyone?

S: Damn. You got me.

I am often misinterpreted. I try to portray an image of happiness, genuinely interested in people and, of course, fighting for everyone else's right to be creative too. I write stories that have deep, active meaning, and then forget why I needed to write them. I shoot photos with a longing for that moment in my gut, and then once they're posted I leave them alone. I sing, I act, and after lacerating self-exposure, all boundaries are dropped. I test my faith in the outside world, and back I run to the creative. I never talk about what I want, or what I should be celebrating.

Maybe it's not a matter of rising above. It could be that other people cannot define me, that my sense of self can and should override every rule. I'll try again. The number of people on Earth is currently 6,819,418,658 (and counting). I think...I can safely say that the odds are working in my favor.

Stand

2010-04-22T23:57:00.000-07:00

I've been here before, sitting alone with a grab bag of feelings spread out along a spectrum of color between absolute resolution and complete defeat. I opened my mouth. I had just finished speaking with passion about what's right and what's wrong, using only my past and the precious spot on the ground I stood on. I spoke, not for myself, but for people who were at that very moment struggling, hustling to find creative freedom. Who was I to represent them? What vote elected me to be an obstacle? All I can tell you is that I saw a void of conscience so wide that we may not recover from it. No, every time you kill an artist's heart, you take away from the world as a whole.

No, this wasn't the first time I put myself in this situation.

Sometime during the waning years at Playhouse I was sitting on a chair downstage center speaking to a house full of actors. It was difficult to get the words out, to even take the breath required to make a sound. We were about an hour or so away from opening the doors to the audience, and I called everyone involved in the day's productions, crew included, into the theater. This was to be the first of two speeches that weekend, and there I sat, a moment before word one, with a roomful of eyes on me.

Deep breath. Eye contact. I never thought I'd be here. It went something like this.

"All of you know, as you can see in the schedule, that this one act workshop is essentially over and done. You're the last people, the ones who are going to close this series out. Now, this wasn't a decision from the top, it came from me. What we ran into was a conflict of priorities in the schedule, and you were going to be given the basement. You would only be scheduled for matinees, and I thought you deserved better. I cancelled the series rather than cheapen it. All of you know my philosophy behind this; There is not a single actor here who represents the best we have to offer. All of you, by virtue of your dedication and talent, represent the standard for what we learn here. I believe in the standard. I don't believe in the best."

"Because this is coming to an end, I needed come here and apologize for losing the workshop, for losing the theater company for you. I'm sorry. I failed you."

This is where my emotions started winning the battle of restraint.

"There was something I should have done to preserve this for you, something I didn't do or know how to do to save this series. I lost this opportunity for you. I need you to know that I'm still here and fighting for you. If you need a director, I'm in, no questions asked. If you can't find a play you believe in, I'll write one for you. All of you deserve a chance, and I lost this one."

The second time I delivered the speech, it wasn't any easier. The actors were overwhelmingly supportive and immediately responsive. They knew that for ten years, this was my entire life. I had work, I had Playhouse. Lower on the list of priorities was sleep, friends, romance, even my own projects. I felt I was only meeting them in the middle; They stayed with me through rehearsals that ended at 2am on a weeknight. They endured my pages of notes after performances. Their moments of truth and honesty on stage validated all of my sacrifices, more so than any accolades, and I never doubted my dedication to them.

I eventually left the program, totally foreshadowed by the moment I stood in Studio Two and realized that "...this will all go away. It's important now, but someday this will be a memory." A handful of productions later, it all went away and my life was redefined.

I never stopped loving the artist, though. The very second we make the connection, the unspeakable knowledge that we are communicating on a whole other level, they become part of a family I owe loyalty to...and feel responsible for. I crave the sight and experience of someone growing as an artist, the light bulb that goes off when they learn something new or the discovery of having expressed something that defied explanation just a moment before. I love the process of searching, of dissatisfaction with everything that has been done before. I admire the hunger. I know the lonely struggle to find an audience.

And when someone is set up to fail, when even the odds are needlessly stacked against them, something alarming stirs up inside me. I sat for a moment after the talk, and I collected myself. I was coming down from 80% passion and 20% logic, and I sat because I was dizzy...or maybe a little lost...but I was right. What I inherited, however, was a heightened awareness that left unguarded, artists will be forgotten. That should never happen. Talent needs to be celebrated.

I have, for the moment, an unanswerable struggle. I have the feeling that this leads towards something important, but am I the person to do anything about it? Who am I to represent the creative community?

As always, if nobody else claims the spot, can I remain quiet and be satisfied with the outcome? I think you know the answer.

Your Drug of Choice

2010-02-28T01:36:00.000-08:00

Whether you are a person who is addicted to something or you're someone who has checked out of living and leads a dependable, predictable life, the question of what motivates you is something to consider. We get caught in our patterns and are attracted to certain things in our lives, all in the name of...what the hell are we feeding? What are we running away from? I think about this stuff as my niece sits in rehab, deconstructing her life and her addictions, while at the same time I know people who seem to slip through life without a care (or interest). I've written many times about moving through a life that feels like a mosh pit, and I get lost...and I stop to look back sometimes and wonder where and how time just slipped by. I can totally understand how people want to numb themselves, either temporarily or permanently. I get it.

I can feel myself getting away from patterns again, from choosing to be around just about anybody to not feel lonely or forgotten. I found myself mired in dysfunctional situations, caught in moments of clarity where I wonder "what are these people doing and why isn't anyone saying anything about it?" "Why does it feel...unjust and completely false?" Why don't I just step away for a moment and see if anyone notices? Circle one hardly blinked, with my contributions quickly being replaced by another person. Whatever I did in that circle was for a long time copied and repeated with more money. Circle two filed me in the "whatever happened to" files. Circle three is highly suspicious of my distance, thinking it's purposeful and damaging.

I watch shows about addicts and I understand that pain that they're trying to mask. I can taste the sharpness of directly touching it, and know that it's seeded, rooted towards how I react to everything. From being teased and harassed mercilessly through five of my eight grade school years through the traumatizing experience of falling in love for the first time and then falling from that height, I know I have to work hard on understanding some things about myself and the world I'm in. I haven't turned towards drugs or alcohol, nor do I take medication for depression, but this doesn't mean that I don't understand the rationale behind Andrew Koenig selling everything he owned, flying up to Canada, and hanging himself from a tree in a park he loved. I totally get the peaceful, morbid poetry behind it. In a world of endless possibilities, he was exhausted of the options that just didn't make sense any more. He stepped away and saw with a quiet clarity what he had to do. I struggled with understanding it when I heard the news. I wanted to reach out to someone who might need it. And then I realized that nobody I know has a void to fill. I attempted to come back to creativity, but because it's tainted at the moment with obligation and a difficulty that keeps ratcheting up, I'm not inspired to take any risks or feel my way through it.

None of this means that I have nowhere to turn. I still have family, with whom I can find moments of forgetting everything else in the world. I have a couple of people I can completely surrender to, if need be. I think I have a pretty good reputation at work, which can be overwhelming and unpredictable. I also keep myself busy - at the moment, too busy - which keeps me moving from one point to the next. I just have to manage these quiet moments.

What would help get rid of that grade school experience that makes me extra sensitive to people picking sides, talking about me, trying to sabotage every step I take? The only way it started to subside in grade school was when it became physical, but I was still talking about it in college. What would open my heart back up after being traumatized by the aftermath of my first real love, and being told that I "have a lot to offer a lot of people, but not enough for one person"? I can finally admit it changed me and left me with heavy, heavy baggage. It's a tremendous burden to believe that you can't be loved, that you can't trust, that somehow you don't deserve it...that this experience...somehow compounded and confirmed the first. It's all too easy to attach new experiences to that meaning, to make everything fit and to feel like the only reason people need me is to provide a service. It's a culinary disaster of the heart, a combination of emotional flavors that don't go together. The fact that months go by between journal entries makes me wonder if I keep replanting the seeds that feed on and destroy hope.

Just over a year ago, my family and I were at a backyard get-together, and Alfonso, who was in his 90s, locked into me and demanded my attention. "El Maestro", as I called him, began with one question: "How old are you?" Normally, he was a little difficult to understand and spoke only about South American politics, but this time it was about me. "How old are you?" At the time, I was 41. He asked if I was in a relationship or had a family of my own, maybe some kids. I told him no, that there wasn't even one girl I was serious about. He said that I reminded him of his brother. His brother was a workaholic, perpetually young until he got older, and then suddenly he got to his 70s and 80s and began to have health problems. He had nobody to take care of him, no woman by his side, no children to help their dad or talk to the doctors like my sisters do for my parents. He had only Alfonso, but Maestro was the older brother, and had health issues of his own. His brother died alone, without a legacy.

He lived a long life, and died alone.

Alfonso looked at me and made me promise I would try. Of course, he didn't know what kind of life I had, he just had the mental snapshot of me with my parents, my sister, and my niece's kids. He didn't talk politics that visit. This was all he wanted to say, and I couldn't forget it. I came home in January, and wanted to try. The first few times, it didn't feel right. I had two Valentine's Day dates that, in theory, sounds like I'm a player to everyone who hears that much, but in reality was me providing a service to others and deserving nothing for myself. I tried again, spending a weekend with an old friend that turned sterile and awkward. Everywhere I turned, I ran into someone who was holding out for a better thing and constantly looked past or through me. I stepped away, listened to the castrated version of my name - "Stewie," which vaguely takes away any importance of who I am - and eventually work started pulling more and more of my attention.

Alfonso died a few weeks ago. I'm now 42.

I am a little less than a week away from finishing a major project, and then I have to consider what I want my life to be. The first thing that occurs to me is that I'm going to retire from doing this kind of creative project. The second thing that comes to mind is that I tend to consume junk food versions of real interactions between people. I need to know the difference and to trust my doubts when they nag at me over time. The most important thing is that I don't lose hope, that it's not too late. It's not my fault that a whole group of guys didn't let me get through a day of grade school without persecution or humiliation, so I never feel comfortable being associated with a group of people unless I can stand apart somehow. It's not my fault that I was loved once, abandoned, and had to watch her with other guys...and that everything since has come with a guarantee that nothing would come of it. It wasn't me. It wasn't about me, though I've lived with the shame of...somehow representing it...of making all of them right.

My niece had the seizure, and for reasons unknown to me, she asked for help and ended up in rehab. Andrew Koenig, whom I've never met, but I know people he knows, never asked for help, and died. Alfonso, in his wisdom, stopped me and knew I needed help. What would I do to wean myself from the addiction to denial? I need to really look at the people who believe in me the most...Andrea, Vivian, Ninette, to name a few...and find hope in the fact that these people are here, now...and they could tell someone a story about who I am that is in direct contrast to what has come before. What they believe, I should understand better than I understand the numbness and loneliness of my past.

I should begin to try, anyway, because the world is filled with circles and none of them are complete. Looking for them should be my new addiction.

A Strong Word

2009-09-18T00:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't written in months, and it might as well be years or even another lifetime. This is the equivalent of having my wings clipped, and I have not sung a song in my gilded cage. I may finally be embracing the idea of adulthood. No, wait. I may be abandoning my childhood. Either way, what I haven't said is that part of the reason I haven't written is that I'm a hated man. It's an active, poisonous sense of dislike hidden behind a face of indifference, and it wishes to see the end of me. You can tell me that it's too extreme a thing to exist between two people, but other people see it exists, too. Do I reciprocate the feeling? I don't think I know how.

“Hatred paralyses life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I was shocked when I saw that Maya Angelou used the term "hater". If feels so juvenile to me and almost dehumanizes the person. It's dismissive, and yet, while I focus on this for the moment, please know that I have a lot of the right kind of love in my life. I know I share bonds with people that defy description. I'm crazy about them and totally feed off this mutual connection we have. There's love between us without question; Not a single move or word questioned, intangibles understood as if they were a private language between us. I've had a few "what the fuck are you doing?" moments with strangers...and let's face it...I know who they are because the real people in my life fill moments with truth.

In this case and only this instance can I mention names. If I ever look in the mirror and can't recognize myself, I know Vivian will remind me. If I sell out, give up, or surrender to a false definition, Andrea will grab me and set me straight. If I reach the end of reason and begin to let go, I can call Wes and open my eyes. These people are my history, along with new names both within reach and thousands of miles away. From their inspiration, I sit here to fight and write.

"We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them."
~ Charles Caleb Colton

I know what you're thinking. Okay, maybe not actually what you're thinking. You might say that you can't please everybody, and odds are that I might not be liked by everyone. That's fairly logical and easy to accept. It's slightly cliche, but there's truth in it. Like I said before, this is an active hatred. I've seen emails. I've heard stories. I've faced the neverending criticism and walk into the storm every day knowing that lightning can strike at any given moment. Do I feed it? I avoid it at all costs. Do I meet the mask of indifference with my own? I know the truth, and at times it completely deflates me because I haven't provoked it. It seethes and needs to be the only thing in existence. The love in my life is the starry night sky, and the hate is the huge sucking black hole looming nearby. That's exactly how it feels.

Cat tells me it's a matter of perception. I constantly see it, so it has to exist. When I forget about it, it resurfaces and reminds me that it's still waiting for me to trip, to fail, to be exposed and open. Jesus, that sounds abusive. I still slip into it, though I'm much better off than last year when this hatred was in my face and almost fanatical about making me unhinge and expose myself.

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."
~ Elie Wiesel

Thanks to Playhouse training, I feel everything (to some extent) and my curiosity prevents me from straying towards indifference. I've held my feelings and thoughts about this for a long time, and felt ready to finally talk about it. It's an insult, really, to those gorgeous stars in the sky. What's going to happen will happen, and I have some say in that. I can't, especially now, be what you want me to be, unless you accept me as I am or support who I want to be. It just can't work any other way.

Falling Sideways

2009-02-05T00:26:00.000-08:00

I sit on this hill and I listen.

I listen to traffic, people floating snark in the air, and loud obnoxious music, and I push it away. I wait, and listen for wind. I smell the air and listen for rain. And then I give up. I surrender to it all and listen to my own breathing. She speaks.

C: Ohh, there's that feeling again.

S: I'm debating it.

C: What's the argument?

S: How much of it is necessary...or just my stupid perception...or actually valid. I indulge feeling everything because it feeds my writing, but on the other hand, at the same time there are some things I can fix or reconcile...which is what a healthy person would do.

C: Do we really need to define "healthy" or "normal"? You know, you don't need to make a stand and declare that you're different. The sad truth of it is, everyone is different.

S: But you know what? Hold on to that thought for a second. (pause) Listen, I don't work hard to create a mystique about myself. I'm not a puzzle to be solved by anyone. That's not my spine. I'll tell you something - I am used to going at it alone, and I don't need anyone's approval or validation. I create projects for me and hopefully I've broken down the guts of what I want to do in a way that makes sense to people so I can still collaborate with others, but it's my dream. It's my way of life.

C: That was a little unexpected.

S: In some instances, I say way too much and face the consequences. To myself, I don't say things until I can vent here.

C: What does it feel like?

S: What, the...wow, I really did get worked up there for a second.

C: What does it feel like when you - what did you call it - "indulge" the feeling?

S: It sinks. It starts moving down slowly with...a realization that...you've been rejected again...and right when you begin to shake it off and pick yourself up, you choose instead to let the moment confirm your worst fears, and then you face the truth about yourself. Do I really suck? Am I really not...I don't know how to finish that. I have to answer it, and then I move on.

C: It sounds masochistic. Why put yourself through it?

S: I like to believe that there's an abundance of feeling and color all around us, and most people walk past it like it's old and irrelevant...but all of it is alive and screaming for attention. I just do it naturally because it's about what's really happening in the present moment.

C: Yeah, but...if the end result takes a toll on you, is it a good thing?

S: Until I found a natural perpetual well of reassurance, yeah. This life is self-generated and self-motivated. I made decisions in the past - mistakes, really - that got me here, but in all honesty, I just don't have the same resources I used to have.

C: A matter of perception. Do you remember the girl from a few years ago and what ultimately spelled the recurring end to the relationship? She felt she didn't deserve what you had to give, but at the same time she inspired so much in you. You also never bluntly offered the real thing to her. It was always implied.

S: Yeah, so?

C: If you had to learn one thing from the experience, why did you have to take the concept of not deserving something? It's just...completely idiotic. Why did I give you that speech the other day?

S: God, everything would be easy if we were just talking about writing music or putting together a photo mosaic for charity. If all of it was left up to my own devices and invention, it's a no brainer. I just have to know that this is what I want, and then I make it happen. It's not so true when it comes to people.

C: Did you know you wanted...?

S: Yeah.

C: Why didn't you say it?

S: That works in movies, not in real life. It's perceived as being creepy in real life.

C: Is that what you really think?

S: Yeah. (pause) How's that for straightforward?

C: The statement is, but the thought process behind it is skewed. Just once, take a chance, okay? Be blunt and in as few words as possible, ask for it. Go down in flames.

S: I'll think about it.

C: That means...

S: That means I'll think about it.

And I listen to the cloud of thoughts that rolls in my mind, the very same one that keeps me up at night. The clock ticks, the wind blows, and the music plays a love song for no one.

How do I make sense of it all?

MONDAY morning update.

S: You know what? You're full of shit.

C: Huh? What? You're the one who -

S: "Take a chance. Be bold. Go up in flames." It's a load of crap. You know where that gets you?

C: Tell me. Oh, and before you do, get a good look at my deadpan expression.

S: Do you remember the "I can't match your level of honesty" theme that repeats? I'm telling you, there are friends I have that totally get it and don't use that as a starting gun for a windsprint to anywhere-else-but-here. I was talking to a friend last night -

C: I don't meant to cut you off, but...well, wait. Yes, I need to cut you off. Does it make sense to you when I say that being blunt and expressive like that is actually doing you a favor?

S: I'm not sure.

C: Listen. If people flip out and have a reaction - or non-reaction - to you, then they're saving you time. They...are...saving...you...time and effort, right?

S: Okay....

C: Then don't waste your time being someone else for the sake of anyone's sensitivity or needs. You are who you are, and you've learned your lessons in the past when it comes to that compromise. I know you have. Those people who "get you" can't afford to be overlooked. Wake up to that, and know that sometimes, you have to say what's on your mind and crack open politeness or small talk to get to what's really inside. Most of the time it won't be for you. Every now and then, though.

S: Point taken.

The clock ticks, the wind blows, and blah blah blah blah. It's time to step out of the mud and reconnect.

As You Are

2009-01-29T23:07:00.000-08:00

I opened my notebook tonight and found two words inside the cover, with a familiar voice speaking them in my mind.

Begin again.

I woke up my iPod and chose the song I wanted to start writing to, and the voice of a great musician - a guy I met named Ziv - spoke to me:

Forgive everyone you know...'cause they were once a child too.
Forgive yourself and love again.
You've been waiting for it.

C: Welcome back to the right side of your brain.

S: Ahh, is that where my heart was all along?

C: So how have you been? Has work been that good, to take you away from doing all of this creative stuff?

S: You know what...I feel like I sold out. I let it become the main thing, and then writing and playing music became a distraction.

C: Who the hell is that person? I mean, okay, the job is great and all, but I seriously don't care about the fun stuff you get to do. You live when you write. If you don't get that out of your system, there goes a year with nothing to show for it.

S: I...you know, I get it, and for many reasons I've...been given a little clarity right now. But don't think I lost anything, because I haven't

C: I know. I can see that. I watched you lost in thought for two hours. I recognize that person.

S: It's a little scary.

C: Why?

S: When I get an idea like this, it turns and evolves, it needs to live and come into focus. There is a crazy need to get it out of me so I can start working with it. (pause) You know what? It's kind of like the guy from Close Encounters.

C: Is there a huge sculpture made of garbage in your living room? Tell me honestly if you're going insane because...well, wait a minute...this conversation is taking place, so....

S: No, I just always have it in the back of my mind. I'm fully inspired and filled with urgency. I'm writing notes on napkins and jumping from one medium to another. I'm a total freak at work, but people seem to enjoy seeing my brain fire up like this.

C: Okay....

S: Okay...what?

C: So I don't get it. What's the problem?

S: I don't have a problem.

C: I look over your head and I see a cloud of...I don't know, everything. It's hard to describe. There's more going on than this new project you're working on.

S: Really?

C: Do you remember the first time we talked?

S: Ohhh crap. That was a long time ago. It was...1987, right?

C: On a grassy hill, with the sun and wind tossing clouds across the sky. I remember how you had some distance from the thing you were dealing with and were trying to reconcile the lingering thoughts, the stuff that just wouldn't tie up neatly.

S: Yeah. It's weird to think about what it meant then.

C: So listen, I have known the intimate workings of your beating heart for a very long time, and I have seen every accomplishment you've had since what feels like the beginning of time. I know when you're afraid to ask for something and when you're taking a jump in evolution. This project is symptomatic of something else.

S: I don't like that you know this much about me.

C: So?

S: There are some things that I keep to myself.

C: Yeah, I know. But I do want to tell you something. (pause) It is altogether okay to have something other than...an invention completely of your own doing.

And there's no response. The song playing over the speakers by Jenny Owen Youngs - I shit you not - says:

I'll draw up the blue prints but i'll never use them.
Now i've only ever offered you myself and you always say it's not enough.

S: That's an old voice talking.

C: Isn't it weird to think about what it meant back then?

S: Oh, God. I hate it when things fall into place and you say something with such...fucking clarity that I can't explain it away. I like my struggle...sometimes.

C: Yeah, I know that one. You don't always have to earn things you get. Sometimes you get rewarded for good things you've done without realizing you've done them. Just take it. Ask for it. Whatever it is you don't want to talk about, take a step back and look, okay? It's easier than you sometimes make it out to be.

S: I'm a complicated person.

C: Not from where I'm standing.

S: Yeah. Thanks.

C: Okay...empty now?

S: It's good enough.

John Mayer now keeps asking me - and he's being persistent:

Do i have to fall asleep with roses in my hand?

The answer might have been an obvious denial for a long time, but it's pretty clear that the simple truth is that right now it doesn't feel anything like it used to. Right now, the Law of Proximity is pretty much in full effect.

Defying Gravity

2009-01-07T23:56:00.000-08:00

In 2008 I took a lot of shots straight at the heart and spent my year's allotment of optimism. It was like finding the surface of water on your last breath, and here I am standing just inside 2009 on a quiet, fertile ground that denies the turbulence of the path that led to it. It's quiet, hesitant as if waiting for me to collect myself, and I've brought some of 2008 with me into the new year. I shed some of it already, scattered on the days behind me, and today, I reached another breaking point where I let go yet again. I'm determined to see change. I've got pockets full of optimism again and a heart intact, and no room for excuses.

With few events at work for a month or two, I've got some time to grab some growth, to find that inspiration I've lost, and reconnect with people. I've got to sort out a few things, and I say this not putting that task first but rather with intention to make it all inclusive. This won't be a year with one silly resolution, or two to five goals to achieve. It won't be an opportunity to assign blame or to define myself in relation to anyone else.

Something snapped inside my brain, after which I immediately grabbed my guitar. That's how I knew I had to write before going to bed. Well, that's the way it usually happens with me, doesn't it? I think it means that both my left and right sides of my brain are agreeing on the state of my self, and that calls for me using some of this frustration and anxious optimism to stand right here, throw down a spike and signpost, and say that I deserve, as good as it already is, a better life than the one I have now. I've had it with expectations, I'm done with anything but truth, and I know it's time to embrace the creative life I should be living.

I've got a mixed bag of feelings right now, but I feel like I'm already burning it for fuel. I want to be busy. I want to do my job and then come home to work on something else. I want to look back on each week and have something to show for it. And then I want to have people to share it with. People here, right in the now, who are present in the present. That does require that I stop thinking about the past, and even the recent past, which will be hard, but easier if I stay busy.

So that's the beginning, the first brick on the road to Oz. What will I find when I get there?

Red Giant

2008-12-21T20:51:00.000-08:00

I have started two or three entries about my strange, spectacular, and perilous journey in a new job, a whole new world, really. I write for about a paragraph about all of my dreams leading up to it, and then I look at everything that followed, and that cup of inspiration sits empty, indifferent to the whole story. I just can't write enough details of all the good and bad I've had over the past eight months because the real issue doesn't lie with job satisfaction. The thing that needs to be unearthed is altogether much larger than that, because let's face it: this is just the start of a new chapter in my career, so of course there were going to be struggles.

What I have to confess is that I am seriously lacking inspiration. I am starving, thirsty, my humanity draining and my need to create waning. Only now, as I am with my family in Miami for the holidays, can I recognize myself and realize mistakes I've made this year. I have seven days left of this vacation to examine my life, reconnect, and be brutally honest about everything I'm doing and not doing. For that matter, it's encouraging that I've gotten past the first paragraph. I think this means that I'm a little closer to the truth of the moment.

While I have watched my latest muse lose her brilliance and interest, I haven't been in touch with friends. I've allowed work to take my whole focus, thinking about it when I'm not at the office and not sparing enough energy to create new projects on my own. I've taken on projects at work that increased the target on my head, and I just have to ask, with everything I'm doing, am I spending my time wisely? Am I showing interest in the right things?

Being around family refocuses all of that in an instant. Nothing else matters here in the cradle of love. I can begin with this, let everything else scatter to the winds, and then there are obvious pieces that remain. They stick despite all of the changes, because I hear their voices on my phone, get messages from them, emails, and when I'm away, they stay and watch over my apartment. They seek me out and know me for who I really am, and still, what have I done?

I realize I'm hopping back and forth between the past and the present, but things have to change. I'm yelling into an echoless chamber and have finally woken up to see what I'm setting myself up for. I've been able to dim the lighthouse of my heart for maintenance in the past, so...I think that is exactly what's called for now. My heart doesn't lie, and thanks to years of theater where everything false becomes as obvious as those rare moments of truth, I can't lie to myself any more, either. Where will I find the inspiration that I've missed so much, and what is the name of my next muse?

The brutal, uncompromising truth is that I can't pursue what I can't create. That is what I do best. I don't compete, I don't express meaningless ideas. I'm made to live a creative life out of necessity, and that often means I have to go at it alone.

I aspire to be better than I am, so think about that when the changes come.

Sleeper, Awake

2008-09-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

I see the image of her in my mind as I've seen it a thousand days since I last touched her, and I remember myself as I was. It's been a recurring theme, defining experiences sometimes before they have a chance to happen. It's a badge of courage, that memory, and it built a sobering tolerance of every difficult thing I've encountered in my life. I've struggled, I've gone head first through rejection and failure, and I faced much of it alone. That was by choice. I've seen in her my importance to another person, and though it's still there, what I never saw was the growth of myself beyond her eyes. I just set myself to pushing ahead, way ahead of the pack, stopping occasionally to see something beautiful, but not real. Because I wasn't alive, surrounded by people who constantly looked over my shoulder for the next best thing, I stopped looking and worse, I stopped hoping. No, I'm not a celebrity. I'm not rich, nor do I drive a nice car or own my own home. I don't walk into a room expecting all eyes on me, and I don't expect anyone else to open a door for me in my career. I only focused on building my life from and inside ground zero, but things are beginning to change.

I've come to a new place where I don't have years of investment. I am brand new, judged as I am, and there are no thoughts of what I once was. My value only exists in the moment, and if there once was a place to deny myself, to accept being overlooked and underappreciated, this isn't it. I am what I do. I'm trusted with difficult projects, compensated in more ways than one, and gain the exact measure of what I put in, at the very least. I'm in a land of appreciation, and this is a foreign place compared to where I have been, where I've paid my dues.

So, of course, I have to change. Darwin once said that "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." I can't speak to anyone else I recognize as older but virtually unchanged, but since I write to ask the questions I may not have answers to, and I constantly turn over the topsoil to try to figure out what the hell I'm doing at any given moment, it's not a matter of this possibly being the time for me to change. It's an undeniable truth. I have to be brutally honest with myself and begin to let go of old habits and beliefs. It's right there in front of me. It's that hill I can see from twenty steps away from my house. It's the addition of new people in my life, and the reintroduction of old friends.

I see an image of her in my mind, but it doesn't resemble a picture I've held for a thousand days since. She is redefined, with a new name and possibly...who knows...maybe a new promise. In fairness, I should hold and offer my heart with no hesitation, for I've kept it so long for no apparent reason other than fear. I'm not afraid any more. Let this be a new recurring theme for me.

The Jungian Thing

2008-09-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

The unpredictability of day-to-day life never ceases to amaze me, but people do. Often, you appreciate people for whom they are and don't even attempt to define them, and then suddenly, like a hockey player being checked into glass, you see someone display an awesome boundary of their limitations, either through action or blunt inaction. These are the same people who will give you advice despite themselves, turning a blind eye to their flawed nature and repeating things they've heard, speaking with such hollow wisdom, embarrassing themselves without knowing it. They talk about a big picture but see the world through a pinhole. They correct your behavior and justify their own. They say exactly twenty words too far in the wrong direction, and everything after that is just mindless wandering in the weeds of their own dissatisfaction.

Words are as cheap as the unsolicited, unqualified opinions that literally litter every avenue of communication we know, and it's gone so far in recent times that people, I believe, have forgotten how to be polite to each other. People will enter a conversation - be it text, email, chat, or even in person - with one need in mind and upon getting what they need, the conversation ends on one side. It seems a growing majority want to be heard and not responded to. That's the impersonal Internet generation, built on more tenuous connections rather than few strong ones. That's where the search for real people becomes so difficult to hope for.

You know who you are.

And I mean that in the sense of you knowing where you stand. Are you sampling people and experiences from a party tray, or do you begin your search from within? Do you step outside and act with good intention, or do you immediately enter the race and cock your arm to strike down any person or idea that threatens to pull a distant spotlight from you? Do you know only about love for one, or do you know about love for all? This is not a test; I wrestle with those questions all the time, both with how people affect me and how I want to carry myself.

I said that you know who you are, and I meant it. Either you've examined yourself in a mirror and put it into words, or it's the theme song playing in your subconscious. These things are self-evident, and they create recurring patterns that can last a lifetime. One that comes to my mind is the constant reminder to rise above the moment and aspire, build, keep moving and searching for truth wherever I can get it. Most of what I've found lately has been the dirty and dense variety, poisonous and completely foreign. The minority - in truth - has been priceless and promising, and the very least I can do is weigh them equally. That's where I want to put my focus, as much as I'm able. I am distracted, but I haven't lost hope.

I am flawed, still reactive and can hold a grudge needlessly. While I try to practice diplomacy and steer away from emotional situations, I'm quick to react negatively when people make the simplest things difficult. In many respects, I'm stuck in the maze of my own making, but I'm not dull enough to believe the present resembles the future. I want more. I need to grow. I look up and off into the distance, and believe I can and should get there, even if I stand to fail many times on the way.

I will get there, despite myself. If I can help it, I'll choose the right words, find the right people, and let everything else fall away. The truth is - if I'm not blind to it - always right here, right now.

A New Prometheus

2008-09-15T22:47:00.000-07:00

Enough is enough. I've written enough optimistic passages to qualify for the very first Hallmark book, an extended greeting card that not only expresses Happy Birthday and Thinking of You, but it also aggressively works towards spinning the negative on its head, regardless of what theme is playing in daily life. Right now there's so much noise. So much noise. I can't throw the iPod cone of denial over my head this time. What's more, I'm going to commit myself to writing something every day to get myself back on track. I'm in the midst of my rookie season and am beginning to forget the love of the game.

What's bringing me back to that? I meet so many people who once loved something, or were moved by something, and left it forgotten somewhere in the past. There are likes and dislikes, attractions and reactions, sometimes the search for an elusive truthful moment. And I get lost. I get busy, and I get lost. One thing I can see clearly now, which I've tried to ignore many times, is that I have lighthouses in the darkness of my memory, reminding me to write, to create, to play music. It's annoying sometimes, because I just want life to be simple. What's worse is the fact that I see these people, or at least read their words and visualize perfectly what they looked like the last time I saw them, and yet I can't tell them that they mean this much to me, still. I wouldn't dare, not even in a weak moment, or risk losing contact. I remain aloof and parenthetical, and brush the feelings aside. It's not fair, but it is the product of trial and error.

The trial has been acknowledgment of things going well, but denying what's actually happening. That's really hard to do, because as much as I may have aged, my body and mind in effect and interest, I still have my old enthusiasm for the simplest things. I will unashamedly let my inner dork come to the surface and say exactly what's on my mind, playing and cracking jokes whenever I can. I'll show interest in the smallest detail, and sink completely into music or a movie without judgement, as if that piece was written expressly for me to watch it. I'll often do things alone to preserve that wonder without judgement, and practically dance with that freedom.

The error has been trying to share that wonder with people, or slipping and saying exactly how I've felt. That seems to be the very last thing people want. Honesty. Appreciation. A complimentary, supportive nature. It all smells strongly of commitment and obligation, like a green cloud that will leave an unwashable smell in their clothes. I've already written here that I've been accused...and I couldn't emphasize that word enough...accused of being too truthful. I've been treated like the greatest medicine with the most bitter taste, shoved to the back of the medicine cabinet and forgotten.

So I step back into the darkness that follows, and I re-evaluate. I think about why I can click with some people so well and then be rejected immediately for an apparent fear that things are going well. Am I too open? Am I too available? Am I too different? At this point in my life, there are irreversible traits and choices that I live with, not understanding an ounce of regret. I've written about it the whole way - for 23 years - and I don't envy a single person. I don't actually optimistically hypnotize myself into thinking that my best days are ahead of me. I can only think obsessively that creatively speaking, I have something great yet to discover. I don't get that from faith, and I don't get that from past successes.

I look off into the darkness, and I see those points of light in the distance. One tells me that I could and should let someone love me again. Another one tells me that I'm smart, and talented, and unique. Yet another one tells me that no matter what decisions I make, they'll be the right ones and I can always alter my course. I tell myself....

Seriously, screw life being easy. My options aren't always laid out simply because there are things that I have to do for survival, and then there's the constant pull from my creative side. It has to survive. It has to keep an opening in me big enough to breathe, to feel things profound and unforgettable, letting out a hopeful voice that keeps searching. There are times I can't get to sleep at night because the overture is still playing.

I work, I pay bills. I buy food and sleep, and so, I live.

I listen to the muses, the lighthouses in my heart, and that makes me feel alive. I can't have it any other way.

The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs

2008-08-21T01:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I need to remind myself of the quote "We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are." Yes, it's one of those things that people say while disconnecting themselves from the spirit of the idea, but damn, it's so absolutely true. I want to spend every day of my life practicing the act of becoming, and I have to remind myself because I get distracted with so many things from day to day. I lose sight of the big picture...which...and I realize this is very stream of thought...I have to consider myself lucky that I've got a sense of a bigger picture than this, you know? The big picture constantly comes into focus and continues to evolve.

Not that I actually have a lot of distractions, compared to what other people might have to deal with. Over this summer, which is about to end, I've spent five days a week working no less than 10 hours a day with two crackberries strapped to my body and 15 pounds falling off of me. It's as if I'm in a submarine that has been floating under the polar ice cap for months, and just now I'm beginning to see the sun shining through the surface. We have one week left of summer that has had so many moments beyond anything I could have imagined a year ago. One year ago I was isolated at a desk, working on my own, worried about my future in a strangely symbolic cul de sac on the 6th floor of an industry I had no interest in. One year ago, I was laying face down in a rut, fed up with patterns of my past and yet at the same time completely stunned by vertigo when faced with a distant, staticy wall of options. They were all out there, beyond reach or definition, but since I had a paycheck coming in every week, no matter how miserable I was I could still sit back, do nothing, and earn money.

In one month, I will be a year past my own personal independence day. I will have survived the thrust into the unknown, the pinpoint landing onto the top of a hill, and I will have faced the trials of a difficult summer. I've been away from family and friends, out of touch and entirely focused on sleeping and working. I can make this all worth it if I start making upward moves within the company. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy I sometimes ignore or encourage the opposite of, and really, the act of believing in the outcome is more powerful than hope. It's the innocent knowledge that the way to get to where you want to go is never a straight line, but as long as you keep your eyes on the next finish line, you'll get there. Here's the secret behind the secret: It doesn't occur to most people you'll meet to turn their gaze above the crowd and see that point in the distance. Because of that, they'll try to discourage you from being different. They'll laugh at or argue with your lack of compliance to their standards. They'll resent you once you're pulling away. After a while, their voices will fade off into the distance, and you'll find yourself in unexpected places, like deep beneath the polar ice cap or a very loud and brighty lit hilltop overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

I'm on a small team now, working in Entertainment and doing everything I can to keep my eyes up towards that big picture. When will I settle down? Will I ever have a family of my own? When will I start arriving at a creative plateau where I can look back at everything I've done? I haven't even begun to answer those questions. I still have so much to look forward to.

What you wish for

2008-07-22T00:21:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, I did absolutely nothing. I spent hour after hour on my couch not thinking, not feeling, not worrying about anything. I simply let each and every responsibility bubble up to the sky and breathed in my own little space where I haven’t had to be good or great, nor have I been judged today. I earned that day.

The story to that point has not been told, nor would I want to directly revisit each and every emotion I’ve gone through over the past few months. To tell you the truth, it hasn’t been easy for me to – in essence – start over again, or at least, that’s how it feels. Yes, be careful when you ask for something, because you’ll get it up close enough to see the imperfections, jagged edges, and patched up areas. Did I say that I’m starting over again? I’m more like…replanted, put in a bigger pot…with better soil. I’m just more exposed to the elements this time.

The last most people heard of me, I got a job that on paper looked like the perfect fit for me. It felt like the two sides of my life, the creative and the professional, were finally coming together. The best things about the job are obvious to most, and I really do count my blessings, especially when I compare where I am today and where I was a year ago. I can hear live music by some really talented artists, learn about their creative processes, and soak in their experience and expression in ways I haven’t thought of before. I can plan events, run them with the same feelings and intentions that I had on more productions than I can count over the past decade. I’m working three miles away from home for a great company.

The steep learning curve of the job has been the most difficult thing to ignore, because of the crazy schedule we have. There are few personalities in the mix, a team of five regulars and a handful of part timers who help with the events. My obsession with how well I fit in reminds me of how frustrated I was many years ago at both my job and at Playhouse, and in that case, it just took months, years…to break away from the pack and make a name for myself. That’s when I had time. I was at that starting point in my late 20s. I’m now back to square one at 40. Again, that’s just a perception on my part.

I find myself using the phrase “at my age” a lot lately, perhaps to remind myself that I don’t have a lot of time to waste, nor can I allow myself to settle into any kind of satisfaction with where I am at any given point in time. I’ve been completely focused on and distracted by the 10-12 hour work day, finding it difficult to unearth the inspiration it takes to write a script or even a blog entry. I’ve lost touch with friends and family, glancing over at a loose collection of open-ended emails and voicemails. When that happens, I begin to lose a sense of myself apart from everything else. Descend on a hill in 91608, where neon lights and loud music ring in a beautiful chaos every single day of the year, and look beneath the lights for a person searching for a voice again, watching people pass through in a brief moment of their lives.

Let’s call the act of doing nothing an awakening, because as I learned in acting class, even nothing is something. It’s a chance to breathe, to remember, to see one’s surroundings clearly, short of being reactive. It’s an opportunity to say that from here on, I can change things on my own terms, and to accept the fact that I wanted all of this, for better or worse. I can’t ignore who I’ve been on my way to whom I will be. There is no actual starting over, come to think of it.

There is only the beginning, which exists only in the now.

It’s about damn time that I saw my way through writing this.

To See The Next Peak

2008-05-21T21:59:00.000-07:00

I sit on the floor of my living room on this windy night with the lights off, a moment to see the difference between where I've been and where I am. There's a gap in my account of everything, a lapse in words but not action. Here's what has gone unrecorded.

My blind faith in the right job came at absolutely the right time. I refused to give in to the most obvious path into the entertainment industry, the secretarial admin route. I tickled the severance package and unemployment checks, and just as that fuel gauge touched red, I saw the job listing like a beautiful pair of brown eyes framed by dark hair. I submitted for it right away as one of my wishing well attempts and remembered a week later that I knew someone at the company, and two days after making contact, I interviewed for the job. A week after that, I had an offer in my hands. It was less than what I earned before, but my last job was paying rent on my soul. This job is actually the natural habitat for me, albeit with a bit of the new guy awkwardness that was tenfold for about the first year at my old job. I'm impatient. I want to know everything now. I'm human. I'm prone to mistakes when I venture into unknown territory. As far as an entry level door into the entertainment industry, this is the most attractive one. I am a Production Coordinator for Universal Citywalk Entertainment and Special Events.

All cool points about the job aside, I'm still me, you know. I still discover myself being rejected in the strangest of ways, and on the flip side, my connection to other people became stronger. I've been told more than once that because I am hard to respond to when honesty comes into play, responding to me becomes insignificant. That's not the intention, that's the reaction. I've been told more than once that my best reaction should be to run in the opposite direction from those people. I figured out that I don't have to run. I merely need to ignore the option to open that door. I mean, seriously. Seriously! Why would I place value in connections to people who place no value on me? No, no longer. I don't think it's right to point out a virtue as a flaw.

I've also worked on a different approach to this year's film festival, more involvement with the committee so that even if everyone walks away without a very heartfelt "thank you", the experience leading up to the festival is a good one. I must say, this year's committee has worked very hard on the selection and lost the battle a few times in the end, but most of the films that made the final list were really dissected and discussed, and therefore earned their spot. We are turning into this final straightaway as a team, and I'm proud for my part in it. Now...oh crap...I have to work on the presentations. Crap.

I still feel like I'm constantly in a dogfight, seeking targets of opportunity while looking over my shoulder. At what point do people feel like they arrived somewhere, and not just to a point where you see how much higher you might have to climb? When can I exhale?

There is that blind faith, the knowledge that everything you do to this point counts, and that you can change the course of everything should it ever occur to you. I have a good job. I have a regular rotation of friends I hardly get to see because of said job and days off where I just want to rest. I think...and I hope...that merely convincing myself that the next good thing is about to happen will make me more open to see it when it does, if that makes sense. Some might call that my annoying optimism, others might call it "the Secret" and make millions on merchandising the idea.

I call it a much better option than surrender.

Good Morning

2008-03-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

It's Easter 2008, and no one has been able to explain the correlation between this as a fundamentally important Catholic holiday and the tradition of an abnormally large white rabbit hiding colorful eggs and chocolate from children. I didn't wake up with candy somewhere in the house, nor did I put on my Sunday best and go to church. I woke up this morning, just before six am, to the sound of someone rattling my front door. To put it more accurately, it was the sloppy sound of a drunken hand trying to stick a car key in my front door. Needless to say, I didn't need a snooze alarm. I got to the peephole just in time to see a bald head swaying, trying to focus motor skills, not expecting me to turn out the porch light. That was unexpected moment #1. He backed away after a delayed reaction, fell ass first onto my lawn, then staggerred off to the left out of view. That's when I opened the door, kicked his keys out, then closed and locked the screen door, followed by the main door. That was unexpected moment #2, which resulted in his zombie like path off to the right and down the street. When I left my house two hours later for San Diego, I noticed his keys and his...socks. The scene was everything Cinderella isn't.

I didn't care. I needed to get out of the house, out of the city.

The trip down to San Diego, and especially Balboa Park, should not be taken for granted. Once past the grey/brown haze, there are rounded green hills, gorgeous fields and valleys, and the very self-absorbed but mind-numbingly huge Pacific Ocean just out of reach in its own playground. Just now, as I write this hours later, I feel like I just took my first breath. Los Angeles doesn't allow you to breathe, and the journey South steals it.

And so, I've been practicing the delicate balance between wondering about my future and surrendering to it. Today alone, I saw things I didn't expect: the people and artifacts of Pompeii, a sexy grilled portobello mushroom sandwich that made eating it feel like an ilicit affair, an amazing photography exhibit, and a sign announcing an Ozzy Ozbourne tribute at the Santa Fe Springs swap meet. I think the theme of the day probably applies to me as much as it applies to religion and candy egg hunting. Everything lends itself to the next thing, regardless of what you choose to pay attention to. Sometimes the moments of your life fall like cherry blossom petals in a soft breeze, and sometimes they're the chocolate bon bons on the conveyor belt next to Lucy and Ethel. There is a progression that makes us wiser, smarter in a way, but again, that depends on how and when we recognize it. Wherever you're sitting, you are moving at about 1000 miles per hour, simply by the fact that you are sitting on Earth. You can choose to say that you're going nowhere, or you can realize that you are racing towards tomorrow. It's up to you.

In the movie "Singing in the Rain," Don Lockwood is being consoled by his friends Cosmo and Kathy after a disastrous opening of his film, The Dueling Cavalier. It was a technological mess, a shallow story showing the lack of the stars' acting chops. They were used to things as the way they were, and suddenly, they were thrust in the position of being left behind by the entertainment industry, of becoming obsolete. That was March 22nd. On March 23rd, Cosmo came up with an idea that not only pulled them back into the game, it saved the film and put them way ahead. That was one moment. One idea. They took it and danced and sang the rest of the way.

Here's to hope and being awake enough to see the moment when it comes.

Flight

2008-03-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

Ahh, so new digs with more privacy and a little more dedication. I feel like I finally moved in with the more dependable of two options and remained friends with the other. This is where I should have written all along, and hopefully this kind of focus doesn't inspire any stalkers or....

Well, I've learned something about myself this week. I've learned that I sometimes act on ideas a little too quickly, before people have had a chance to adjust. Sometimes, I even get to ideas before others, and this causes a political ripple effect that tends to turn back on me. It happened with the theater company, and many years ago, and happened at one of my jobs when I was put in charge of a major project and upon completion I rewarded the team before my boss got a chance to. That man was very gracious but was caught off guard. People in the entertainment world are much less understanding, and feel entitled to a competition of ideas before collaboration. There's almost always the illusion of collaboration, but much too often, one selfish person ends up sitting on a big idea for lack of the ability to pull it off. Progress is held up, potential and opportunity are left on the vine to wither away, but let's keep our priorities straight. The ego stays intact.

And then there's the matter of an existence on the net offering people an alternative to a real exchange. I blog obsessively, sometimes not online, about my life as I try to figure things out, even going so far as to script conversations with people I couldn't otherwise talk to. It's a great device to use when you need to get things out of your head and lay some thoughts to rest. Of course, the unintentional purpose it has served has been to excuse some people from that real exchange, to satisfy a curiosity that completely absolves them from participaton. That much is not cool, especially on such a social site as MySpace. The great thing is, some people read my blog and still write, which is amazing, I think, because once you dig a little deep to write a blog, you never come off in an attractive way, I think. That really holds true if you stay on the traditional diary or journal theme of a blog. I am not a hot potato or an illegal substance. Some people get that.

On second thought, maybe all this isn't so much about other peoples' reactions to what I do or what I have to say. Maybe this is more about regret, and whether or not it's relevant. In either case, analysis of it is backwards-looking, which is dangerous. The best thing I can do is either react or not react for the moment, and then adjust to whatever change comes from inspiration or...well, those uncontrollable outside forces.

Such is life, I suppose. We rarely know exactly what it is we think, much less why other people do what they do. What do you really have control over, anyway? Think about it. In every instance of injustice that I've been through, there's been a mix of my actual part in it and my perception of other people in it. Truly, when the moment has come and gone, there's only one course of action to take.

Create distance, invite time, and rise above.

His Quietus Make

2008-03-07T14:47:00.001-08:00

I will actually come through on a promise I posed on my very first entry here in MySpace, spoken out of caution and concern on January 11th, 2006. Since then, I have written almost 80 entries, but the real number of journal entries since the mid-80s makes this little experiment look like a playing card. In truth, it's not MySpace. It's our space, where we have shared friends, shared status, possibly a spot on someone's top friends list, and hopefully a photo that doesn't make us look like a mass murderer. We build who we are online, sometimes despite who we are in real life, and because I love to write, that option to blog here was the irresistible chocolate donut sitting there on the plate, daring me.

The truth is, if you let it, this little wading pool of thought can get deep and a little revealing. Sometimes, it even gives people the option of reading you without effort and that affects the lines of communication. The real question becomes: Why do I feel the need to write this stuff in such a public place? My journal began on loose sheets of college ruled paper, then moved to word procesed documents and printouts, all kept in the same binder. Eventually, three binders were filled and now sit in my attic, where in hindsight, I realize all of my thoughts should be kept. The geek in me couldn't resist the Internet, so here I am, swimming rivers of change and knowing that this is the wrong place to write.

See, my space is up here, in my head, in the conversations I have with my friends and family. It's in the stories I write (I'm in the thick of writing a script now, and that might be the reason I was jarred loose from the pattern), and the music I play. My space is wordless: a hug, a handshake, a kiss, the truth right in front of you.

So why do I write, and will I keep blogging? Somewhere I'll keep it up, because this is what I do. For more than half of my life, I have emptied my heart and mind into words so I could have a little perspective for myself and indulge in the demons and angels of doubt and hope. It's a habit I'm not going to give up easily, and eventually, the living, breathing line of this little section will go away.

What I said a few years ago is true. Blogs are stupid. We are much smarter than the thoughts we leave behind.

(Of course, this just means that I return to Blogger and stop writing on MySpace. Blogger's great, isn't it?)

Compass

2008-02-26T09:37:00.000-08:00

The view from where I stand is so different, as if I took a long walk absorbed in my thoughts and didn't realize I left the city. Life had been the same for years, maybe a decade, where I was constantly going from one schedule to the next, creating, fighting, always hungry to get to the next thing. It was one half of life lived in the misery of a day job, and one half breathed onto stage, rehearsing and playing, working hard and trying not to blink so I didn't lose a single moment. The only problem was that though I did more and achieved more than anyone, including myself, could ever imagine, I didn't actually get anywhere. I made my mark at work, transformed the stage, but I stood at the same level, staring at the same four walls. I think that's why I quit managing the theater. It wasn't so much the politics and frequent miscommunication. It was the sense of being in a different place than everyone else.

Looking back, that might be where the crack was formed. I lost my job, lost a lot of contact with friends in the process, and arrived at this view, a long journey pared down to one set of footprints and more change on the way. I've had nothing but time and space to think about what I've done and whether or not all of this was worth it. I realize I've been flipping over this same exact theme as if I've been studying the little holes on either side of a pancake, but something always happens that takes me back for a moment...draws my eyes to the horizon behind me and then turn to scan the foggy future. Something always makes me wonder about my hands and the relevance of the things I can do. This is just one the many wonderful things about being 40.

Something always comes up...the other day I was cc'ed on an email from an old friend about the play we'll be in this Saturday. It's going to be her last. It will also probably be the last time I will see her for a long while, as she's moving out of the country to get married. She was my favorite girlfriend on stage, my duet in the musical that took so much out of me. She spent the day with me when I got ready to take that train trip, and took me to the station. I knew she was engaged, and newly so, but I didn't expect her to leave so quickly. In between her acting jobs, she was a great friend, and...okay, I just caught myself because for some reason I'm eulogizing her. Maybe I'm not really talking about her at all. New paragraph. Get off this.

I once wrote that you never see love coming, but when it leaves, you watch it's every step. I guess...I love my friends and sometimes wish things would never change, but they do. Friends in my past have gotten married or moved away, or just faded from one life to another, and they've all become unrecognizable in a way. I know I'll be in the right frame of mind on Saturday to say goodbye to this friend, because emotionally I have to become a little detached when I do this play (it's complicated), but in the back of my mind I know two other friends will soon be married, and I'll isolate a little more. Everything seems to be pointing to the things I've done and will do more so than the people I've been around, so I stand here with this strange, different view, trying to reconcile what I've done and what I'm meant to do at this point.

Make art. That's what Glen Hansard said at the Oscars when he accepted his award for best song. That was the first thing spoken the whole night that had an impact on me. Make art. That, of course, set the table for what his partner had to say after: "Hi everyone. I just want to thank you so much. This is such a big deal, not only for us, but for all other independent musicians and artists that spend most of their time struggling, and this, the fact that we're standing here tonight, the fact that we're able to hold this, it's just to prove no matter how far out your dreams are, it's possible. And, you know, fair play to those who dare to dream and don't give up. And this song was written from a perspective of hope, and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are. And so thank you so much, who helped us along the way. Thank you."

There lies the courage to move on and keep trying, in those words, in the heart of truth and pursuit of a voice in art. People have not always made sense to me on a very personal level, but find me in the middle of writing a play, standing in front of actors with my notebook in hand, or playing guitar and singing with others, and you can see me live in a way that love always failed me. As the new saying goes, "Unlucky in love, damn good at art."

It's time to get moving again.

Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor

2008-02-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

Now that the Writers Strike is over, any idea of the struggle to be creative in Hollywood quickly fades from the public eye. It gave many idiots the chance to say that the TV shows or movies were poorly written in the first place, and that writers weren't missed. The only good stories were told many, many years ago, or worse, these people expressing opinions over the Internet hardly ever watched TV (which made their opinions about TV in the first place totally invalid). The first thing I can tell you is that the strike isn't really over yet. True, writers, producers, and actors are no longer walking the picket lines, but right now they're going over the latest contract they got from the AMPTP, and consensus is that it's definitely less than what it should be. I won't go into details, but there is still a tricky wording of the contract that needs to be navigated and debated. Do you ever read the small print in things you sign? You might be surprised if you did.

But that's Hollywood, the industry versus itself - the business of Hollywood versus the ideas of Hollywood - and it tends to believe people are expendable. It will exercise this belief from the top down to the smallest corner, many variations on the theme of short term gain for profit. It's practiced in the small theaters and acting schools, in the high profile dealing of organizations representing guilds, and unfortunately, there's more on the way. There is an ongoing debate right now in the Screen Actors Guild over the upcoming contract negotiations, and which of the members should be allowed to vote on the new contract. Obviously, if you pay dues you should be able to vote, but there are some in the guild who don't agree. From the top down, it's an embarrassing overture of narcissism, and the business might be focusing a little too much on "more".

While business looks at the bottom line, it's very easy to lose sight of the sacrifices people make when they choose a creative life, whether it's writing, acting, or whatever it is that requires practice, training, a commitment that takes away from other things in life...other, sometimes important things. The view from where I stand is of people busy doing, constantly creating and looking for opportunities. My friends, many of whom are actors, are perpetually working on films, plays, and auditioning for TV. They will work crew on other friends' films, keep returning to classes they can barely afford if not for the occasional day job or paying acting jobs. These people keep returning to an industry that keeps rejecting them, but despite these crazy priorities, including living a life with low pay and a constant hustle for work, there are still a lot of writers and actors out there, and they need their guilds.

On the other hand...business in general seems to have a similar lack of conscience. A few days ago, I received an email from some former coworkers, the next ones on the chopping block schedule for the extended mix of reduction in force. There's a get-together on their last day at the local restaurant/bar, and they were inviting me. I immediately went right back to the unfairness of the process, of previous layoffs where my friends were sniped from the ranks, where I was asked to dig my own grave and then afterwards endured the enlightenment of seeing who my remaining friends really were. Do I really want to go back there for a visit? I think, maybe, I already said goodbye. Over the years, I was known for writing monthly newsletters, and this was the last one I sent, after I was let go. In hindsight, I guess the most consistent thing about me is that I've always focused on people who struggle, who believe in ideas over profit. Someday I hope to be able to talk to both sides and bring them together. Enough already. Here's what I called "The Final Newsletter":

Greetings former colleagues, close friends, and...well, those of you still at the old Blackjack (the nickname I gave 21st). I didn't want to end my newsletters like...Laverne & Shirley (they had no final episode) or...well, that was a bad example. I didn't really have a whole lot of time to write on my way out, nor did I remember to include my email address, which would have been nice. Nobody could blame me, huh? All of a sudden, I was both Papillon and Neo from the Matrix, and I'm making one quick appearance to finish things off right.

The Tribe Has Spoken
This whole thing has been a surprise to many people, but not to me so much, because I've been through this before. I just wasn't as close to people back then as I was this time around, but I'll tell you two things: 1) I'm sure we'll be BFF, and that we'll keep in touch, and 2) Hey, there IS life after being pooped out by the auto insurance industry, and it's pretty awesome. Sure, John Edwards speaks to the dead, but I can offer the same advice he gives. Those who have crossed over don't really have any ill will over the circumstances that got us here. We're in a good place. We went towards the light and are doing well. We just hope you're surviving and are able to enjoy each other with the time you have together. That is what our bond was when we were amongst you, so I sincerely hope you keep up the tradition. Honestly, there's no resentment towards anyone or anything, only enlightenment in some cases, and relief.

Connectivity
First of all, I have to give you what I didn't give you before. My email address is: sjirel@gmail.com. Use it wisely. Or not. Up to you, entirely. Also, as long as we have the net, we always have a way to keep in touch, don't we? You know I have multiple websites and am busy at this very moment with outplacement and this exciting job search. I want to keep in touch and invite you to do the same. Who knows where we'll be in a year? I hope to send you an update soon to let you know where I land, but I also wish this kind of "upturning of the soil" for you, a chance to really see who you are and what you're truly worth. The main thing that I learned throughout the classes I've taken recently and seeing friends go through the whole adjustment period (Klaus, Yvonne, Hagay) is that I wish I had gotten myself organized much earlier. I had a decent resume. Now my resume is sexy. I had a cover letter and a couple of websites I could submit to, and now I've got a whole networking plan and some solid stuff to work with. It's great to be pushed out of the nest to discover you can fly.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So that's it, gang, the last in a short history of long emails sent to you to let you know that I can hear you breathing in those cubicles and offices, and that you're not forgotten. This has been a great experience for me, and I'll do everything I can to avoid flipping burgers. You're all in my thoughts, and I really do wish the best for you. You made my time at the wrong job completely worth the time I spent there, and I won't forget you for it. Okay, honestly, some details will become fuzzy over time and should we meet again, I might use the wrong name. Don't take it personally. My brain is only so big. Take care of yourselves, and be good people.

Your friend always,
Stewart

Here's one last quote for you:
"And that's the world in a nutshell, an appropriate receptacle."
~ Stan Dunn

Science of People

2008-02-18T18:37:00.000-08:00

I've been walking more recently, to the local restaurants and coffee places, and this has offered me brief moments of perspective to not think as much as feel the mileage of the past couple of months. I think I've outgrown this "living on severance" lifestyle. I need to be busy again. No, not just busy. Busy with the right things.

Creatively, I am looking at a blank canvas thinking wistfully about the palette of colors I used to paint with. More specifically, I miss the way I used to feel around people. I miss that effect that some had on me, where I rolled around details of our last exchange in my mind. I would search music for the right theme, see colors and textures that reminded me of what they wore, even called on things they said in the things I wrote. Sadly, in my night sky they are the few steady points of light, not the gaudy ones that sparkle and sometimes fade, disappearing with the belief in their own hype. It's too easy, much too easy, to say that this only happens in Los Angeles, but the truth is that narcissism is a global obsession.

Forgive me if I've mentioned all this before. Some things, I guess, don't change. Consider it a fact that few of my friends give me pause to wonder why some things are said or done. Well, let's face it; The simple, whole-hearted people in my life have given me the opportunity to be a friend in return, and there goes the perpetual cycle of reciprocation and understanding that builds good, solid friendships. They make it easy to differentiate what is real, and what isn't.

As I may have mentioned before, the ace in my sleeve is the ability to remove myself, and walk away, if needed. For example, I was supposed to go out with a girl upon my return to L.A. earlier this year, and it should have been easy. We exchanged emails. I called her and left a message. Then I had time to think - while she was busy not returning my call or emails. I remembered that every exchange was difficult, feeling as if she was trying to manipulate the fog of ambiguity around her as if to simulate an old-fashioned idea of mystery. I had to work hard to earn any secrets she guarded (while she, of course, made it very clear she was seeing other guys). All this play, and I could only wonder what exactly the prize would be. The immediate next thought was this: If I have to work that hard on something that isn't even a friendship yet, chances are the pieces don't fit.

My most practiced instinct is to step back and watch all this impartially, in much the same way I directed plays, watching my actors go through a whole range of emotions on stage. I'm so comfortable occupying that margin in reality, where I can exercise my curiosity. There I can ask, without investment, why people would say "love ya" with the same enthusiasm and emphasis they would have reading those words off a mylar balloon. I can ask why people would use pet names in the middle of largely impersonal ideas. That is my right, after all, to ask the questions, because it sometimes becomes necessary to hang those questions off of weird, open-ended words.

I asked someone, once upon a time on a long road trip, what she was thinking. She said "nothing." Nothing on your mind? It was just blank? There was no thought process fed by anything her eyes were looking at? Did she really shut herself off like C3P0? Okay, maybe her mind was blank. I've never really known that. Maybe she was feeling something and didn't want to talk. Maybe, even, she was thinking in abstract and didn't have words for it. "Purple taffy exploding jiggle warm frisbee sharks."

People really do think nothing, and think nothing of the things they say or do. We automate, follow patterns, and repeat borrowed thoughts. Unfortunately, we sometimes build a rationale for being the way we want to be, unique and different than everyone, just like everyone, just like the person across from you and the loud conversation coming from the next table. What truly sets us apart is how we pay attention to each other, or even, if we do amidst a crowd of unconnected names.

It's too easy to stay apart and alone.

What are you thinking?

The Road Not Taken

2008-02-03T21:07:00.000-08:00

It's February already: the writer's strike is allegedly about to come to an end, the Lakers have acquired Pau Gasol, and my niece's baby Mia should be born any day now. Oh, and LOST is back. That's pretty huge. There is one thing on my mind, though, and I need to change the setting. Things must be said.

M: Like what?

S: Well, I kind of thought we'd talk again before....

M: Yeah, things have been a little crazy.

S: I would imagine. You don't mind this, do you?

M: No, it's fine. (pause) So how are you?

S: Surviving happily. You know, lots of change. Okay, that was dumb. You know better than I do about change right now.

M: Not as much as you'd think. I have this one major thing, but it's definite. It's all planned out and...it's kind of exhausting to talk about. It's nothing like the year you've had.

S: You leave tomorrow, right?

M: Yeah.

S: Nervous?

M: Maybe. I don't know. So much is happening now. I'm a little numb.

S: Do you ever feel like sometimes like there's no perspective on the past?

M: What do you mean?

S: Maybe it's just a sense of accomplishment, or a milestone, like you should feel like there's a measurable point in your life that you get past and then move on from...but in reality you look back -

M: And it's all a blur. It's like you're trying to find yourself on a map, but the map got wet and all of the ink has run together.

S: Yeah, exactly like that.

M: Nope. Don't know what that feels like.

S: What? Oh.

M: I'm kidding.

S: Is that just a part of getting older? I'm beginning to think I'm going crazy.

M: Well...let's not start that conversation, because what I know about you -

S: What you think you know about me.

M: Okay, true, but still.

Silence. I looked around the place we were sitting in, but she drank her coffee and looked at me a moment before continuing.

M: I think...it's different for everyone, but yeah, I feel that way sometimes.

S: It's so hard for me to rationalize this stuff because there's so much about people I don't understand.

M: People are not as complicated as you think they are. Normal ones, at least. Are some of those weird people still in your life? How about that girl who only wants to talk through texting?

S: What can I say? They're interchangeable parts. Nobody's really consistent. I do hear from some old co-workers every now and then, but I am really out here on my own little island, you know?

M: That's your choice, though.

S: Those are my standards - there's a difference.

M: You and your impossible standards.

S: Do you really think so?

M: I just can't figure out some stuff about you. You've led kind of a...different life.

S: Somewhere behind that I'm suspecting there are thoughts about me being in a relationship.

M: It's been way too long! All right, I need to catch myself because it's not my place to say anything.

S: When are we going to have another chance to talk like this? You know how this conversation has to end.

There's another moment of silence to let this sink in.

M: It doesn't have to end the way you think it will.

S: I usually begin with the end in mind.

M: But that's now how you actually work through things like this.

S: So tell me what's on your mind. You say that it's not your place, but here you are, sitting across from me. Right now, this is your place.

M: Okay. (pause) I don't think LA is good for you. I think you're surrounded by too many fake people, especially doing all of your theater stuff. Finding good friends is hard enough, but settling down and having a family is nearly impossible when you're not meeting the right kind of people.

S: Where should I go, then? China? Miami? Just because my life doesn't add up a way that makes sense to you, it doesn't mean I'm unhappy.

M: I don't think you're unhappy. I just wish you weren't...alone. I know how happy you were in a relationship, and I feel like part of you is being wasted, or lost, if you're not in one. I just hate thinking that you don't want that any more because of something I did.

S: That was a long time ago. A really long time ago. What did we figure it out to? About half a lifetime?

M: Yeah, I think that was it.

S: Didn't you already say that all this was my choice? Give me some credit.

M: You know what I'm trying to say.

S: I know what you're saying, but...listen, many years ago, I stoppped passing everything through the filter of what life would be like with you in it. I accepted what was left and built on that foundation. You still existed, but in a different way.

M: And what way was that?

S: I always hoped that you'd be proud of me if you only knew the things I did.

M: You shouldn't do anything like that for me.

S: I didn't do it for you. I did it for me. The difference is this: with every risk I took, every sacrifice I made, I thought about the one person who knows me better than every other living thing on this planet and whether or not I was betraying that knowledge of me. Once, when I was helping you get over someone, I bought some lottery tickets, those little scratcher things, and I gave one to you. You said "Oh well, unlucky in love..." You meant that it was one or the other, but you deserved to win at something.

M: I said that?

S: Yeah. It kinda hurt my feelings, because there I was, and....

M: I don't even remember saying that.

S: Well, after you, I made a bunch of those kinds of decisions. I was going to win at something, so...it was one thing or the other for me. Look, if I had chosen to just try again at relationships and pave over the experience of you in my life, I think that maybe you and I would still be here right now, talking about that other thing I didn't choose to do.

M: That...ugh...that just kills me. You take all of these little insignificant moments with me and make them epic stories that changed your life. Who else does that? Seriously. Promise me you won't write a bible about me while I'm gone?

S: God forbid. The numbering of each line alone would kill me.

M: I just don't know why it had to be me. I'm not who you think I am. At least, the person you're talking about is not the person I see in the mirror.

S: That's okay. Someday you'll catch up to my way of thinking.

She took this in for a moment, then checked her cell phone.

M: I have to go.

S: Okay.

M: I don't want you to walk me out.

S: Why?

M: I don't know. I don't want to say. Just let me walk out, okay? Please?

S: Do I get...?

M: I don't think it's right.

S: Okay...I think I understand.

M: It's not because I don't -

S: You don't have to say anything. (pause) Good luck, and...have a safe trip.

M: I will. Thanks for the coffee.

She grabbed her things and quickly left. I just sat there for a moment, learning to breathe again, and then took a sip of my latte, now cold. Tossing both cups in the trash on my way out, I took my first breath of night air, and it hurt somewhere deep inside. Two steps towards my car, I heard my name and turned to see her walking towards me. Without a word, we embraced and held each other tightly enough to leave an impression in each other.

Time, wind, passing cars, clouds floating overhead, all stopped. The moon disappeared, along with the city, the earth, the sky, and any other reason for existence.

But there we were.

In my notebook, in an ideal last meeting, inside my iPod and in a little blog lost in the wilderness of the Internet, there we embraced one last time for the ages, and forever more.

Good luck and have a safe trip.

In the House

2008-01-27T19:15:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in a small theater in La Canada, a place preseved in time without stadium seating, the screen staring out over our heads...okay, wait...I am...the only one here. Blame the rain. The news suggested, because of rain & lightning, that people might want to stay indoors. For me, lightning lost and cabin fever won. Rain is one of those things that I just can't resist. Plus, I had a free ticket for a movie, so I came out to see Juno.

I was in a different theater last night, and the irony rests in this: I don't wonder for a second why I'm sitting here instead of my beloved Arclight. I did, however, wonder what the hell I was doing back at Playhouse West last night. I was originally asked to help with a recording session, and then had to jump on the logo because the crazy director wanted to use a noose to represent the two one-acts. A noose. I ended up burying it in the text of the title, but still, those two responsibilities formed the hook that brought me back to Playhouse to oversee two small productions which the director eventually hailed as the Second Coming.

Both shows have been exhausted in classes, and one of the two was produced at least twice before at Playhouse. The three actors did a nice job - which was to be expected at the beginning of a run - but I just don't know that I saw the same shows that the director did. I have, in the course of the hundreds of performances I've seen over the last decade, seen some chilling performances, including the entire run of the first production of one of the two shows. It irked me when the director said that he had been waiting for 30 years to see work on that stage that resembled the work in his class, because he has come to see my shows and loved them. (Maybe he's just talking about his students. Yeah, that has to be it.)

And then it hit me. This is exactly the kind of culture that the director, who also happens to be the founder of the school, seems to love. Over the years, the people trying to find a voice in the theater company have fought, competed for time and space, and struggled against an apathetic student body to get seats filled. Each production becomes an army unto itself, knowing that a good percentage of fellow actors and directors who come to see it will only come to tear it apart. I've even seen the same behavior at the film festival, where the slogan has been repeated: "Lie, cheat, steal."

So why, I have to ask, do these people work so hard at trying to squash competition on the home front? Why do they work so hard on their own productions and fill their minds with the need to be better than everyone else? Call it my insanity, but I worked with the tunnel vision of why we needed to do the show we were working on. I wanted my actors to act seamlessly and not think, and to never finish working on a role. I wanted my production to stand on its own, with my particular brand and style, to speak for itself as a living thing. In the end, because of my failed struggle to keep the theater company within the reach of the entire student body (just a couple of people in charge did everything they could to squash those efforts), I ended up flying my pirate flag and focused my casts entirely on the center of the production and nowhere else. I isolated my casts and only depended on the school for production space and advertising. I have been with the cast of one play for about nine years now, having played more than a handful of roles in it. Whenever the founder gets involved in the production, I see the same culture coming up again, this time with a handful of people with questionable talent being held up and apart from everyone else. I isolate myself and stay focused. Why does it have to be this way?

Ultimately, I like to think they only win the moment of recognition, the conditioned response that they maneuver people towards, and the people they fool are spent mindlessly. Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, preached the concept of 20-70-10, in that 20 percent of the work force gets promoted, 70 percent do much of the grunt work, and 10 percent need to be fired. He based this on a competitive performance curve. Acting schools, and I imagine the entertainment industry, are built on something closer to 10-50-40, in which 10 percent are held as the elite, 50 percent are what pay for the acting school and the teachers salaries, and then 40 percent drop out. Know what that means? Everyone is expendable. This probably holds true just about anywhere that greed and insecurity can take root, but I guess in hindsight, the noose in the logo shouldn't be so shocking. It serves the same purpose it always did, to intimidate and illustrate the law of the land.

In the moment where I'm faced with this reality - which I've had a lot of experience with over many years - I always have to make a choice, and it becomes clearer every time. Am I who they want me to be, or am I what I believe I am? The actual answer falls right in line with my search for work. It forms the relevance of my close friendships. It's built into the rhythms of the journal/blog that I've been writing for 23 years now. At the risk of sacrificing everything - and I have sacrificed a lot - I am what I believe I can be. I'm not done evolving.

Being in two old theaters reminds me of how simple things get complicated. I beg you to understand that it doesn't have to be this way. Even a cynical heart like mine can find the simplicity in life and appreciate it completely, but you have to have hope. That is the best preparation for the very next moment.

The Trip Home - Part 2

2008-01-12T20:00:00.000-08:00

The last leg of my trip home was spent without dread, without anticipation, without so much as a moment of concern over arriving at Union Station in LA. I was occupied with the moment - truly living in the present as it perpetually unfolded in an ever-expanding bloom of landscape and life. The view out my window was spectacular, and that was a given, but the really unexpected part about the whole trip was the experience of meeting so many new people on the way. These weren't just any people. The kind of people who travel by train know what they're getting themselves into, and are not blase about the adventure they're on, either. They're open, generous, and friendly, and they teach the value of the moment by example. I only wish I could have shared the experience with Flora.

Flora was my mother's closest friend in Miami, and she has been stuck in a wheelchair for many years now. She was the grandmother of my niece's youngest child, and she talked with my mother on a daily basis. By the time I got to Miami, she had checked herself into a hospital because of some pain that she was having, and she hadn't talked with my mother for a few days because she hated being drugged and incoherent. On the road to getting better, they finally talked on the phone and she said that she was going to be home soon. Flora lived vicariously through my 40th year adventures, wanting to hear all about my trip in October, when my dad and I drove up to central Florida to see the space shuttle launch, and this time she was really anxious to hear about my long train trip across the country. On that phone call from the hospital, she aske my mother to make sure to bring me with her as soon as she got home. I immediately thought that it was great that I had taken hundreds of photos on the way, so I could show her my whole trip. My mother told her that she loved her, and ended the phone call with the plan to talk again the following day at 3pm.

At about 2:30 the following day, we received the news that Flora was dead.

The cruel interrupted expectation of hearing from her best friend left my mother weak with grief. The whole house was quiet for hours, everyone sitting in their own corner, distracted with their own thoughts, trying to reconcile the uncompromising loss. There's no way to flip it over in your mind, even when the doctors were clearly to blame for Flora's death with careless drug prescriptions. Any way you look at it, she was taken away.

...and I sat there...and I thought about my parents...I thought about things left unsaid...and undone...and I exercised some re-evaluation in my mind. Have I told the people close to me how I feel about them, even if not everyone has been ready to hear it or is able to accept it? Have I wasted any moments with my family, taken them for granted, or worse, said things in the heat of the moment that I didn't really mean? When I make plans from now on, how can I count on any guarantees and then greet that appointment, that friend, that phone call with a blase attitude of entitlement? All I need to do is hear the sound of my mother being given the news, and I know - even better than I thought I've known before - that EVERY moment counts, and some things just shouldn't take you away from what is most important in life. This experience shook the hell out of me. The rest of my time in Miami was spent a little differently.

On that train ride home, I really opened my eyes a little wider, approached more people, and tossed any hesitation aside in favor of experiencing more. My last night on the train, I found myself at dinner with Art and Winnie sitting across from me, and Ann sitting by my side. The kinds of stories I heard from these people - their collective experiences, their amazing lives - could have made me feel like such a small person at that table. Each one of them could not speak without fascinating me, as if by sitting there I was as much in the presence of greatness as I was throughout my steps in Chicago and Washington DC. Art had knowledge about everything that came up, especially medicine, which was his field. Winnie had once auditioned at 20th Century Fox studios in the era of the greats. Ann, an interior designer, had dated Mr. Bushnell of Bushnell binoculars, and traveled the world. There I was, merely eating steak and drinking wine. When my turn came to talk, I told the story of my parents in Argentina and their trip to the United States, their sacrifices and difficulties, and then when I got to the lives my sisters and I have chosen, the whole thing became a story about honoring my parents, about their continuing inspiration and the closeness of my family. It slowly dawned on me shortly after I followed Art and Winnie back to our sleeper car (they were two doors away from my room). I sat in the freshly made bed by Jesus, our car attendant, and realized that we all carry our family history with us, that by being where I am and having had the experiences I've had, I've helped to fulfill my parents' dream of living in the USA, and that yes, although I fully felt the loss of Flora because she wanted to hear my stories, my parents still live through me. And I'm a writer, not for studios or for any industry but my own experience, which lends a bit of responsibility for having the ability to write.

I finally arrived in LA, and with a little perspective, I believe I figured out a good analogy for how I see my home city on the map. As I sit here alone in a restaurant (well, writing this part of the blog, anyway), I think back to life on a train and wonder how someone like me can thrive in a slow, social place like that and then turn around and carve my little bubble in this city. Here's the best I can do to explain LA: Imagine all of us at the supermarket. We're constantly shopping, pushing our carts and tossing both our basic needs and little luxuries into the basket. Not once would we think of looking in someone else's cart, not even at checkout, when we're laying everything out on the conveyor belt. At least, we don't look at the different items and attempt to decipher a story. Our groceries - our choices - are our own, and in the supermarket aisles we do not compete for a better collection than the next person. We're merely providing for our own and those who depend on us. It would be too self-serving to say that LA is competetive (with the exception of the entertainment industry), and I do honestly think it's inaccurate to say that LA is unfriendly or selfish. My city of angels is nearsighted, perhaps unwilling or unable to look deeper or beyond.

That's why I fit in. I don't blend in. I don't exactly even stand apart, either. I know, because of my actions and the legacy I carry from my parents, that I am the way I am because I've chosen to be this way. It's not inherent in the geography or tradition of where I live. It's not even valued much of the time. It takes me getting out of the city to find affirmation, or even the simple action of bridging the gap between people and exercising a little selfless curiosity.

Flora recognized this openness that I'm often encouraged to hide. My parents are proud of it. Thanks to Art & Winnie, Ann, Jesus, and the people whom I shared the whole trip with, I'll continue to trust my instincts in this wicked little town and do a little more than merely survive.

Art & Winnie, arriving home

Jesus, proudly standing guard

The rest of the hundreds and hundreds of pictures I took are at my Webshots page:http://community.webshots.com/user/sjirel

The Trip Home - Part 1

2008-01-05T09:03:00.000-08:00

I begin this very first entry of the year in a small busy coffee shop in downtown Chicago with a warm cup of coffee and Donna, the sweetest and most efficient server I've had in a long time (they establish eye contact here in Chicago!). The snow has mostly been rained away outside, and the clouds hang low, skirting the buildings and thwarting my plans to see the whole city from atop the Sears Tower. This particular restaurant – Lou Mitchell's restaurant and bakery – came as a suggestion to me by Kevin, a man handing out the local homeless shelter newsletter. Wearing earmuffs and an eyepatch, he led me a few blocks away from Union Station with a little bit of the local history and an enthusiastic impression of the breakfast at Lou's, and I'm now sitting in front of the greatest salmon and onion omelet I've ever had. It's taking me a little time to get through it; It's served in the skillet it was cooked in (all of the breakfast dishes seem to be), and it's huge.

The trick to getting here is to not begin by asking anyone in the stations. Regardless of which one you're at, the people who work there are usually one moment, one key phrase or an off-center look away from snapping. I've tried to keep transactions light, brief, and simple, but at the same time I can see how I might blend into an unthankful population. All I have to do is sit in the wrong coach car, and I immediately know what they have to deal with.

Oh…hang on…free soft serve ice cream right after breakfast. Can't write now. I'll be with you in just a few lines.

Sunday, January 6th, 2008
11:21am MST

The view outside my window perpetually reflects the question "How did I get here?" Right now, I'm sitting in my little roomette with a cup of coffee next to me, typing away at my laptop and watching New Mexico roll by. We are about an hour away from Las Vegas, NM, and a little less than a full day away from Los Angeles. We should be arriving at Union Station at 8:15am tomorrow morning. In total, I will have logged 8,381 miles by train on this vacation (not including the local train I took with Monica and my parents for dinner in downtown Miami). That's four days there, four days back, with sights and experiences throughout the whole vacation that have changed my life. Truly.

Let me quickly recap the Chicago experience and what led me here since then. Right after a conversation with my waitress (mind you, the restaurant was busy and she had other customers, but she had time for everyone) and then a chat with the hostess, I walked away from the restaurant shaking my head. Everyone in there felt like family. Where in Los Angeles is there a place like that? Anywhere, not just restaurants, even in peoples' homes – is there a place like that? The work family cut the umbilical cord and set me free. The theater family is mostly the same. I digress.

I left the restaurant and entered the old Union Station, which is now both used as a waiting area and preserved as a historical place. This was the place where Elliott Ness fought the mob and had the famed shootout with Al Capone. I walked across the Chicago River from there and hopped on a little red bus for a two hour tour through all of the city's sights and attractions. I was pretty much the same wide-eyed camera hungry person I was in Washington D.C. I roamed a freezing Washington with a heavy backpack and layers of clothing, a camera bag slung to my side and a map in hand. I absolutely – and I don't know how to stress the absoluteness of this – made the most of my time there with the seven or so hours I had to roam I saw:

The White House

the Vietnam Memorial again (I bought one more bracelet from the vets nearby and said a little prayer for John Pagel's buddies and all of the vets whose families we've met over the years)

The Lincoln Memorial (I sat on the steps and looked out at the pool, embracing the moment as if I would forever more see myself on the back of the five dollar bill)

The Korean War Memorial (I said a little prayer for Tom Aki's father)

The Air and Space Museum (which also had exhibits from the museum of American History, which is closed for renovations. I was in the presence of….)

The Library of Congress (a building that awed me with both its contents and architecture)

The National Archives (I stood two feet away from the foundation for our whole country, the original set of rules in existence)

All of this, I did on foot. If you look at the map of the area, you'd see I did a lot of walking. Before I did all this, however, I didn't want to repeat the zoo of my Miami to D.C. trip, which was noisy and eventful, complete with a bad cover band playing classic rock five rows behind me and a crazy woman going through peoples' belongings. I got a sleeper to Chicago and assumed that the trip from there to LA would be easier. As soon as I got on the car in Chicago, things started going a little crazy in the car, all the way to Kansas City. It was one thing or another, and I asked about any available sleepers. Amazingly, one became available, and as I sit here now, I'm in my own little cabin writing away, pausing only to sip coffee or snap a picture outside my window. Since Miami I have taken 464 photos. That is considering that the whole time, I've been very conscious of seeing everything with my own eyes first, and then the camera captures the moment after.

In one year, I have seen some amazing things, and what I find most curious is that I could have merely chosen not to. It makes me think…and it makes me thankful. If I didn't write, if I didn't love photography, if I didn't appreciate everything I've seen, I wouldn't be able to tell the story. That, after all, is what I do.

472 photos now. It happens just like that.

The Adventure - Part 2

2007-12-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

I actually slept heavily last night, alternating between one dream and the other, not quite sure if I was still home or on a train speeding past small towns in Kansas. What confirmed it was the first spoken thing by the person next to me: "It is hard getting a good night's sleep on a train, isn't it?" I knew he was having trouble sleeping. He fidgeted and changed positions multiple times before I dropped off at 9:30 or so. He was also awake a while before I woke up. "About half an hour ago it was snowing outside."

Now it's an endless vista of snowy fields, playgrounds for horses and birds. Thousands of leafless trees frame the picture, sometimes block the view, but not a single picture or set of words could fully capture the hundred new definitions of "beautiful" that I've seen so far. I sit here and bask in the sun coming through teh observation car, awaiting the metropolis coming in five hours, Chicago.

(12:12pm - Pulling out of the Mendota, Illinois depot with two more stops until the windy city!)

(1:28pm - Chicago Union Station at last and yes, snow everywhere! )

Wednesday, December 19th
2:07pm
The last leg

I am definitely feeling the effects of being on the train for four days. My butt is numb, I'm exhausted and in need of a shower, and I'm really anxious to get home with some real food in me.

The Chicago to DC trip was evenful, after having wandered through the cold, rushed streets of downtown Chicago. I stood in front of the Sears Tower, touched snow piled up against one of the bridges, and I thought everything was going to be easy and peaceful from that moment on. I returned to the station to find familiar faces waiting for the train to DC. I thought, "You get to keep a lot of the same friends? This is so awesome." We were checked in and began our mad dash to the train, dragging heavy carry-on luggage behind us. Excitement was building. I got to the door and I should have asked to sit with Danny, the Chicagoan college student I met in line. Instead, what came out was "Can I have a seat with an outlet?" He said "Yes" and assigned me seat number 35.

[Warning: the description becomes graphic at this point. It may not be suitable for people with weak heart or stomach conditions.]

Instead of an outlet, I had to sit in the shadow of a man and a half, the largest and stinkiest resemblance of a human I had seen on the trip thus far. I noticed him chowing down on a bunch of bread sticks from Pizza Hut in line, but didn't even have a moment of dread that I'd have to sit next to him. He smelled like a fiery hot soup of dead fish and sweaty socks, an unfortunate circumstance of not bathing for days and maybe an infection or seepage somewhere. I have been close to people who smelled like they shit on themselves. This was worse. I stood, staring at the seat number, and then had a gag reflex I had to walk off, my eyes tearing as I approached the back of the car. In fact, I only had to sit next to him when I showed the conductor my ticket. I focused on mouth breathing for the two minutes, and then spent 95% of my time on that leg in the lounge/observation deck with Danny, who absolutely made up for my bad luck with the toxic fat man. Even better, he stunk up the whole car he was in, and I never had to deal with it for long. I slept in the observation deck next to the largest windows on the train, and was accompanied by a good number of people within radius of the guy.

Upon arriving in DC, I lost Danny, but immediately put my bags in storage and set out to discover the city. I walked all the way out to the Vietnam Memorial Wall and spent an hour there after having passed the museums, the Capitol building, and the Jefferson Memorial. I spoke with a Vietnam Vet in an area close to the wall, and then slowly and reverently, I walked up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, let myself appreciate the moment and sat down on teh steps looking out across the reflecting pool. Yeah, even as I write this, it's still amazing to me that I was there. I helped take a few photos of people, and then I walked back to the station.

I found a handful of my fellow travelers there and we stuck close together, relieved and happy that this was our last leg. Although this last part has been a little chaotic - this was the fastest and bumpiest ride thus far - time seemed to slow when my friends left the train:

James, the engineer in Jacksonville, FL
Don, who never flies and always travels by train, in Orlando, FL (A lot of people got off in Orlando)
Jay, one of our loudest snorers and definitely our loudest cell phone talker, in Fort Lauderdale, FL

And here I am, with four hours left until I see my family and that shower I so desperately need. As I look out my window at a bright moon at daytime peeking through two clouds, I'm really thankful that I made this trip and saw what I saw. Yes, I have to do it again in two weeks, but this has already changed me.

The Adventure to End 2007 Begins

2007-12-15T19:28:00.000-08:00

Riding quiet rails under the blanket of darkness, I am removed from the sleepy cityscape, industrial park after superstore skating by us without even a whisper. This is what it's like as you ride east from Los Angeles. The seats are wide and warm, the windows large and clean, and slow or fast, the train hops and leans in a relaxing rhythm that insulates you, rocks you deeper into your seat. It's not claustrophobic like a plane; You're encouraged to move around and explore, and the bad inflight movie is replaced by the view. It's not a cruise ship - not so far, at least - there are no activities or entertainment. This trip has only begun, and I haven't been out of this seat yet.

Sunday, December 16th, 8:20am
In Gallup

I just had breakfast with three strangers, talking about our destinations both in life and location. The long, flat plain outside had snow scattered throughout, and now, I'm at home enough to begin seeing all this in perspective. Fairly soon, thanks to an absence of outlets, my iPod will sleep and the only soundtrack I'll have until I arrive at Chicago will be the marriage of wheel to track.

The view, of course, continues to be a feast for my eyes. I'm soaking in every detail, not even really pausing to take pictures because the beauty rests in the fact that the landscape is constantly moving, changing shape and height, unfamiliar patterns suddenly appearing in front of a very wide horizon. And what am I doing at this point in my life, other than enjoying the scenery? (I'm staring at mountains, by the way, mesas rising above snowy fields.) Honestly, I'm thinking about a goodbye I just had, about sixteen years in the making. It's a story I can't reveal too many details about, of course, but not wanting to be accused of being boring about it, I'll dance a little. Better yet, I'll make this a slow dance so it'll count.

I have loved many times in this life, but I have only been in love once. It was both perfect and completely imperfect at the same time, kind of like a flawed but unique diamond whose flaw lends the mystery and name to it. My heart was captured in a bubble of youth and left broken inside it when we went our separate ways, and the rest of me slowly fell apart over many forgotten seasons until there was nothing left. All that remained was a small simple puzzle of a heart in an airtight bubble. Hope that she would return faded after years, and then true hope that I would return faded after. The story becomes somewhat familiar at this point. I discovered theatre and began breathing again, obsessing over this new language of creativity. I couldn't stop; I wrote plays, songs, poetry, played with photography and art.

(We're motoring alongside Route 66 through a town I can only describe as the one from the movie Cars.)

There has been one constant throughout the theater years. The bubble stayed intact. It didn't matter what I did or who I was with, the heart in the bubble stayed broken and I knew I couldn't be loved. She tried and couldn't maintain. Others made an effort but were conflicted. Everyone else affirmed my short-sighted belief, but then again, I DO live in Los Angeles, and the entire population seems to be a mismatched collection of odds and ends. Try as hard as I have, I have not been able to romanticize the city as much as my solitary experience in it.

Very recently, the girl appeared in the shape of a voice, a faceless spring flowing with familiar feelings and affection. It was the sound that I had been missing for 16 years, the almost unrecognizable beat of my young, intact heart. Over a few months and scattered conversations flavored with some longing and regret, she managed to mend the heart and pop the bubble with a gentle goodbye. Are our paths altered by the fact that we made contact? Does anything in our lives get redefined?

(Riding towards the New Mexico/Colorado border, and there is a beautiful, vast nothingness out my window. Yellow plains, meet blue sky.)

Nothing changes. We are who we are now. What I wanted to remind her of is that she's precious, unique, loved, and up to now, the magical love of my life. She made me feel just as special, but even more so, she encouraged me to be open to deserve it from someone new. Yes, I can be loved. Yes, I can hold her in my heart as my soulmate. I just don't think that we're given only one. She held me throughout my young adulthood. I can, now at 40, hold my 24 year old heart in the brand new search for my happily ever after. That's where this trip begins; I am full, finally complete and ready to start over. I'm in a place to see new worlds, meet new people, and I'm fueled by the knowledge that someone out there loves me. She began this transformation of me with a kiss beneath a starry sky, and finished it with the news that she's moving away and wants to see me happy.

Someone out there loves me. How awesome is that? Now, where is my next love?

Past Present

2007-12-04T19:42:00.000-08:00

Sitting in the museum of Natural History, catching up with an old friend....

C: Not here for sightseeing, I'm guessing.

S: What gave me away?

C: The huge camera on your hip. The fact that you're looking at the architecture of the place maybe more than the exhibits.

S: Maybe I just needed to get out of the house.

C: And this is it? T-Rex versus Triceratops? Huh. It looks like a battle for survival, but really, I think the King was just pissed off he was smarter than everyone else.

S: And hungry.

C: That, too.

S: Don't forget the fact that this big brain had little tiny arms.

C: Some things have never evolved with men...ooh, is that the Hall of North American animals?

S: Sure, umm...okay. Hall it is. So...wait up, is there anything wrong with changing my scenery?

C: Of course not. Look at that mountain diorama with the goats!

Annoying Father: Bobby, look on the other side, raccoons!

The boy glances, but shrugs it off.

S: That was interesting. He was pointing to the beavers. Yeah, I hate it when beavers go through my trash.

C: You know what that just looked like?

S: What, the...guy?

C: No, you. You recognized it. Someone trying to evoke an emotional response with careless words. Is that pretty much it?

S: Well yeah, I recognized what he was doing. So?

C: Hmm. I'm just saying...it looked like it was familiar to you, like you've seen it recently.

S: What are you getting at?

C: Back up to the big window over there. The moose. I want to take your picture.

S: Careful, it's a new camera. So what are you saying about me recognizing...what, someone being careless with their words?

C: Move to your left and turn to your right a little. I want it to look like you don't know there's a huge moose behind you. Who was talking out their butt recently?

S: People do it every day. I see it in the things people write about thsmselves, the things they say. I hear their expectations of others and where their letdowns come from. Then I see what they do, and it's a total contradiction. It's crazy.

C: Ever think you're putting attention in the wrong places?

S: Christy, what options do I have? I am where I am. I'm not working on anything all-consuming, so wherever I stand, I'm wide open. The simplest exchanges are meaningful and when I'm out, especially with a camera or notebook in my hand, I go exactly where my heart dictates.

C: Come with me. I can't have a serious conversation with a moose looking over your shoulder. So...if you're still so open and always have something creative with you, why aren't you doing something?

S: I don't know. Blog entries don't count, do they?

C: Nope, not by themselves. Ooh - let's go to the room with the stones and gems.

S: I don't...I don't know about the creative stuff. I usually just wait for insipration...or an opportunity. Remember the two year span that led up to the musical? I was blogging, writing poetry, multiple plays....

C: All because of a girl.

S: No...no, no. Not just because of her. It was the girl and the outlet. I had the theater company back then and a bunch of collaborators.

C: Ohhhh look at all this gold. That's amazing. I'd probably pick up one of these rocks and not know the difference. (pause) So that's your plan? Wait it out?

S: I really don't know what to do. This stupid strike kind of sets a precedence, doesn't it?

C: That's right...I was going to ask you about your disillusionment with the entertainment industry.

S: What did you want to know? I haven't even written about this.

C: As soon as you were laid off, you were excited about the chance to jump in. Now, after you did you research and interviewed some people, the writers strike actually killed your love for it before you even got in the door?

S: No, that's not it. How can I explain this to you? Look, over here...look at this opal.

C: Beautiful.

S: But look at the rock next to it. It's unrefined, right? There's an opal stuck in the huge rock, and you could leave it alone as whatever nature designated it to be, or you could work on it and shape it to what you think it should be.

C: Okay, I'm with you so far.

S: Before you even chisel it out of the rock, you have to have that idea of where it's going to end up. You have to balance dissatisfaction and optimism, constantly correcting whatever it currently is all the way through the process. Grinding, buffing, chiseling, all the time knowing how beautiful the finished product already is, hidden somewhere inside this lump of rock.

C: The 7 Habits guide to Jewelry?

S: That's where I am in the process of looking for the next job. Dissatisfied and optimistic. The difference is, I don't know if there's a gem in this one. I look at these underpaid people walking the line, and I wonder how the industry appreciates talent, whether it's marketable or not.

C: Or relevant. You're worried about that, aren't you?

S: Yeah, well....the transition at this point is a little hard. I'm right in the middle of it. Let's get out of here. Upstairs or downstairs? Uhh, dead birds or American history?

C: History, always. So...okay, here's one thing I don't get. How is it possible that so many things completely shut down right after the layoff?

S: That's part of that same relevance mystery. Who knows how all this stuff happens? People change quickly...or, actually...wait - this is my theory: Sometimes people are forced to play roles because of the circumstances and the environment, but that's not an accurate reflection of who they are. Maybe it's more along the lines of who they want to be, because otherwise they would have changed their...situation, right?

C: I don't know...it's hard to just let go of responsibility to the life around you. You can't just...well, look at you. You had a job you didn't like for years, but you justified it because it afforded a lifestyle that you wanted. If the job wasn't an accurate picture of who you are, you would have gotten a better one a long time ago, wouldn't you? They forced your hand in the end.

S: Yeah, I guess so.

C: And another thing - you have to be completlely honest with yourself...I mean, you can't fool me, obviously, unless you're really trying to write me into a story. I don't think that's what this is about. The real truth is that if you wanted to stay in touch with a lot of the people you used to be in contact with, you would have made the first move.

S: There are some people I can't contact first.

C: You are defining the "can't" in that thought, my friend.

S: Huh. Good point.

C: This is a weird place for a skull. Who is this? La Brea Woman...about 8 million years old. Ha - take that, creationists.

S: She was tiny.

C: Do you think she died alone? It isn't a display of La Brea family. It's just...well, it's just her head. Her tiny head.

S: No, of course not. That would be just...sad.

C: Why do you sometimes believe you will? (pause) No answer?

S: Let's...not get ahead of ourselves, okay? The spanish haven't even conquered California yet.

C: "The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith." Goethe said that.

S: You're so lucky you only exist in text. I'd love to hear how you pronounce Goethe.

C: I can look it up on Wikipedia as easily as you can, mein freund.

S: For the win. Come on, let's worry about the future when we get there.

C: Uhh, you do that. I'll be busy savoring the irony of that statement.

The Caves of Hira

2007-11-30T22:38:00.000-08:00

I write a lot about optimism, not to paint that picture of myself but more as an exercise to rememember a little perspective for the moment. That's why I blog; Clearly, the plays I write are purely hypothetical, subconsciously working through little demons. Poetry, of course, is all about celebrating what might be delusional, but I digress. Now, I'm going to confront the painfully realistic.

The year approaching my 40th has been amazing. So much baggage from the past has been taken off my hands, and I've been able to let go of a lot of things that weren't working for me any more. I reached the peak that I was climbing for years, ready to make a change. I directed a play that was proud of, I stood on Mayan ruins and stayed in a suite on a cruise ship, I drove a brand new convertible up the Florida coast to see the Space Shuttle launch, and best of all, years of having a job I didn't like ended in a dramatic bomb scare (the last time I saw my boss) and then a quiet morning after. Quite a year to remember.

The real surprising thing at this very moment, is that the overture has made a subtle shift to a minor key. What I'm also being told, in many ways and places, is that I'm too old and too late for an alarming number of things. Yes, it was expected when I began the intimidating task of changing careers and industries, but on a personal level, I am (and I'll admit this) reading reactions and comparisons that for the first time, feel like an outside negative opinion of my life at 40. I had my anxieties about it before and have always been fully aware of what people might think is normal for a life at this age, but I've lived simply and without regret for so many years, I entered this year with a "wait and see" attitude.

Again, I haven't had any regrets about my choices. Living a life doing theater with the waking moments away from an easy, well-paying job has been awesome, and I didn't waste a single day. My relationships - even the fleeting ones - fed me creatively and fueled my courage as I took a lot of chances in my artistic life. Even when I asked one of my closest friends at the end of my Playhouse chapter if I had anything else to prove, she described my record in those little theaters as "prolific". I have no illusions; They're small theaters in the middle of Los Angeles, but considering the history of the place, who taught there, and what the industry thinks of the school, I don't dismiss my experience there, either. So why, after spending my 20s working and having fun, and then spending my 30s living for live theater, would people see me as spent and unimportant? Am I really done with this life, never having gotten to the normal stuff everyone else has found? You can run the whole block of 30s and never look at 40, but as soon as you walk through the door of 40, you're staring straight at 50. Me. 50. Inconceivable.

I would say that the hardest part of this is that first impression people have, when you're immediately labelled and therefore some people will never know everything else there is about you. That would apply to anyone reaching this age. The hardest part of this is, in my case, painting yourself into a corner and having to sit there with your thoughts. I have nothing but space and time right now. Look around you. Are there familiar faces who need you, who keep a rhythm in your life and who will, at the lack of one breath, notice if you're not there? Lucky, lucky you. I made it a practice to isolate myself when building my creative life. I was alone as a director and writer, keeping the vision intact. I'm alone in my preparation as an actor. I often need to focus when I explore with or without photography, so I'm open to everything around me. I'm used to it. Now I'm here, writing this to put it all on the table so there is a record of where I am before the beginning or after the end, so my story is accurate and comes directly from the middle of the circle.

See, now is the time to listen, to not be afraid of the outcome. Now is the time to find the new direction - because there is one - and leave the expectations to others. Now has to be it, the only thing, because without hope in the now, there is nothing. So I smell defeat cooking on the minds of others. I see pity in the spaces between words. I hear indifference in silence. That's not my story.

I write because I'm still alive and haven't yet surrendered. I write because I'm not stuck and firmly believe that the unimaginable is still ahead of me. Just in case, though, I write to leave proof that I was here. Now it's time to listen. There is more....

You Are

2007-11-19T19:36:00.000-08:00

This is one of those entries that has begun multiple times as I tried to wrestle with ideas and time. The brick wall I kept running into was actually just a very resiliant mirror, and I realized that I kept turning the self-realization screw tighter, making it harder to get to an answer outside of myself. The truth is, I don't plan the blog entries, even though I sometimes bookend thoughts and use devices that might hint otherwise. I actually start with a fuzzy idea, and try to answer a simple question with either something I haven't thought of yet or something I haven't listened to. I mean, what's the point of common sense if you discount it when it applies to your situation? Such as it is, I was wrong to look in the mirror on this one. It begins, simply, with a question.

Who are you?

No, not your name, and not your favorite color or who you're related to. I'm asking about who you are. Put yourself in the past tense, as if the moment when you stood up for yourself has already gone, and someone is retelling the way they remembered you. Are you, in fact, what you settle for, or are you what you aspire to be? Does any of it matter if you're not doing what you aspire to be? It's hard in this world to not wear a label, especially one that's not immediately read a certain way because of how you look or where you stand in a crowd. Forget for a second what even the closest people to you believe you should be, because they only know what you've told them. In the most private place of your heart, how do you want at least one person in the world to see you?

Let's face this much; There's a lot of competition out there to be whatever it is you're interested in. That applies to just about anything, be it careers or relationships. To choose one thing, or even two, you have to know that this is what makes you unique. The knowledge that you are exactly what follows the question "Who are you?" should at least begin to erase any concept of competition, right?

Or maybe...you don't know yet. It's okay. It's just me asking the question.
Some will say that the answer changes because one has to adjust themselves to different situations. Does that actually redefine who you are, though? Look, I understand the whole thing about different situations. This whole re-evaluation started forming clouds on the horizon when I was laid off. Despite my immediate optimism, I still wrestled with questions about why I was chosen and let go. Yes, they did me a favor, but still I wondered. It wasn't until I got to the outplacement program that I actually heard the question. They asked all of us to come up with a 30 second commercial, an answer to the question "Who are you?" for employers. I answered it a few times at the beginning of each class, and I had to remind myself that I wasn't defining myself completely. I was answering "What can you do for us?" and not the bigger question. Still, the seed was planted.

I've been thinking about it a lot. I've had nothing but time to think about it. The crazy thing is, for once in my life I haven't been too busy to pay attention to the things and people who would normally deflate and defeat me. Know what I found? It doesn't really matter how most people value me. I still try to see the best things in my world, and that, I think, answers the question in my own mind.

For the life that I've led and the things that I've done, the answer is mine to keep and believe in. Despite who I've had to be in different situations, I am still alone with my thoughts at the end of the day when my head rests on the pillow, and there, I know who I am.

Indeed well. Sincerely.

2007-11-14T18:03:00.000-08:00

Getting out of the house last weekend, I went up to CityWalk (immediately wondering what I was doing up there), and I saw all the noise, heard the bigness of the place. I walked in my own jetstream, disillusioned and strange, and I didn't recognize the place. Was it fun to visit once upon a time? Did it have a magic to it, like some of the other places I can't get around to revisiting? I distinctly remember thinking how lucky I was to have Universal Studios and Citywalk practically in my backyard. Maybe I was naive, holding on to a first impression the same way I remembered Hawaiian sunsets from my youth, the Vatican, family vacations, and a certain pair of brown eyes I fell into and never emerged from. Can you blame me? We hold on to our very first impression of something, but to see them with older eyes makes it hard to reconcile. Especially now.

Sometimes, unfortunately, the last impression is the thing we hold on to and hope to forget. We leave the experience behind us, and whether its solved or not, every now and then you cross paths with your past and even with perspective, it's an uncomfortable reminder of something wrong you have no power over. I've been really lucky this year to have had some huge mysteries of my life solved, but in the past few weeks, a reminder of a particularly helpless moment reappeared. Yep, while it might seem like I have it all together right now and optimism is the soundtrack of my life, I am still seen by some people in my past as strange and troublesome. Any simple conversation - even by email - is full of obvious politeness, an annoying attempt at walking on eggshells. I can see the look on this person's face again, as if she's talking to a mental patient, trying to play things safe to not arouse any uncontrollable emotions or reactions. It's crazy how obvious the behavior is, even now.

Flash back to many years ago, when at the end of a long, strange friendship, things blew up between one friend and I. One simple act on my part, nowhere near the level of rudeness I was on the receiving end of for years, caused the person to write me off completely, despite my efforts to reconcile and even accept much of the blame. I was in pain, felt misunderstood and alone, and in one group of friends, everything I did was highlighted as insane and wrong. And so it was, when I was able to spend time with these friends without the influence of this other person, they treated me with the same behavior I recently read: polite, detached words, non-committal and backtracking from the first syllable. It's kind of disgusting, and still a little embarrassing, but nowhere near as effective as it used to be. I have had two experiences in my life where I was in pain and the people closest to me abandoned and shunned me. Thanks to them, thanks to the people who never listened or gave me a second chance, I've become strong and independent, quiet about what's going on inside. I know better now. You have friends, and then you have the friends who are connected to you, heart to heart. In that respect, I'm so unbelievably lucky.

I have two people I can always call, and I stay in touch constantly. I have two more who will always help, and I'm spending Thanksgiving with them. I have a family who works hard at maintaining contact, at listening to nuances in my voice and would drop everything if they felt I needed them. So what do you think? Do I set myself apart from the world as the tainted, problematic person some people once saw me as? No. They gave up on me. Whether they gave up on me before we broke off contact or they simply cut me off without any explanation, it's the same exact unapproachable void. On my own shore of this sea of nothingness, I can look back and rather than attach blame, I can simply remember that I offered love, was rejected, and with time I learned to give that love to others. That is the last impression I want to hold on to, hopefully with a little wisdom and pride intact.

Can you blame me for relying on good memories to propel me forward? As much as I am able to remember the ugly moments, and am reminded even when I choose not to, nothing I tell you will replace listening to Space Oddity with the sunroof open on a starry night, or an amazingly heartfelt hug on a Halloween day at work. Nothing will desaturate the warm colors of a musical coming to life on stage, and the best parts of the story lending themselves to real life. While I have suffered, I have done so honestly and expressed the same in simple words, but that has emptied my heart to make room for greater things to fill it. All this awkward maneuvering that I see, to serve purposes that in the end have little to do with me, will just have to remain beyond the ability for these older eyes to reconcile.

I have everything I need, especially now.

Natural Selection

2007-11-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

I once wrote, in the tagline of a play I never finished, "What is the difference between revolution and evolution? The direction of the movement." It was a story about a war of ideas and beliefs, about confusion and loss, about being remembered the way we want to be remembered and not leaving that definition up to anyone else. It was a war, not a struggle, of one man against the world, then the world against ideas, and then the man became just another form of the ideas he was against in the first place. The main problem, of course, lies in the fact that truth, a sense of order, of right and wrong, is subjective, and contrasting ideas are not often discussed because...well, as we're prone to think, "Would anything I say make a difference?" I'd like to be the first one in this hour to tell you that yes, everything you say makes a difference.

If you've read all 64 blog entries before this (and...damn...if you have...wow), you would know that I'm constantly soul searching, asking the questions that I can wrestle with and leaving the other little mysteries alone until I can find relevance (like why I hadn't been able to get the song "More than a Feeling" out of my mind). Being out of work has risen this to a whole different level, because people have confirmed certain things about me, and I have to believe that I have those qualities going for me. My resume looks great. My outplacement program has involved all of us without work in a bunch of exercises to help us sell the best things about ourselves. I don't know where anyone else is in their lives, but I've had this...this habit of journal/blog writing...for 22 years now. Over that time I have fought my demons. I've believed the worst things about myself. I've even accepted defining places like my former job for years at a time, because it was just easier to stay in one place.

Do you know what feels more right than believing the worst? Love. Listen, you can call me out for being more of a dreamer than a realist, but I, too, can see that something is exactly what it seems to be. I can empathize with a bad situation or acknowledge a dead end when I see one. I have tried, and failed, and tried again, and found success. I have been rejected and then missed, completely alone, yet at one with the entire world in front of me. What gives me this kind of annoying optimism is the fact that I crave love, am addicted to it, so that is what I try to project. I will never say that I'm not worthy of it, because I have so much.

So we all have choices, as I keep repeating in my entries to remind myself, more than anything. I could try to understand the past, or worse yet, try to fix it, but at this beautifully even-numbered age of 40, I'm a little more occupied with the future.

This is my transition between revolution and evolution.

Chrysalis

2007-10-08T21:19:00.000-07:00

Somewhere beyond the atmosphere of my former job, beyond the influence of my old theater company, and everyone I knew at both places, I'm floating out in the middle of nowhere, looking for a new home and the next version of me. For years, I have been as people have seen me, defined in familiar terms, within safe limits, and independent by choice. I have floated in pools of ideas that sparked like synapses, I have run the gauntlet of doubt from everyone around me, and the whole time, I have worked my ass off to rise above. Rise above what? Everything. Everything and everyone. Only from the top can you see far.

Right now, however, I can see in every direction, because I am completely alone, in control of the next step, knowing fully I could choose to do anything right now. I could move to another city and start completely from scratch. I could choose to be something entirely new, putting everything creative I've done behind me, burying it in my past. I could do that, but...I need to know what's next. I have been growing and expanding in this same patch of land for years, and I need to know what happens if I expand again. It's intimidating and so much bigger than me, because...well, if I've reached this plateau and there's nothing here for me, then all of the sacrifices I've made have been for nothing.

That's what I'm carrying; I have worked 40% of the time with a lot of people and 60% of the time alone, reinventing and studying, writing and revising, singularly focused on the how and the why while others have enjoyed life spending time with friends, having families and attending birthdays. I've been so lucky to have a life where I haven't had to say that I wish I could, or that it would be nice if someday I could do something creatively. I've done everything I've imagined I wanted to do, and outside of career, I could easily see the next step. But now, I am staring straight at the future like a huge tornado that I need to run straight towards. I need to swallow the fear, bleed a little, and try to lock down that presence of mind that found me constantly creating. I need to set the hopeless romantic in me aside for a moment and engage the fight. Some say this is just unemployment. I see it as war.

For eleven days, I have wrapped myself in reinvention, evaluating myself on paper and letting go. I've seen everything I knew become unfamiliar parts of my past. I've marked the end of my 30s, simplified my life, and have been very focused on not wasting a single day. It would be so easy for me to be lazy, to just sit and wait, hoping for something to come along. It would be too convenient to give up, to narrow my options to the point where I can justify doing nothing. I've been there before. I'm not there now.

Know this: I'm scared about the prospect of doing this alone. I'm really uncomfortable about moving backwards, about encountering the feeling that I've lost something in the process.

But...

At the same time, I'm anxious and excited, selfless enough to listen to the experts I'm meeting and trust their advice completely. I'm optimistic and encouraged by my past, writing this mostly to throw a rock down at this point in time to mark where I am and hopefully look back someday to see that this is where I made my stand. This is where I chose to acknowledge the fear and doubt, and then leap into the unknown anyway.

That's all there is. This is the week I've begun to step out into it.

The Trial of Fledging

2007-09-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

The great thing about inviting change into your life is that the possibilities become exciting to look forward to, fascinating to fantasize about. The difficult thing about having change thrust into your life is to try to react to it the same way you would if you had invited it. In a way, through action or inaction, you set yourself up for just about everything that happens, and as I've said before, sometimes all you have to do is pay attention to what's really happening around you to know where you are...or where you should be.

Yesterday, at about 10:00am, I was escorted to a conference room I originally booked, and met up with a handful of fellow co-workers there. There was one manager for every employee there, but I didn't notice that until after the fact. We were told all at once that due to the merger (which was just finalized), they had to eliminate positions due to redundancies, and that we were the unfortunate part of the 11% that was being let go, or just over 600 people. (I found out about the 11% in a press release later.) It was brief and we were escorted to our desks, then escorted out, and this was going on throughout the company, and my immediate reaction wasn't one of shock and betrayal. I was actually kind of relieved and smiled when I got the news. See, this merger was just finalized, but the cuts and job loss will happen over two years. We've had the threat of losing our jobs hanging over our heads for a while now, but that's nothing compared to what the people who are still there will go through.

Enough about them. I fulfilled the instruction from the CEO and now president when he told our department, "Don't quit, let us fire you." That's easy to say for a man whose salary might double as a result of the merger, but that's neither here nor there. My only regrets about the whole thing are that I didn't get the chance to say goodbye to people before I left, and that my boss planned to be out of the office that day. She was the one who asked me to book the conference rooms for the layoffs, essentially asking me to dig my own grave. I thought it was a nice stroke of irony, maybe a planned oversight. My old boss didn't say anything to me, and she was in the meeting. I guess there is a professional distance, and where friendship sits in the balance versus career, career for the above the line people will always win. I don't like it, but it's...well, I have to say that it really determines the difference between mere effectiveness and greatness. Everyone is expendable in the workplace; not everyone is replaceable.

And so begins my awesome journey to begin again. That was one of my favorite parts of my musical, when Helen tells Jack in a posthumous recording to "begin again". I can feel her giving me the same advice now, at the best possible time. In the past two amazing months, just about everything regarding my past and present has been redefined and wiped clean. I no longer have much of the mystery of family history hanging over me, I am no longer defined by past relationships as tainted goods, and now, I'm no longer working the lie for a paycheck. I may have said this before...that without theater the day job just can't be justified. My job was a shameful thing to admit because I've known all along that I was much more capable. The search begins now on borrowed free time from my former company - thanks to severance - for a much better fit in a different world...maybe even in a different city (as my sister suggested).

The bigs in my former company completely have the right to stay in the game and make calculated decisions to make more money. That's business.

I'm a free agent now, able to consider all possibilities and not worried about my usefulness hanging in the balance anywhere. In one week, I turn 40 and I could not have asked for a better gift. It's completely up to me now, to use my time well and keep everything I'm doing in motion. Stay tuned...the trip from here on gets interesting.

Aspirins Into My Cereal Bowl

2007-09-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

As I reach another chapter of my life, I'm noticing that some of the fog of war is lifting now that I'm out of theater and real life has been able to catch up. I have had a lot of things completely wrong for a really, really long time. I can't tell you exactly how I feel, and I'm not quite sure that I'm even trying to unravel what's going on in my head. I haven't written in a while because I'm focusing nearly all of my writing on a fiction writing class, and...well, that's what happens when I work on a project. I obsess and narrow my vision to what I'm trying to learn, a habit I've always had but was strengthened by watching my friend Lisa Hayes work on her music. That's why my writing style tends to be simple and straightforward. I work hard to keep it simple rather than trying to fool you with clever, witty phrases and ideas that would never be uttered in conversation. I'm so lucky to find out that that this style follows through anything I write, whether it's blogging, playwriting, poetry, or fiction writing. Wait - emails, too. Texting. What else? Greeting cards? Post-it notes! What? Oh. You get the idea.

I'm also really lucky that I can separate myself enough from this narcissistic society to see the parts and write about them, and at the same time protect myself from the traps of my own personality. I know most of my weaknesses, and I know what my strengths are, but still, I have to watch myself. I trust easily, and sometimes I can see the hurt coming but I tell myself that I'm strong enough to take it on the chin and remain standing. If there's one thing I learned from acting and directing, and then that fed my writing, it's that an artist attempts to "defend the truth", no matter how ugly. It was a part of learning how to prepare as an actor. You can't think about conventional things you should care about, for the only things that work are the things that truly move you. You have to be brutally honest.

You have to be brutally honest. I thought about that as I packed up two friendships and marked them "return to sender". The truth had been thumping me on the forehead for a long while now, and the things those two people were saying the whole time were so blatantly obvious, but of course, I reached shoulder deep into my bag of second chances until I began to wonder why I wasn't really paying attention to what was going on. What were the words? What wasn't being said? Most importantly, what were the denials? Oh, man, it was simple math the whole time and I made it fuzzy with my own prejudices and expectations. When I ended one of the two friendships, there was just a brief moment of surprise, and then the undeniable acceptance flooded the cavity with silence. What am I exercising here again? I'm only doing the things I want to do now. Okay, never mind my job. I'm talking about personal stuff. I'm not settling, I'm not wasting my time, and I'm enjoying people in my life who really seem to reflect me accurately, for all of my flaws and good points. The people I don't hear from...well, I could speculate, but really, what's the point? I could get it completely wrong.

It's really funny how we sometimes make misinformed decisions, and our whole lives become built on our own delusions. You just can't regret them, because you have no choice but to accept who you are. Some people happen to think they are the center of the universe and the others the master of their own domain, but especially now that I'm at this place in my life where I'm looking at the last two decades of change, I know I'm just a stranger in a strange land. I'm not even an important part of this world, but I'm trying to learn as much as I can about it and write about what I see. I know that the history around me moves regardless of me, so I won't presume to walk through any door and feel like every head turns. That arrogance of youth is totally gone. I've been humbled by even getting things about my own family wrong.

Right now it's almost as if I have a freshly erased blackboard in front of me. The huge, complicated equation has been erased because it was based on false numbers. I'm hitting the gym three or four days a week now in addition to cycling in the mornings before work. That's very recent. I'm redefining myself as a fiction writer. I'm only reaching out to meet people halfway, and using the rest of my time to make today count. Today. This day. Whenever you're reading this, I'm reminding myself to be grateful and happy and not let doubt fester in the back of my mind. Yeah, I'm going to try to use Occam's razor until it dulls, or at the very least, until I know better.

One of my closest friends used to sing to just about every song on the radio, but he used his own lyrics. I corrected him a few times, not knowing the brilliance of what he was doing, but I eventually gave up and we laughed every single time one of us could make up a new lyric to a song. No, the Police had it wrong when they printed the lyrics to "Spirits in the Material World". It was "Aspirins Into My Cereal Bowl".

Honestly, what is the truth that matters? Is it the one that belongs to one other person or a group of other people who want you to believe what they believe? Is it the truth that you see, from where you stand in the world? When all is said and done, the only thing that matters is what you hold to be self evident, and how you act based on that. This might sound like an over-simplification, but it is, after all, right there in front of you.

Zuzu's Petals

2007-08-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time - for me - since I've written, mostly due to the heat, being busy, a few surprises, and all the fanfare I shower myself with when I'm motivated enough to change my life yet again. I've actually written a lot - nothing blog-worthy - but on the eve of a new challenge, I feel the need to catch up and really seek out a moment of clarity and perspective about my life so far. Why now? Is what I'm about to do that important? Not really, it's just a writing class I'm starting tomorrow. What would inspire me to stop and look back now, other than the fact that most of my writing will be focused on the study of writing?
I've got a year to live.

Don't read that wrong. I'm not planning on dying, nor am I sick. I mean, I don't know when it'll happen, but if I go, I currently have everything I want. I have a few really good friends who are committed to life and our investment in it together. My family's doing great. I've had a whole life in theater stuffed into a decade and promise of bigger and better things. I've found a way to pay attention to what people are saying and doing, and I'm endlessly entertianed by the dance around me. I'm so thankful for what I have, but yes, all this can change, so I'm inspired to make better use of my time and get back to living a slightly larger life. That includes getting on my career, getting back to learning and seeking new places and people, and even new avenues of charity now that the one through work is caught up in the merger and the other one through theater has no home for the moment. I've sat in the cocoon of home recuperating from having left my actors and my stage, but I am currently in the midst of recreating and rising from what was.

I have a year to live. Really live. And then after that, I have another one. It allows me a chance to make plans beyond saying "I have a day to live". This is basically me saying that I'm optimistic about my future and not weighed down with regret. My mistakes from the past, especially the ones that invited recurring patterns, only lend to my experience and not to my character. My character is all about the things my friends recognize: I love, and love with my whole heart, and I take care of the people close to me. I'm opinionated but committed, eager to connect (sometimes to a fault), but at the same time - and most of the time - I choose to go my own way.

Here's what my experience dictates: Acting has taught me to not respond until I'm really provoked or inspired to react. I only recently learned this on a personal level. Also, you own your own perceptions and issues with the outside world. 90% of the time, people have more than enough on their own plate to accomodate worrying about your problems, so...this is what I tell myself...pull yourself together and keep moving. If you can do all this and choose happiness over anything that might slow you down or obscure your view from the answers you need on a daily basis, you can pretty much stay young and true to yourself. It's not easy, but sometimes the practice surprises you, and you find the spectacular in the simple moments of the day. Alternatively, you could be distracted by the unsolvable mysteries of situations that are completely out of your hands. It's your choice.

Yeah, you have to accept that there are things you can't help or change. You have to be okay with that. There are mysterious people in the margins of my life who play by their own rules and on rare occasions enter my world like strange lights in the sky, appearing and disappearing without explanation. I used to think that the exchange was somehow a reflection of me, both an attraction to who I was perceived to be and a repulsion to the realization of who I actually am. In reality, it has nothing to do with me, and I have to either let those moments go or fight the temptation to reach for them. It's usually both. I'm still practicing the balance of that.

What's the worst that would happen if you, in a mixed moment of courage, changed a response to something, or said exactly what was on your mind? What would happen if you suddenly chose to not do something expected of your character or decided to stop living a life that isn't working for you? You and I have that same year to look forward to, my friend. It can be whatever you want it to be. We do, after all, have a year to live, and in the end...if it really is the end...it would be such a crime to have wasted it.

We are still here. That means we have a choice. Isn't that all the power we need to begin?

Tight

2007-08-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

BEFORE I say anything else, I'm watching Dancing with the Stars and both Dolly Parton and Wayne Newton are scaring me. Scaring me! Wayne hasn't had his face pulled back as tight as Dolly has, but man. Wrinkles add character. Sinatra looked great as old blue eyes, Sophia Loren is still a hottie. Plastic surgery people, please save the money for something else. It's okay...no, shh shhhhhh, it's okay to age.

Wait - how many times have I written about turning 40? Also, am I not working out like it's a new fad? Okay, guilty. I'm still not ever going to pull my skin back over my face like a condom on an apple core. Yeah, I said it. How's that for a mental image?

We all want to be loved forever, and we sometimes want the ridiculous combination of our youthful bodies with our current wisdom and knowledge. I know I'm chasing it. I see it all over the place in the entertainment world. People want to be seen. They want to be noticed. Just like the craft we practice, the lives within tend to be an enhanced mirror of the lives outside of entertainment. That's why some films and shows tend to resonate so well with audiences. It's not a matter of finely crafting stories based on psychological study and behavioral equations. As one of my greatest acting teachers once said, "actors are very special broken people". The same holds true of any kind of artist.

In a rehearsal this past weekend with that very same teacher as a director, I watched really interesting behavior of people who were getting parts taken away and given to them, who had a chance to establish themselves in a pecking order that just doesn't exist. It happens every time he revisits the show. People want his approval. They want a chance to set themselves apart from others. It's not competition - there's nothing to win. It's manufactured self-esteem. There was one girl in particular who has always drawn attention to herself. She laughed the loudest, even when nothing was funny. When the whole cast would be addressed, she would either talk to someone else or rifle through her purse. She, like Britney, like Paris, like Lindsay, will not stand with others on the same level. She wasn't the only one at the rehearsal, either. There were others screaming for attention, for approval, even physically staying close to the strongest person in the room, the "alpha male" director. It's behavior that occurs in rehearsals and in performances, where the self-involved aren't self-aware. I kept looking around at other people, to see if they noticed the same things I was watching. Only a couple did.

Back in real life, the volume is turned down on the same attention-getting habits, but they're still there. I wonder where they come from, and often ask myself how they make the transition from an innocent cry for help to a destructive, self-serving path that really leads to endless dissatisfaction. So Dolly and Wayne have altered their looks, and I know a few surgically enhanced girls at the office. The girl I saw at rehearsal is really no different than the brat I worked with who never quite found out what it was to be accountable for her actions, even when she could clearly see the cause and effect of them. I've seen the most unbalanced people complain about the drama of others, and all of it, both the creative and real worlds I live in, begins to blur and I ask myself why people seem so disconnected, and at the same time want approval, want to redefine the world according to them.

What in our world ranks possessions over ideas? What makes it possible to believe that we're not okay the way we are? When this life seems to be made of all these irregular puzzle pieces, and we end up craving something real, what happens when we center ourselves and are once again able to manage the whole thing? Do the real things we needed get capped and put back in the medicine cabinet?

You have two options: 1) to tighten up because life moves fast and as you get older, sometimes your decisions illustrate the fact that you are alone with your own values and perceptions, or 2) to relax your hold on everything and see yourself in the ever changing context of the world, constantly getting better and never letting any outside influences take anything away from who you are.

So who are you? Who is the country star, the vegas performer, the obnoxious actress, the divorcee with fake breasts, or the writer blogging late at night? We're not so different, you and I. We cross paths, we fade away, we lose sight of each other, of ourselves, and here we are again. We all want to be loved forever. Shouldn't we first get that love from ourselves?

Me, Myself, an Island

2007-08-09T00:10:00.000-07:00

This year...really, this year more than any other leading up to it, has represented the social exercise of maintaining self-awareness with respect to others' feelings while at the same time not caring about what people think of me. It's important to note at this point that I'm saying this with a healthy amount of hindsight, that it's not a proclamation of independence or intent. It's not a discovery or resolution. It's just the result, I guess, of having reached a few limits, and rather than compromise myself to win the favor of others, I've finally thrown my hands up and accepted that, in the moment, I just can't behave the way people want me to, or worse yet, be the person people want me to be. I am so guilty of having tried this in the past - with a theater company, with people at work, with friends, with relationships - and in the end, I've found out that merely disguising the parts doesn't make them fit together any better. It is what it is.

Now, I won't sit here with this pickle in my left hand (it's lunchtime) and tell you that I absolutely don't care what everyone thinks about me. That would just be a flat out lie, and I suspect that anybody who tells you that they're completely apathetic to opinions about them isn't telling you the complete truth. Our reactions are different, but even a two second exchange with a stranger could make or break your day. That guy who honked his horn at you in the parking lot might be immediately forgotten, but later, that unresolved memory might be waiting on your pillow. "Wait...was he honking at me? Yeah, he was. What did I do?" I used to think that adapting to everyone who had a problem with me would solve the whole pillow issue, but it didn't. There's always a reconciliation with the day's deeds, at least in my mind.

What I'm beginning to learn is that people are entitled to their own anger, happiness, and yes, even a sadness you want to take away but sometimes can only be in the company of. The point really is, to be strong, to know yourself, and in my case, to keep asking questions so I can really be here, living in the present and always be ready to change direction and see things differently...

...because I can't, as much as I've tried in the past, make anyone feel anything that somehow fits in the world of my expectations. I only have the capacity to be the person I aspire to be, to constantly learn and pay attention, and hopefully stop wasting my time worrying about things that are out of my control. I've finally surrendered to that, and the get out of jail card I have in my back pocket is that for years, I've explored my life and the world around me mostly alone. I've had only a couple of people in my life who have been right there with me, but for the most part, walking away and doing my own thing has been a briar patch for me. Oh, I know people have complained about me, or even recently in my history, don't quite know how to maintain contact (which could easily make me feel like "tainted goods", but it doesn't), but as a friend once told me, that's not my problem. It's all in the reaction.

If I close my eyes, I can see myself surrounded by nothing familiar, an ocean of indifference and memories in the back of my mind. I've walked away from aging definitions of things I wanted to do and people I wanted to be around, and I wait here in silence. I do have this pickle, though.

Soon, it'll be time to rebuild.

Solo

2007-08-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been into words that mean one thing in one language, and with the same spelling, mean something different in another. Take "once". In English, it implies one time, a singular occurence In Spanish, it is the number eleven. The title of this entry is also in the singular, more often than not describing a person away from everyone else. In Spanish, while it implies one thing apart from other, it is also an expression of "only" or "just", as in "this and nothing more".

Commercial airplanes encounter air turbulence, its pilots never being able to predict where and when it'll happen because, of course, air is invisible and different currents at high altitudes are moving in different speeds and directions. They fly cautiously, holding on and trying to gently move with each bump and push on the fuselage of the plane. Suddenly, from one section of deceivingly clear sky to the next, the pockets of rogue wind fade and the plane slices through the air smoothly and effortlessly. The pilots and passengers who paid attention could look back at a rough patch and ask "what was that?"

That's kind of where I'm at now.

Sometimes I let people in because the timing feels right and for the moment, people are on their thoughtful best behavior. People forget themselves and "I" becomes "We" for - all too often - a short time. Once "We" becomes a fragmented collection of "Me", "You", and "Them", I start struggling with a comfortable place to be, and then suddenly...

...well, this time I've found myself alone in a deceivingly clear section of sky. I found myself in that turbulence, tried to either work against the push of other peoples actions and intentions or try to flow with them into pain and rejection, and then took a step back. I was invested. I was stuck on hope and optimism that things could go back to "we" in a few places, but it just wasn't meant to be. In the past, I held on for years - once for five years, once for eleven - because I valued time and commitment. Never one to say that it was time wasted, I did learn a lesson. With that recent step back, I also revoked investment. On one hand, that means that I'm back to going at some things alone, but on the other hand, I'm doing things on my own terms, and that makes me happy. With solitude comes an opportunity to be creative again and not just pass the time with company. I can keep looking for collaborators, people who are in the same place and time as I am. I can find people who believe in the "we", and the only thing outside ourselves is the thing we create together, be it a song, a story, a funny moment, or a great idea.

My lunches alone have become productive again, filled with writing and seeking, something like the days when I used to know Nons and started writing poetry on the way to creating the musical and huge movements in my creative world. It's kind of funny; In Spanish, if I describe you eating, I use the word "come". It comes from the word "comer". In English, if I want you to meet me here, and in this particular case, I'm talking about being here in this moment of understanding each other, of knowing what both you and I bring to this sentence, to this weird little self-indulgent page on the net, I use the same word. Come.

The Fool on the Hill

2007-08-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

I've actually written a few blog entries that withered on the vine, attempts to recapture something unemotional but enlightening. Let's face it; It's better to leave enlightenment in words to another forum. As Mark Twain said, "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

My search has become interesting over the past few weeks, travelling up to Ojai, Santa Barbara, and Solvang, meeting people along the way and discovering the completely unexpected. With completely open eyes, no fear of the road less traveled, and a camera in my backpack, I've seen a lot, sometimes asking myself "How did I get here?". Watching an oceanside wedding, being invited to watch a play in an outdoor theater modeled after the Globe, driving along a 150 year old stagecoach route, the list goes on.

As if that wasn't enough, there was a flashpoint of activity with my family that brought on a lot of new information yet to be digested. My family history back in Argentina is a total mystery, which makes my family here in the states my closest friends. Yes, I have that relationship with them as a group and with them as individuals. The momentary re-establishment of contact with Argentina just opened a dusty and nearly forgotten footlocker of history that includes a lot of finger pointing, power struggles, politics, a child born in a convent, and fifty years of silence between siblings. The escape of my family to the U.S. was exactly that: a flight to pursue freedom and a future in a Romeo and Juliet kind of way, and new fertile ground to plant new roots and raise a family. This is just the beginning of it.

Naturally, I needed to get out of the house to clear my mind. Then I got sick and had to go see a doctor. Prescription medicine is not cheap.

My mind, of course, hovered back to the recurring questions and debates over the people who have floated through my life. The interesting thing about being in the state I've been is that I've kept myself away from others, finally quarantining myself with medication and silence. At work, I stayed at my desk, did everything I could to guard myself and keep a steady schedule of remedies. Today's my first day out of the shell, a chance to stand on a peak and look above and across the path I've just come down, even the part that precedes me and is still shrouded in fog. From here I can see some simplicity in the whole thing, even if it escapes me to some extent.

A while ago, a girl wrote her phone number and email on a random blank page in my notebook, and I believed for months that something significant would happen when I arrived to that page. Although absolutely nothing happened and I was eventually rejected and dismissed by the girl, I was sitting on a warm patio in Ojai with a huge margarita in front of me and I flipped back to the page with the phone number and wrote this:

For posterity:
Something was supposed to happen upon arrival to this page. It was a miracle; The sun rose, it set. The moon quietly crossed the sky. Wind blew through leaves and children laughed in the distance. It was a good day.

Yes, getting sick was a blessing, so I could think about the weekend excursions and those other magical moments I've had this year. There are moments so fleeting, that stupid me, as I wait for something significant to come along, they come slowly and fade, hoping that I would notice and appreciate them. I see those moments and won't lose them:

...standing in front of that girl and basking in the glow from her smile...

...sitting in the Hollywood Bowl with a friend enjoying the perfect romantic atmosphere...

...driving along the rocky coast by Malibu feeling a lump of stress blow away...

...and now, sitting two tables away from a beautiful friend at work who is also eating alone. I think I'll have lunch with her tomorrow.

50 Things You Might Not Know About Me

2007-07-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

My good friend Soledad created this list in her blog, and I just had to try it out for myself. Truthfully, I don't know that I can come up with 50, but it's worth a try. I do love making lists. I'll try to make this unique.

1. I'm the only person in my immediate family to be born in the U.S. The rest - my parents, my two sisters - were born in Argentina, and are often reluctant to tell me anything about what it was like to live there.

2. I have a crazy fear of roller coasters that, no doubt, comes from a serious car accident I was in when I was 3. My mother's car was parked on a hill, I released the parking brake, and my middle sister and I rode it all the way down as it jumped a curb, flipped over, pancaked, and dumped us out. My sister had the only injury, cuts on her knees from the glass.

3. I used to have long hair shortly after high school, when I was into heavy metal. Garage bands, guitars, bandanas...that was rock in the 80s.

4. I once supplied the voice of Mickey Mouse for Michael Eisner's (he was the prez of Disney) very first personal computer.

5. As a sophmore in high school, I broke my left forearm in a 90 degree angle. That was the easy part. Resetting it was hard.

6. As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of falling off the roof of a 6 story building.

7. I took piano lessons when I was three but abandoned them shortly after. I picked the piano back up when I took it upon myself to tune the family's piano when I was a teenager.

8. When I started learning how to play the guitar, I played two or three hours a day.

9. I only eat one item on my plate at a time. I don't like to mix up my tastes.

10. I've been to Hawaii over 20 times, made possible by the fact that my dad worked for the airlines.

11. My mother altered just about every piece of clothing I wore, because she was, professionally, a seamstress. Carol Burnett even specifically requested my mom when she wanted a few dresses made.

12. I have fired, due to the generosity of a friend, an automatic .45, .38 snub nose revolver, and a .22 rifle. Ahh hang on - I think Chuck Heston is at my door.

13. I don't know how to swim. Oh yeah, another traumatic childhood incident when I almost drowned.

14. I've played guitar with a band in front of 2,000 people, and solo in front of 500.

15. I attended college twice, once as a music major, then a few years later as a theater major, english minor. I never finished.

16. I memorize music by attributing colors and shapes to it.

17. I've been keeping a journal (now this blog) since 1984.

18. I wrote my first play in about an hour.

19. I can speak Spanish, but not write it correctly. I still think in English and only grew up speaking Spanish with my mother. Oh, come to think of it....

20. I grew up speaking English with everyone in my family but my mom. My sisters speak English with each other but Spanish with my parents.

21. I almost always have a guitar pick on me, for luck.

22. I once worked at the Wherehouse (video and music) for one summer, and that was the only retail job I've had.

23. I was a video game tester at Disney.

24. I was online during the early days of the Internet.

25. When I was in grade school, I was teased and harassed by a group of kids in my class. That lasted for years until I actually started fighting back.

26. My first kiss was in 1st grade. I still remember the nacho cheese on her lips from the Doritos.

27. I was an altar boy (and no, I'm not repressing any memories).

28. I used to drive a Jeep Wrangler and loved everything about it except for the frequency of tow trucks and visits to my mechanic.

29. I've been in two car accidents where I was the driver.

30. I once did a 50 mile bicycle race in Mexico and got my bike up to a little over 65mph on a downhill stretch.

31. I've written over 20 plays and produced six of them.

32. I'm both a neat freak and a pack rat. I think there's something in the pleasure of having so much to clean up. I love throwing things away.

33. I have six guitars and one keyboard.

34. I don't often go to parties. As a matter of fact, I've only ever actually had three birthday parties (not including ones I had as a child).

35. When I was a child, I created illustrated books of poetry.

36. After high school, I wrote a book of just over 100 songs and then five years later, shredded the whole bunch.

37. Thanks to breaking a bone in my left hand in the early 90s, I have seven visible knuckles when I close my fists.

38. I was a football player in grade school and a track athlete in high school.

39. When email was fairly new, I had a pen pal for about seven years. Everything was awesome until she moved out here.

40. My mother was 40 when she had me.

41. My addiction for DVDs has waned only a little bit - I have nearly 300 and can now resist temptation, even when they're on sale.

42. I've been a loyal Laker fan since the 70s.

43. I was once a personal assistant for a brilliant actress.

44. I'm allergic to penicillin. In fact, I'm not even sure I'm spelling it right.

45. I'm the go-to person for creative stuff at work, and I totally don't even see the importance of it. Why? That's just dumb.

46. I'm fascinated by religion but could be described as agnostic.

47. I used to be a Disneyana collector. In my collection: a 1939 record set of Snow White & the Seven Dwarves, a 1969 map of Disneyland, a light from the Electric Light Parade

48. I spent nearly every weekend at the theater for two years, for both matinee and evening performances, PLUS rehearsals during the week at night after a full-time job.

49. (matching Sole's 49) I type nearly 100wpm, once clocked at 98wpm on a 5 minute test, and 85wpm on a manual typewriter.

50. I still have the blanket I was brought home in from the hospital.

Whew! I didn't...think...I could come up with that many things. Are they interesting? Hmm.
Well, YOU try to do it. There. The gauntlet has been thrown down.

Current Mood

2007-07-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

I find it really ground-breaking that MySpace has given us the power to choose our mood in the new status section. Whether you choose happy or sad, that must be what you want to feel, isn't it? It's alarmingly convenient and effective.

With a couple of very quiet days at work around me like an ocean around a small island, I started doing some maintenance and found myself missing old friends when I ran across their emails.

C: All of your old friends?

S: No, not really.

C: Not the recent ones you broke off contact with?

S: I didn't ceremoniously break contact, Christy. It's nothing as big as that.

C: Do you talk to them any more?

S: No, not really.

C: Are you making any effort?

S: Friendships shouldn't be a lot of work, should they?

C: What I'm getting at is -

S: I was beginning to wonder.

C: What I'm getting at is this. You were trying to re-establish one friendship, another was a daily thing, another hit one snag and -

S: And what? How long is this list? Should I keep every habit in my life whether it's working or not?

C: Meaning?

S: Do I drink soda any more?

C: No.

S: I stopped drinking it for my health. I also eat a lot better. As I get older, I'm beginning to see the difference between just seeing myself in context with the things that make up my life, and having the option to stop doing things that don't work for me. Other people around me more or less believe the same thing, only they try to change the existing things...and people around them to suit their needs and ideas.

C: Damn.

S: What?

C: For some reason, that got all complicated. I thought it was going to be an easier explanation.

S: Okay, umm...maybe it felt more complicated to you because I'm writing both sides of this conversation. Would it have been easier if I just said, "I've had it and don't want to deal any more?"

C: No, that feels...unsatisfying and out of character.

S: Well, I choose to be happy, and that means making some tough choices.

C: So that's it? The very second someone does something wrong you're going to bail and dump them?

S: No! That's kind of harsh and blunt. Look, I love the imperfect perfection of the whole world around me, and...oh, I feel I need to say this: I'm flawed. I do and say the wrong things sometimes and have been lucky to find a few people who forgive me, and know how to share that blame and forgiveness when it's called for. I just...think that...sometimes things work and sometimes they don't.

C: Kind of like a key, right?

S: Maybe not that exclusive, but yeah, kind of like that.

C: I'm a little worried, though.

S: About what?

C: You could shut yourself off completely and go crazy.

S: Sometimes I need to, though. Sometimes I need to climb a mountain without reaching for a hand up.

C: Or dead weight, or the knowledge that anone got up before you did.

S: (pause) Sort of, yeah. (pause) But there are some people I will never shut out completely.

C: Who?

S: They know.

C: Aren't you overthinking this whole thing?

S: Aren't you the one who brought it up?

C: Yeah. One more question. What if you make a mistake?

S: Mistakes...is there such a thing when one doesn't believe in regret? Little things between friends can be healed and mended, but the bigger decisions...well, they are what they are, aren't they?

We're all imperfect, and everything is so temporary. Sometimes we come across puzzling people we're fascinated with until the mystery (ha - I almost wrote misery) either unravels or enfuriates us. Sometimes we just come across people who keep us company for part of the journey. It's easy to accept things the way they are until years pass by and you're standing in the same spot you were, dreaming of change. What I'm looking at is the bottom line, and how the things in my life add up to that. It means not being afraid to change the pieces out and try new ones. It means letting go of things that have been comfortable and familiar.

Sometimes it means whispering a little goodbye and not trying to take everything with you.

I clicked on happiness.

Some Assembly Required

2007-06-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

I have been waking up lately in a cloud of the most subdued, passive anger. Actually, it's a peaceful, friendly, loving anger that feels ominously like the opposite of a hug. It comes with an ounce of vindication - I'm not crazy for feeling the way I do - and pounds of awareness and knowledge. Still, I control my reactions, stand back patiently, and make many small disconnected efforts to understand.

This has been the persistent soundtrack since I've returned from the jungles of Mexico. Los Angeles has proven to be the unsolvable puzzle, where everyone is mostly preoccupied with themselves and words are used to negotiate rather than communicate. It might be like this in other cities, but this is where I live, where I was born and grew up. The truth seems to be that most people are completely blind to the ripple effect, and people grow so restless in this dense city that many feel they have to get out or go insane. I've seen it time and time again; I even funded one friend's escape to Chicago...or Boston...no, I think it was Kansas City. Honestly, I can't remember which. They all got out of the maze, gained perspective, and found a spot to look back and reconnect on some level.

The obvious direction for this train of thought is to say that they quit, made some kind of mistake, maybe showed weakness at a deep level in their conscience. That would be inaccurate, and besides, I can't make that judgement. All of our lives unfold in unique ways that play out our fears and strengths in a neverending series of tests that either repeat themselves or increase in difficulty. We all have the one thing in common with L.A., though: We see the maze, the puzzle, the huge contradicting mosh pit, and we have all said at one point or another, "Get me the hell out of here!"

I know a lot of selfish people here. I blame them sometimes for the absence of home, the lack of support or unconditional love. These people use me as a resource, they remind me how lucky I am to be in their orbit, and all too often they say the right things but don't believe them, or so their actions would lead me to believe. They make promises that are open to the back door of lame excuses, and often observe and suggest that I should be more understanding, easier to appease, perhaps a little less analytical of behaviour that would otherwise hold them accountable for their flakiness. Denial is a hot commodity, a fashionable choice that keeps the sport of evasion and opportunism alive. It is all about feeling good and making things easier to digest, and never, ever having to take responsibility for anything.

That is why I am not leaving Los Angeles, dirty and mindless as it is. I'm not going to let my birthplace kick my ass. I will not allow the place that broke my heart and offered me equal portions of failure and success - absolute blue furry bliss versus sharp serrated moments of blood red desperation - take me apart and send me packing to a place I have no relationship with. I know that if I leave, most of my problems will travel with me at this point, and the pieces to my puzzle would be left behind lingering in the smog and freeway traffic. I own this. This is the riddle of my life. I don't want to ever look back and say "What was that all about?" and be too far to put things together. I will occasionally step outside and get a view of it all before diving back in, but I'm going to stick it out and tame this cloud of indifference.
My family has always put together difficult jigsaw puzzles every year during the holidays. We've done the double-sided, the story-telling mystery ones, the 3-D puzzles. We have never left a single one unfinished. I may, in this case, abandon pieces that don't belong, but believe me, I'm not walking away from this one just because I'm angry.

This one belongs to me.

The Sun and Moon

2007-06-03T22:17:00.000-07:00

Far removed from the usual writing spots, I'm writing this in the Shakespeare Library, deep within the cruise ship Inspiration, currently moving across a quiet and dark Gulf of Mexico returning to Tampa from Cozumel, Mexico. For the past few days, my sister and I have not endured any obligations, schedules, or expectations. We've eaten when we wanted to, did what we wanted to, and brought not a single breath of work or anxiety with us. The only traffic we've encountered was at the jacuzzi next to the salt water pool at the back of the ship.

Ironically, the symbolism of the whole trip fell right in line with familiarity for me; On the way to and from Mexico, I've seen beautiful sunsets (which incidentally, look much better reflected on water than they do framed by rush hour traffic in my dirty rear view mirror) and the almost impossibly beautiful moon, which embraced the water and ranged in color from orange as it rose in the sky to stark white. My temporary home, as I mentioned before, is called the Inspiration, and all of the decorations have had something to do with the arts. In Mexico, I've seen a culture obsessed with the sun and have done my share of worshipping during the whole trip. I've wandered through Mayan ruins dedicated to the goddess of the island where specialities are fertility (love) and prosperity (money). I even made an offering, a coin in a small pile of others despite the fact that "In God We Trust" is written on them.

In all of these locales, though, I moved in the stillness of the world around me. I was in the ocean, the jungle, the stars above in a dense, black sky. I was at the center of my universe, and I wondered which symbol captured me the best: Am I the sun, opening my effect and my attention to the whole world around me, or am I the moon, perpetually hiding in all the ways I've written before, always keeping a dark side reserved? Well, it wasn't a very difficult question. Nani said it once: I am the sun. Try as I can, I give off light and heat, I illuminate and clarify, and until the end of time, I chase the moon, always finding her in a sky that doesn't suit her.

And so I return to the race. I will immediately lose that sensation of moving without effort, the vision of waves moving silently past. I'll immediately lose myself, sitting once again in a huge box of lights and meeting rooms, a ship that goes nowhere with a captain who travels alone and incites competition and a fight for survival among his peers. With the theater a bit off in the distance, how will I recognize myself? How will I find the center of my universe?

I will look for old friends. The sun will look down for the son, painting the sky and reaching out to encourage and comfort. The moon will always give me a place of surrender, peeking out from behind buildings and through the lingering smog, reminding me of the ocean without a visible horizon, that despite all of the obstacles, she and I are continuing our dance.

I'm going to give this place another try, and then I'll look for change. When I rediscover and reaffirm who I am, the things and people who define me as I'm not lose a little color and gravity. In only a few more hours (we disembark tomorrow morning), I'll insert myself back in a little changed. The old world will need some adjusting.

Previously, on LOST in LA

2007-05-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

One year ago, I was sitting on a bus dreaming of taking a real vacation. I looked out at the people on the street, wondering why I wasn't in my car singing to the soundtrack of RENT, calling family or friends on the way to who knows where. I was sitting in someone else's space, not quite relaxed, subliminally unsatisfied and just going along hoping that things could change by themselves. While some things haven't changed, I am in a different space right now.

A week ago, I wrote the following unfinished sliver of thought:

Friday, May 11th, 2007, 11:18am
As I sit here between two buildings and about 2,000 people working under oppressive fluorescent lights, I wonder why I'm the only one sitting out here. Maybe it was the spreadsheet that had me going cross-eyed. Maybe it's the glimpse of the outside world from the edge of my cubicle. Maybe it's simply that perpetual ache in my heart that constantly wants, searches, needs something real.
Ahh, there it is. That's what is happening just underneath the surface, the surprising and recurring theme that defines my perpetual sadness. It doesn't mean that I'm never happy; I'm just defining one note in the symphony that is always there. It's my soundtrack.

Yup, you saw it correctly. That's how my handwriting translates through typing when I write at the office. It's Courier New from a world that forgets about people until they become a problem.

So I still flow like water around everything and hardly stay still, and when I get my head screwed on straight before I go to bed, I wake up the following morning completely disinterested in the past. This is especially easy when I've exhaled a whole week like this one, watching it slip by because it was dominated by work and automation. I am not sitting on a bus; I'm going my own way, and that includes a vacation to the Yucatan peninsula in 13 days. I sang all the way home from work (and the gym) today, and I'm not so concerned at this point with whom is along for the ride. Everybody in this city seems to be tumbling in their own bubble, and the whole thing from a distance must look like a huge carbonated novelty aquarium.

13 days, and I'm on my own schedule, sitting on a cruise ship with my sister and turning my gaze from the rear view mirror towards the Mayan ruins poking over the tree line. I'm going to clear my mind, relax my body, and open my eyes to the new direction I have to take when I return. Once again, it's time to turn over the topsoil and see what grows.

Sometimes, to find your way around, you have to get out and come back in.

Brainsqualling

2007-05-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

I have a writing exercise that helps me when all other thoughts of story structure or creative wandering lead me to a sad little stump in the road. I make lists. I do it to pass the time, I do it to avoid making a trip right to the center of what I'm feeling, so...wait...that's significant. What am I avoiding? (Sometimes the words come out so quickly I get surprised by things I write after I read them.)

Okay, maybe that has to simmer for a little bit. I...uhh...where was I? Oh, lists. Yes. I make lots of lists. Among the crazy, stupid things I make lists about, I occasionally use them to empty my mind when I'm in transition.

So I asked myself, can I name ten lessons that life is trying to teach me? This is what I came up with:

1) If you have to say something important, say it and then let it go

2) Second chances are overrated and third chances are just plain dumb

3) Sometimes people are truly unaware of their actions, and sometimes they're just unaware of the consequences. Most of the time, they're only focused on the benefits.

4) Apathy and indifference are in style right now, but they're the plastic cup of friendship; They're convenient, stackable, and completely disposable.

5) If you don't believe in compromise, you can either hold on to your principles or you can hold on to your friends, but not both at the same time.

6) Life is too short to settle for spending time doing things you don't like doing.

7) You can't blame people for wanting to use you for the things you CAN do instead of the things you WANT to do. That's their limitation, not yours, and you have an endless supply of the word "no" at your disposal.

8) People will fight for the freedom of stupidity, and they have a right to that. For example, George Bush was elected TWICE.

9) 99% of everyone out there will not care about the details you obsess about, so make them count for you.

10) Try as much as you can to get the world around you to conform to your rules, but know that people will not change. They'll twist and contort slightly to fit around you, but sooner or later they'll snap back to the person you should have seen and accepted in the first place.

11) Never limit yourself to ten.

12) If you reach for something or someone and you get denied or ignored, don't lose faith in the action. You are merely a key looking for a lock.

I suppose the real question at this point is whether or not these are too big for fortune cookies. Okay, this isn't quite like the other lists I've made, but this is all about brain maintenance.

Now what is that other current I very nearly tapped into?

2007-05-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

Every day I wake up in my own bed with the belief that there are very real people out there somewhere. I know it's true; I know a couple of people who are genuine, responsible, empathetic people. Why I don't spend more time with them is beyond me. Somehow I find myself trying to gain the trust of people who fall short of being completely open, people who can't participate in a human exchange of thoughts and feelings honestly and with great care. Okay, before I even get into this....

I acknowledge the fact that I'm extremely open and at times reactive, that I will call out behavior and say things at any given moment because they occur to me (that may be the training as an actor - it really transforms you). I have an almost unfiltered connection to my instincts yet at the same time I'm trying to figure out why I find myself in the ripple effect of people whose least favorite subject is any bad reflection of themselves. I think I'm trying to begin with accountability, the knowledge that I sometimes have unrealistic expectations of people who can't measure up to those precious few whom I can always count on. I make the decisions to care about and stand close to the wrong people. I did it for nearly twelve years with one person. I have to accept blame for that.

But I'm already involved. And I will be here again. When you train for years to be sensitive to behavior, to make the other actor on stage the most important thing in a moment, then you're going to spot false behavior like a bright orange jumpsuit. You'll see the shallow belief behind words as clear as bad singing. You'll begin to doubt before you believe, and then...as I've seen with people I've worked with in the past (not naming any names), you completely isolate yourself while you're in the business. That's the maddening life of an artist. It's no wonder why most people don't get too involved in the craft, and those who do can get lost so easily.
So who's real, and who's merely out for themselves? How are you supposed to react when you discover that someone you've invested in is not interested in your problems? In the past week, I've dealt with being interrupted, rejected, bombarded with small talk, and at the same time being told to stay cool and to simply enjoy the friendship when I'm obviously not being treated like a friend.

And here's the real bottom line; In the past week, my mother was admitted to the hospital via the emergency room and is still in a hospital bed without much more than guesses about what put her there in the first place. It's been nearly impossible to get a hold of a doctor, but tomorrow she may be two procedures away from being released. Hopefully. That's where my heart and my mind has been, and still, with that knowledge a few people have taken shots at me. I do believe that's worse than the indifference of others. People should know better, but they don't. The end result for yesterday was a total breakdown and the clouds of depression darkening the sky. It shouldn't have happened. After having gone through losing another friend to cancer, walking away from my theater company and finishing a production, the changes at work, and my mother, I shouldn't have had to go through the catharsis I did.

So it's time once again to toughen my skin and try to move past, to focus on the health of my family and to not take on the baggage of others as my responsibility. Yes, it hurts like hell when friends acknowledge I'm having trouble and abandon me, but when I step back, my priorities become a little more clear. My family comes first. I can always call them and - thank God - my mother is getting better and I'm going to commit to calling my parents a little more often. My very real friends who love me also need more of my attention, because they have proven themselves, even when we've had trouble in the past, that they won't leave me.

Most of all, because I need to be there for the most important people in my life, I can't lose faith in myself. I am who I am because I've chosen to be. I write. I play music. I am working hard for a creative life and trying to find a career that will fullfill that. Right now, I have a film festival, a play to direct this coming Saturday, and another play in the works. That's what I know I have. There may not be a relationship in there, nor is there a muse any more, but I do have purpose. Some people have exchanged that for a sense of belonging, but I think I've done okay for myself.
This was the sound of me hitting bottom. This is a frame of my deformed shape meeting an immovable object. Change comes next.

Say Goodbye

2007-04-27T19:45:00.001-07:00

It's been a strange few weeks. I actually started to write a couple of times, but well...you know how it happens in my world. If I can describe it in two lines or a paragraph because I've mostly said it before, I'll dump the gas tanks and ditch in the ocean.

The past two weeks have been all about the phrase "I wish I knew them better" which is, of course, always said as an afterthought. Such as we are in this high speed attention span world, we see and experience things and suddenly we're ready to click on the next thing. The very next thing. Watch me raise my hand. I can be guilty of this myself, but possibly less than the average person because I constantly look for something genuine, and then I write about it, or create it in stories. I'm an opportunist in that respect; I really tell those who are close to me what I'm thinking and feeling to a fault. This little self-indulgent collection of journal entries is a great example fo that. Whom do I write this for? Here's my secret: I don't consider this writing. I'm recording myself, preserving the moment in a medium that comes as easily as speaking. Whether I'm any good at it is up to the viewer. This is just what I do.

Here's another secret: Even though I do all this, I still find myself saying "I wish I knew them better."

A few weeks ago, I lose another friend to cancer. It came switfly in two emails; my former boss, much better known as my great friend Cathy, wrote to me to tell me that her husband Dave was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer towards the end of last year. I immediately remembered Maxine, I remembered Siony, I remembered the paradoxical unfairness and glory of Robert's last year, and then came Cathy's second email. Dave was undergoing chemo, beating the cancer little by little. In a cruel card up fate's sleeve, a blood vessel burst in Dave's lung and he bled to death. This stirs up so many conflicting emotions - anger at the deceptive patience of cancer, frustration over the growing belief that it is a death sentence, and the regret over not having spent more time with Cathy and Dave. We had dinner a few times when they lived here and I had a standing invitation to go visit them in Indiana. I just never made it out there. He had a dry sense of humor and was brilliant, but cancer doesn't discriminate. He was stolen from us.

And so we arrive at the final effects of the layoff my company began two months ago. I remember saying to a superior right before it happened that I didn't care if I was on the list, but I hoped they didn't take any of my close friends. The word came, and again, bad news came via email. My friend Nattie wrote an email to our little group and wanted to see us right away. She had two months left with our company, a deferred layoff, and now those two months have expired. Whether we spent those last months the best way we could have is irrelevant; I said everything that was on my mind and we had weeks filled with lunches and breaks and hundreds of text messages. The change was out of our hands and we all dealt with it the best we could, but...well, I can't exactly say that it's all over because we'll always be in touch, but things will be different.

So we find each other from day to day, we meet people we have something in common with and work our schedules so we can see them again. We connect and on rare occasions we say the right things to the right people and then suddenly time sits still. We think that things will always be the same. Think about that for a second. The things you count on from day to day could be there tomorrow, everything you know...every place you go...the people around you...but that just doesn't mean that you can take any given moment for granted. In hindsight you wish you had more of those opportunities, another chance to say the right thing.

What's left, but the love we have for the people in our past? Isn't it better spent on the people who are around us now? Yeah, I forget sometimes the short attention span of the average person nowadays. Most go through these shocking moments of reality and then click on the next thing, but I suppose the fact that I'm sitting here writing about it might put me in the exclusive minority. Or maybe not. There are a lot of blogs out there.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
~Kahlil Gibran

The Razor's Edge

2007-04-14T01:28:00.000-07:00

A completely blank canvas of a Saturday begins in reflection of past blogs, days spent in three worlds, and nothing but the future on my mind. Once again, the future is in the here and now. Before I do anything with myself for the day - for the weekend - I need to keep writing for my own salvation, proof that I walked this earth and met people along the way. The way to where is the real question.

I had two interviews this week at Warner Bros, two eye-opening and provocative experiences that really make me look hard at the definition I've worn for the past few years, and definitely the past five and a half months. Apparently, what I haven't exactly seen as clearly as others could is the fact that if you've attempted to put a title on me, it is still an underestimation. If you've attempted to define me, you still don't know the whole story. If you've needed me for one thing - and I'm talking business here - I am able to do six more things beyond that. I don't always see it because I'm modest and am always focused on helping people, but when I have to sit down and list my skills and then talk about them, I find myself wondering who that person is on the sheet.

And then the question comes: "Where do you see yourself in five years? In ten years?" I thought they were talking about what company, or a specific position, of which I only knew one thing; I wanted to work for Warner Bros for as long as they would have me. If I eventually become an independent, hired by them to make films, write TV shows, or someday even running the whole studio...well, then, all that is possible. The truth is, I've been building who I am for years and haven't followed a path. I'm on an artist's journey, and am constantly finding out about where I want to go. Is this safe, now that I'm turning 40? That ten year question puts me at 50, and it's difficult to think about my life at that point. Maybe I can answer this question better later on, but until then I need to write and fill my time away from work with the life, the pursuit of "Know thyself", which I picked up when I was about 15 and visiting the Oracle at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in Greece. Out of everything I did on that trip - I travelled throughout Italy, saw the Vatican, and stayed in a suite a few blocks away from the Acropolis - the Oracle held something special for me, an excursion I requested and oddly, when we got there, my parents and I were the only ones there. It was familiar, it was quiet, and shortly after that I started writing my journal. Know thyself. It's not a waste of time to explore that.

And so, I had a moment from my musical this morning, towards the end of the play, when I'm thinking about my past and following the advice that Andrea's character, Helen, gives to Jack: "Begin again." I pulled out my guitar, started playing songs I wrote, a few other songs I found chords to on the net, and then played the song from my musical that had me thinking about the people close to me, the people who own a very private piece of the best in me. I thought of calling someone new, someone I had been trying to reach for some time now but remains shrouded by clouds and trees, off in the distance. I called my friend Heather instead, and that is what I suppose this other person does, constantly returning to proven sources of love and understanding. Andrea, Heather, a handful of others...they're my foundation, and they will be there five years from now, ten years from now, when I am suddenly where I was headed all along.

It could be said that the best forms of advice come two words at a time. Know thyself. Begin again. Keep trying. When I can look back at a week or a single day and say, "that was a significant, important experience for me", then I know I'm putting the advice to good use.

There She Goes

2007-04-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I was inspired to include this, but tonight I found myself playing a song I wrote for someone a few weeks before she moved away. In this weird time of perpetual, slow transition, I think about those times when I was very present...and I had to write about it.

There She Goes

I see my friend is leaving

Gone already, she is

For whatever I knew has left me

Already

But where do I go from here?

I stand here, mixed and conflicted,

Wondering what it is that I did

Or didn't do

I ask my ocean for forgiveness

And there it sits, rolling.

Because I stopped walking,

Mesmerized,Inspired,

Feeling a whole sky of emotion,

Feeling more of myself than ever,

And all the while becoming obsolete.

So here I stand, ripping inside,

Dropping memories to the sand,

And I let go,

Saying goodbye to my friend yet again,

And there she is.

I see my friend leaving

Gone already, she was

As I remember her when she loved me.

(but no more)

And my heart drains itself of all its love,

To paint the best picture of her I know

In this moment,

And there she goes.

SubNova

2007-04-07T23:49:00.000-07:00

About fifteen years ago, maybe more, I was camping with a band of gypsies close to San Diego, just north of the Mexican border. Yes, you read that right, I was camping with a band of gypsies. My theater people at the time were an unusual bunch, and we went to the sanctioned event called the Baron's War, where people would use modified weapons - all padded swords, axes, and halberds - and stage mock battles in various scenarios. While the aggro warriors beat each other senseless, earning bruises and faking death, we gypsies were off in our own tent getting drunk and taking naps until night came. As soon as it got dark, three or four of the warriors girlfriends would come drink with us and they danced as we played our drums.

At some point in the late evening, I walked away from the big red tent and into a clearing to see the tent from afar and hear the absolute absence of city sounds. And then I looked up. Across the sky were more stars than I felt I could comprehend, an overwhelming feeling of insignificance beneath this complex and limitless canopy. I almost fell to my knees, it was so staggering, but I slowly started to breathe and take this in. The more my eyes focused, the more I started to get perplexed about the concentration of stars in the middle. It didn't seem real. A voice off to my right explained that this was the rest of the galaxy I was looking at. I couldn't see who it was, but that was a rare moment of clarity that definitely made me aware of the size of things. Me, my problems and struggles with daily life, my loves and losses, were all sitting on one invisible dot swirling around one mostly invisible point of light, in perspective. On this unique world, I place importance on the small things, and sometimes they take the focus from the big picture. I had the vision of the really big picture for one night only. One brief moment in time that I can't seem to forget.

Such is the girl whom I called my moon. Such is the friend who escaped L.A. by clicking her heels three times and moving back North. Such is the one major love of my life who checks in on me every couple of years from the uncomfortable seat of married life. They all appear and disappear, brief moments of exciting rediscovery and silent rejection that keep them up in the memory of my night sky. I say what I say to them with full knowledge that my honesty either means nothing to them or can be completely irrelevant, and will often be met by good intentions followed by silence.

That's where I pick myself up and keep moving. That's where I continue to encourage myself to keep believing. It's because that sky is still out there. That possibility of finding that connection with someone again is still there. Hope is still alive, and all this, the rejection, the disappearing acts, is really irrelevant in perspective. We are just sitting on one arm of our galaxy, and I am just one invisible dot on the map.

And the Wind Calls My Name

2007-03-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

I could have written in the hot spot, the very moment I sent my cast off to the wrap party, leaving me behind to sit in the theater alone. I could have written sometime during the foggy-headed weekend, something about milestones and never regretting the decisions we make in life. I could have, but I didn't. It took the wind a few days to clear my head and start shaking the trees outside to grab my attention. This is where I am. I'm listening to the howling sound of change.

Sometimes I give a list of random questions to friends I lunch with at work. Yesterday's set included the question: "What two things did you learn last weekend?" Number one for me was that 40 is old if you haven't done anything with your life (and in some respects, I haven't). The second revelation was that going into and coming out of anything, be it a career, relationship, or life-changing experience, you have to do your best to know who you are. In the end, you may be alone, on the ground covered in dirt and blood, and everyone might judge you for falling or looking unattractive, but if you know who you are and value that, then this is all you need. I repeat, this is all you need, this intimate knowledge of and belief in the best things you have to offer. You may be fortgotten, you may be ridiculed, but you know where you stand. This is where I am. I'm listening to the reaffirming sound of my own conscience.

I won't go down for being the nice guy.
I won't go down for holding on to my principles.
I won't allow myself any longer to interpret rejection as a fair evaluation.

If there's no love where I am, then I simply have to keep looking for it. I have to have faith that it is out there, maybe in another group of friends, another place of work, and on another stage. It's out there, and that's where I need to be.

Say/Do Masochism

2007-03-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

I'm going to break a major rule of my blog writing style, and I'm a little disappointed in myself, because I came up with a title for this entry that captures the idea but unfortunately uses key words I need to use in the body. If you haven't noticed already - and I'm betting you haven't - I have a rule about blogging that I do everything I can to maintain: I can't use any of the words from the title in the body of the blog. It was never like this with my journal because nobody ever read that, but this is a different medium. Nevertheless, rules were meant to be broken, but only once, or else the novelty wears thin.

The things people say and the things people do are in two different worlds. I've seen a lot of the two contrasting lately, and in the wake of after effect, I'm wondering what the words mean when the action betrays them. I wonder if people are just not aware of what it is they say, and beyond that, I wonder if I should place more importance on the things people don't say. Actually, my theater training tells me the truth: Place more importance on the things that people do or don't do.

I also have to trust my instincts. There are friends I have absolutely no doubt about, and I've been accused of a resistance to new things and new people, but that's why you establish close friends and everyone else is friendly. It doesn't mean that I love people less, and it doesn't mean that I lose a little faith in people. I just have to embrace this individuality I've practiced for so many years and...most importantly, I have to know myself. I can't take perpetul rejection from a few people to heart. To do so would be insanity, and especially now when I'm redefining so much in my life, I really need as much belief in myself as I can find. This is the project of Stewart 4.0 in the making, and there's more in the balance than you may be aware of.

There's an old saying...oh God, I might have mentioned it two three times before in this blog, so you might wonder who exactly I'm trying to convince...anyway, there's an old saying that goes, "We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are." Oh holy shit yes, there is truth in that. "What we are" is the part that's difficult to define, because it's not what we think we are, it's a matter of who people want us to be. A friend of mine recently reappeared and seems to be stuck in that hole. Another mysterious friend from my past wrestled with the question, defining it in her email address with the demand "need to be me". But who is "me"? Who am I?

Okay, I keep bringing up in various entries that idea of "we are what we do", but that's the fight. That's the struggle to leave the labels and definitions placed on us by other people and realize our potential. That's when you start looking for the people who love and accept you, and I've been on both sides of that. I've been very lucky to be the one theat some people have turned to when they needed to recenter themselves. Tonight, right after work, I reached out to two people - one of whom has always been unconditional with me and leaves me feeling great about myself, and the other has had a crappy answering machine for as long as I've known her. They have a piece of me intact, and suddenly the others...the ones who can't make up their minds....

Well, the things we say and the things we do are two completely different things. If they match, it's a unique convergence and the truth behind them go straight to the soul. You've given yourself sincerely to another person. That's where my weakness is. Since I practice this, it's easy for me to feel let down, a little bewildered, wondering what it was in any given moment that I did wrong, and why I fell short of a person's expectations. I see that blank stare from my boss sometimes and I know everything there is to know about how much longer I should stay at my job. I get blown off repeatedly by the friend who wants to keep the tight circle of friends together, and I scold myself for lowering my guard around her. I carefully navigate the changes with my theater home, always keeping my anxiety about it in mind, and I take shallow breaths of self-esteem to keep my eyes focused and my heart intact.

And what touched all of this off? The guilt of complacency. The idea that if I tried less, believed a little less in myself, and simply accepted where the people who are physically closest to me want me to be, scares me. It upsets me. I've always had a fear of mediocrity, of letting time slip by me unnoticed without anything to show for it. Many years ago I started letting go of the people and places that never knew me because I wanted to do more, I wanted to be more, I just wanted to have more fun with life. Today, an instant of being cut off in mid-sentence after being held at a repelling distance took me from strange wonder to a stinging cloud of rejection.

I can't let it get to me. I have to keep in mind all of the great things I want to do. Better than that, I have to remember the people who believe in me, the ones who extend themselves to knowing me. The tragedy would come from the acceptance of rejection, and that is something I'm not inclined to do. No, that's not the legacy I will live up to.

And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough, when I say what things are like
Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.
That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.
~ Bertolt Brecht
(a poem given to me by Christine Cavanaugh, one of the truest, most direct people I've ever known)

St. Hat Tricks Day

2007-03-18T01:50:00.000-07:00

I just stubbed my toe. Walking barefoot to the kitchen barefoot after having gotten home from the theater at about 12:30am, I accidentally kicked the edge of...oh, never mind. I'm in pain.

Okay, I'm over it now.

I just talked for a while with my lead actor after a decent performance of my play, and looking back at my history at Playhouse, I'm so glad that this was my last conversation with an actor in that theater. There has almost always been one actor who stays late, the one most eager to learn. Over the years it's been people like Vito (the absolute opposite of the word "lazy"), Suzy (the most talented actor I've ever worked with), and tonight it was Amalia, the person who goes beyond the word actor and achieves that definition that is beyond most actors' reach: she's an artist. That's everything I aspire to be, from my first conscious breath in the morning to the moment I close my eyes at night. It comes as no surprise that these three people are the ones whom I attribute my experience to, the ones who made everything worth the trip I've taken.

I guess this is about the magic number of three. At the beginning of this weekend, there were three performances left. When I was done (for the most part) as director tonight, I sent three of my actors home, or to a bar, or to wherever they were going on this holiday. I even had three crew members tonight. The real questions is, as I write on the third Saturday of the third month of the year, is this play the way I want to finish a career at Playhouse West? Is this the best I've ever done?

I have to say...that the answer lies with the audiences. I will never feel like it's the best thing, because I always want more. As my distant friend Iulia says, "more and more, always". I work my actors hard until closing night, and then I will, as I've learned how to do through repetition and experience, be satisfied with the outcome. It is what it was always meant to be.

I love the process. I love the moments of clarity, of pure bonding with artists and that understanding of what we're doing. Whether or not the audience gets it is kind of irrelevant. In this chapter of my life that's closing, I committed myself completely to the actor, to making sure that they are different on closing night than they were when I first saw them rehearse. I know I haven't reached all of them, but I worked my butt off through each and every performance. Back in my college days, I gave extensive notes to my two actors in a black box theater when I made my directing debut with "Two and Twenty". Tonight, with two performances left, I gave my final notes at Playhouse in a black box theater to two of my actors, and then one.

That actor is a musician an an artist. Those are three of my favorite words.

The Law of Proximity

2007-03-04T11:20:00.000-08:00

I have been trying, over the past week or so and especially last night, to write a new blog entry, and to do it in a way that's a little more than just narrative, a recap of what I ate for breakfast, what I ate for dinner, and what happened in between. Always, I ran out of steam, lost the next thought in a cloud of distraction, and whatever I wrote is immediately deleted. I've done that many times in my life, written pages of a script, short stories, songs, and deleted them without a second thought. I guess I've done the same thing with people. That, unfortunately, is a little too easy for me.

Sometimes the lyrics of a song haunt me and call me back to writing, which helps me cleanse my cluttered mind. Lately I've been hearing the following from the song "Crumbs", which I used for "The Shape of Things":

I can tell, by the way you're pushing crumbs around the table
You're not listening to me
And you say, that you have come as far as you are able
But you're not far from the tree
And you say, you're OK, but you live your life like it's over
And you say, you're OK, but you live your life like it's over

So I stop, many times a week, to look at the world around me and see the people who are near and far away. And there lies an idea I have about people whom you just can't connect with, and the people whom you do. It is those names, those faces, that can define us...that attempt to define us, but that's not right. The distance between us defines us.

I once wrote about a girl I knew for over a decade, a friend whom I used to write to nearly every day. She was the single most consistent and important friendship for years until she moved out here. Gradually, I started recognizing her less and less, and soon I realized that when she lived on another coast, she was still sharing the same space with me, living in that mailbox. When she moved to my town, her life existed in her zip code, and suddenly our friendship stopped being relevant. It didn't live inside the mailbox any more, the emails were saturated with appointments, schedules, dinners, inconvenient invitations, and the strange expectation that she could put forth less effort than writing email, because we were in the same city. The people who grew closer were the people who were physicallycloser. That's the way it always was.

Earlier this week, my company had what it calls a RIF (a Reduction in Force), laying off some 130 people, assassinating them from an odd family of people who have been driven to work and overwork for the past four years, stuck inside two buildings within a song from the packed Ventura freeway. While they were being informed that they were being let go, all of their access was being revoked. Most of them didn't get the chance to say goodbye, and I don't know who's better off, those of us who are staying or those who are going. We know each other, we've grown on each other because we are near. When the depth of friendship can be affected by a floor or two, the attention paid to distance is a greater thing.

In two weeks, I will be ending a 10 year relationship with my theater company with the final performance of "the Shape of Things". Aside from everything else I've written, I know that my relevance in a whole group of people will suddenly disappear, even darken in Playhouse's habit of slandering the people who leave. I keep getting assurances from those close to me that they wouldn't dare say a bitter word about me, but I know better. I'm making the jump into a void, into complete uncertainty, but I do know who will be in that void with me. The comfort of knowing the few people near me definitely outweighs the idea of not knowing everyone where I've been for the past few years.

The song finishes with:

And all the things you ever tried to tell me,
Somehow don't apply to you
You're the one evading hope, side-stepping every inkling
That the good guy, the early bird, the one who tries, the one who tries again wins

So despite the rejections from the girl, the company, the difficulties with career and direction in my life...I'm still in it. I pull in closer and focus on myself, keep myself strong and keep trying. Every last person might be off in their own zip code, but I will reach out to the people who have made an impression on me, and if they have no reaction to that or to me, then all I can do is keep moving. I can't be afraid to try again.

If I give up, stay in one place and everyone else keeps moving around me, my whole life will be a series of deleted pages. Hey, forget about this whole distance between people defining us. What defines us is what we do, and how we react to things. That is who we are.

The Memory Of

2007-02-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

"Take this sorrow to thy heart, and make it a part of thee, and it shall nourish thee till thou art strong again."
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I woke up this morning with a profound sadness. I have no idea where it comes from. I could attribute it to the legacy of depression that comes down to me from my family - two of my uncles on my father's side ended their lives abruptly - but that would be a copout. I don't have to own anyone else's depression. As much as it might be chemical, it is also my choice, just as it was my choice (and has been for 10 years) to go home after a play rather than hanging out with castmates at a bar. I usually come home, wind down, and begin to empty my mind through whatever means I can find: writing, playing guitar, sending out a few emails, maybe some Photoshop work. Whether I'm on stage or directing, doing a show takes a lot out of me, so I need to empty that before I go to bed or else that insomnia comes around again and I'm up all night thinking...feeling.

Wow...it sounds like I'm a big mess, doesn't it?

C: You think you're the only one who feels these things? A lot of people feel sad, they just don't write about it.

S: You think? I can't always tell what other people are feeling. I just see what they do....

C: So you label that and move on. Have you ever heard of the "benefit of the doubt"?

S: Yes, I have, smartass. Sometimes it's just easier to consider the worst case scenario and be nicely surprised.

C: Or maybe, Eeyore, it's easier to think that people, for the most part, have good intentions and when they do something wrong, they just might be human.

S: How did this turn into a conversation about other people letting me down?

C: How did you forget that this is a conversation between your conscious and subconscious? Do you think I don't know what's going on with you? (pause) Listen, I know that this is a big year of change ahead of you. I can feel the anxiety connected to that.

S: Damn, I keep forgetting I can't hide anything when I write these conversations between us.

C: I think you're leaving Playhouse for the right reasons. I think you're doing the right things for your career by starting to network your way towards Warner Bros.

S: Thank you.

C: But I also know what a leap of faith these things are. You're solid in both places right now.

S: It just can't keep going the way it's going.

C: Right.

S: And I can't become what I want to be by remaining what I am. What I do at Playhouse gets lost in the competitive atmosphere controlled by two people. What I do at work is rewarded and counted on, but it's so wrong. It's not what I'm meant to do.

C: So take that leap of faith. Change your life this year. Know that there will be mornings when you'll wake up a little sad -

S: I wrote that I had a profound sadness. Look at the top of this entry.

C: There will be mornings when you wake up a little sad, and that's just the aftermath of having done something you love doing the previous night knowing that it's going to end soon. You forget how great it is when you're not doing it, and you forget how much you're going to miss it when you're in the middle of it. This is about right for you, you know....

S: You think?

C: With every show you've ever done - I'm talking about beyond college - you're experiencing things a few weeks ahead of time. You know what that sadness of the final performance is going to be like. And then...what? What's beyond that? It's completely unknown.

S: Ohhhh that's scary. New school, new theater company, new roles.

C: But do you know what's great? You don't have any concept of failure with that. You don't see yourself returning to Playhouse to direct or produce -

S: That would be the failure.

C: So this bold move to walk away from ten years could be the thing that breaks life open for you. Think of all of the weekends you've spent there, the late nights rehearsing and all of the people you've worked with. You came to every cast having to prove yourself all over again because your reputation at that school has been smothered time and time again, but you did it and now you have all of this experience behind you.

S: I sacrificed a lot to get here.

C: And you're wondering if it was worth it.

S: Yeah.

C: You have one thing that many people don't have when it comes to the creative world, and that takes sacrifice.

S: What...? What do I have?

C: Instinct. You know how you react whenever something creative is broken down into structure, laying things out into a formula for everyone to follow? It's against everything artistic, isn't it?

S: Yeah, I guess I don't understand it.

C: That instinct will always be there for you. The sacrifice - while others have gotten married, had children, moved into big houses and indulged in their lives - helped refine the thing you love to do. The sadness in the morning is part of the artist that goes to bed at night. You don't put any of it on, it's part of your DNA now. DeoxyriboNucleicArtist.

S: Cute.

C: And before you begin to think about what it is you're not, and what you don't have in your life, show that depression the fact that you're sitting here working through this having a conversation in a virtual world.

Okay, so maybe that actually qualifies me for psychiatric help, but truthfully, I feel a little better now. When the credits start rolling, all it means is that this particular movie is over. There's always room for a new one, and if I'm standing alone at the end of the next one, all I can do is keep looking forward and try a new leap of faith.

"There is no future
There is no past
I live this moment as my last
There's only us
There's only this
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
No day but today"
~ Jonathan Larson

Creation Took Eight Days

2007-02-21T23:00:00.000-08:00

With the heaviness of that last entry, you might wonder what direction I'd have to go in to recover. The obvious answer is that I wrestled with the same question years ago. That's also a non-answer, bred out of avoidance and clever misdirection. The truthful answer is that the direction always changes. I had started writing a follow-up a few times, even considered deleting that story, but I can't. It's part of me. It explains a lot, I think.

So here I am, dealing with the issues of today: Work is a little difficult to maintain, my father is in the hospital recovering slowly from knee surgery, and of course, I'm watching the health of the rest of my family. Add all the change with my creative life, and that's more than enough to handle. Somewhere in the margin, my niece is finally getting her wish; She has collected enough friends to replace my family, and seems to be on her way North with her two sons, a distance that might still feel too close to any of the three families she seems to hate. Her philosophy is "Love me for what I am, not for what you want me to be", but that has to contractually involve the rule that she's not built like us. I remember someone who used to be in my life telling me that she's not "thoughtful and sensitive like you are. I can't be like you."

Yes, there are people who are not built like you, who can't appreciate what it is you're feeling at any given moment, nor are they interested in bridging that gap. They don't "get" you, they don't see the best in you, they don't, in the end, have anything in common with you beyond sharing the same space for a limited amount of time. I've said that I'm different many times in my own blog, so I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. I just tend to focus on the many people who will always be strangers to me rather than fully appreciating those precious few who actually fit in my world.

The direction at the moment is towards tomorrow, with a healthy balanced stand in the present. Who is with me? Who wishes I could be different, maybe someone I used to be? The sometimes unacceptable reality is that goldfish grow to the size of the bowl. My niece will leave and put us behind her. My sister will heal and grow without her and the boys. My parents will adjust to life as they get older. I, like them, can't ever go back to who I used to be, because I, too, have grown to the size of my bowl.

The people around me will just have to get used to that.

Naked History

2007-02-16T16:07:00.000-08:00

On a very special episode...of the blog: Things are explained and math is applied to abstraction. A brief retelling of the past explains the frustrating complication of the present, and whatever you do, you won't want to miss the final five lines. (This episode rated PG-13 for strong language.)

This is the story you don't know. You might understand human behavior, you might have met a hundred people who fit exactly the same description as me, but you don't know how I work. Some people may be predictable, there may be only about 700,000 words in the English language, but I utter one word and chances are good that I mean something different than the person next to me saying the same thing. I don't have all of the answers, but I am looking for them.

A little over a decade ago...holy shit...about a decade and a half ago, I fell in love. I found the singular answer to everything, the name and the face I wanted to see every single day of my life until the last sun set in my world and I slipped away to that perpetually moonlit sky. She was omnipresent, threading herself through every pore and every blood cell that went through my veins. In other words, it was absolutely crazy how important she was to me for the few years I knew her. She fit. I have to add at this point that I was a virgin before I met her - I didn't see any value in just wanting to get laid before or since - and as easy as it would be for you to assume that her role in that part of my life increased her importance to me, just wait before you snap a judgement.

I wanted to marry her, started talking about plans and knew in my bones that a life spent being a good husband and father from that point on would be the very thing I wanted. I was, at the same time, just starting to seriously study theatre acting and directing, so - Libra that I am - I started balancing. Her mind wasn't so made up. She wasn't exactly ready to settle down, nor was she convinced that I was the one. When I found out that she immediately wanted to be with someone else, I suddenly found myself on the floor of my bedroom on a New Year's Eve, seriously considering making it my last. I prayed with every cubic inch of my breath for a new answer to fill the void left by the old answer. Before I acted on anything, I had what my friend Eric Edwards called "a moment of clarity". I heard my family turning Dick Clark up in the living room and my thoughts switched to my annual tradition of dancing with my mom at the stroke of midnight. My soul was patched, my face was washed, and I went out to be with my family.

Sometime later, my answer once again rejected me for another, and I was suddenly staring at an empty bottle of sleeping pills, The doorbell rang, I answered, and two police officers stepped inside to check on me and offer me some sound advice. Something changed inside me. It was that instant of fear, the fear of letting down my parents, of suddenly falling into a downward spiral that I could not come back from. I had to face the friends who called because they were worried about me. I had to see her again.

Slowly things mended between her and I, but it was never the same. There were glimpses of hope, but late that year, the behavior returned and I found myself staring from the outside in again. What replaced the feelings of loss and fatality was fear. It was in that last conversation where I thought to myself, "Holy fuck, I can't keep doing this. I'm addicted, I'm hurt, and I'm lost, but I can't keep looking to her for an answer to who I am." It may have sounded like I was angry at the moment I told her I was done - she, by the way, laughed at that reaction - but I was scared to death. I knew a part of me was gone, and that I would have to completely rediscover myself. I hung up and did what I'm doing now. I pulled my notebook and started writing. When I was done with that, I had nothing but pieces around me and I wasn't wearing a single facade. I was starting at zero.

For the following three years or so, I didn't answer the phone. It wasn't just her. I didn't answer phone calls from anyone. I floated like a ghost to my college theater, left that place, went to another college to finish off my degree, and though I had sworn off of anything romantic, I got caught in TWO romantic triangles. Both ended with me running in the opposite direction as if I was on the downward slope of an avalanche. I left college without the degree and went to work.

What I couldn't deny was my love for acting and theater. I was a hard worker, too, sacrificing my creative life for the sake of the daily routine of working, going home, doing nothing, going to sleep early, and then repeating the same thing on the following day. As much as I denied that I ever wanted to go to that world of entertainment again, it was always right there. It was just outside my door, in my peripheral vision, in the back of my mind when I went to sleep, in all of the scribbles on the wall of my shower. They were snippets of stories, ideas for the next journal entry. Oh yeah, this very thing you're reading was my life support.

I enrolled at Playhouse West without any intention of being a working actor. I just needed to do it. I needed to study, to act, to read plays and see what it did for me. After only a short time, I was asked to work on productions, and that led to directing. That led to writing and producing. That led me to today, where I'm considering the next move of leaving Playhouse and starting up completely new somewhere else, ready to write, direct, and...teaching.

To this very moment, this very beat of writing this - oh Lord - very long story that I needed to write because I've never quite told the story, I still have that fear inside me. I still have a connection to that person on the floor with the knife and bottle of pills in front of him (wait - did I mention the knife?), like a string tied to a thumbtack and fixed to a moving point. I survived this long because I've always tried to stay singular of purpose, always conscious of being direct with the people I talk to, honest with my feelings, and not wasting my time being superfluous because with every wasted breath, I feel a little tug on that string. Sex clouded my judgement; I chose to be celibate and have kept it up since then without reservation. You might have wondered why I work so hard, sometimes coming home from a long day of work and immediately working on a project before I go to rehearsal. I'm running, my friend, filling my life with color and music, keeping every possible form of expression close to me and doing my best to reassure myself and everyone around me that it's great to be alive.

I am George Bailey running through Bedford Falls. I am the blip of the heart meter, pinging and giving signs of life. I can make a connection and then turn to the next thing because I've kept myself alive all these years. Whether people understand that I'm trying to be genuine and not throwing out words to be anything to anyone...well, that's on them. I only know how to give. I don't know how to ask. I have the life I never knew I wanted. How could I fault myself for that?

The girl resurfaces every few years or so, and I see her as the best friend I can never have. She's not the answer any more, even when I heard her voice again, because in the void she left behind, words, music, shapes and colors all fell in and became part of me. There are beautifully mismatched patches on my heart, and the scars left behind are all forgiven and drawn into the pattern of my experiences. Within the brief encounters I have with her - she always disappears suddenly, like my own little Brigadoon - I fall short of convincing her that my life is good. It is, simply, just me making the best of wherever I'm standing, with that hunger to live and keep moving towards the things and people who inspire me.

I'm not looking for the answer any more, because there are so many all around you, if you would only stop to take a look. The answer, as I've recently come to understand, is just being in the present, and suddenly I don't feel that tug on the string any more. This is how my life works, and I'm here to tell you that I love you, even though I don't know exactly who is reading this right now. You might be listening to your own soundtrack and none of this makes any sense to you, but the way I see it, I said what I came here to say.

I'm still alive.

But Not For Me

2007-02-14T18:30:00.001-08:00

Bubbles are fun little space to live in. They refract light, hold a little environment unto themselves, and when they burst, they shed little tears of joy everywhere and leave a perfect circle where they land. How many things do you know of that leave a perfect impression when they come to an end? I suppose that depends on your particular definition of the word "perfect". It might depend on your reaction to endings.

I don't know if this will make sense, but I crave those endings. I have an addiction, a longing for that lingering final look when your eyes drink in an image for the very last time. There are a few things I wish would never end or change, for the most part, but everything else seems to have a blinking expiration date on it. I think...this comes from the fact that I've had so little closure with important things in my past. There has perpetuall been so little awareness of this thing we share together that I carry with me a collection of things and memories I alone put value in. Everyone else does their own thing - work hard, go home, fall in love somewhere along the line - but I feel like I fly beyond the radar across a quiet, ever-changing landscape. I see what I see, go where I go, and I exist in this little bubble of the blogosphere like a comet cutting through the solar system, only occasionally changing course.

This might be a mild, slightly bitter helping of insanity. Of course, I can't define this as insanity, because...well, what am I basing it on? What's normal outside of my life that I can compare this to? This is normal for me. No, I think that insanity only comes with hour after hour of frustrating therapy, and I haven't even invited that into my life yet. Isn't this supposed to be therapeutic? Yes - reality check - I'm writing this for me to sort out things in my mind and heart. It's a selfish act of lacerating self-exposure, hopefully walking the line of brutal honesty and entertaining literature ("Ohhh thank God that's not my life.").

I actually started this entry in a California Pizza Kitchen, which I didn't think would be crowded, but there I was having a white pizza and a Sam Adams in the midst of a Valentines Day crowd completely at ease with my singularity. I wrote the following few lines in my directing comp book before diving into this, which I'm finishing at a Starbucks:

In a little diversion...art stops for life and life stops for art, both turning to mirror each other. The air I breathe is filtered through pen & keyboard, so I validate myself by stating "I feel, therefore I am, and if you think this isn't normal, don't look."

This is me attaching myself to the moment, refusing to go home where I have work awaiting away from the work that I run away from. This is me treating myself to the road less traveled, towards doing what I want to do rather than what is easy to do. This is me practicing detachment and independence from the world, as seen through the walls of a bubble. The light is refracted, the world distorted, and I wonder sometimes if this is exactly what it really is, and not just the way I see it. I have that gift, of taking these moments to stop and look, but still I wonder. What is it that other people do? Do they simply work hard, go home, and fall in love somewhere along the way, never asking why or how?

If I change my life and only work on what I love to do, what would fill the void? What would I leave behind, once it's all over? I hope I leave something close to the shape of a perfect circle.

Stepping Out of Line

2007-02-07T01:20:00.000-08:00

I learned something about myself today. Okay, wait...let me backtrack for one second and preface that by saying that I've always said this about myself, and have tried to manipulate this into being true, but...wait, actually, I started seeing this on Saturday but today this little habit suddenly flicked me on the head and said, "No, this is actually the way you are."

If I find out that someone is doing exactly the same thing I'm doing, within the same circle of influence - be it something they do with a person or just something that would merely duplicate an effort - I immediately turn off of that thing and focus my attention somewhere else. It's instantaneous, once I acknowledge the dupe, and then the previous thing (what was it?) doesn't really exist any more. Ewwww it's kind of an L.A. thing, I think. It's that living in the moment reality .

It's okay. No, it's okay. It's kind of funny, actually. I figured it out at work, in that aquarium of uncertainty where the population is unhappy at the moment as the budget cloud looms above, threatening to poke holes in the ground with layoff lightning. That's the perception, anyway. The sky has yet to begin falling. Nevertheless, I enjoy the little distractions, and the people sometimes indulge in quirkiness that I can only assume comes from living most of the week inside an 8x8 box. These people have their own rules, but just the same, you try to have unique relationships with the people you work with. It doesn't always work out that way.
People are different at work. It's actually time for me to affect a change in my work situation. Maybe I'm getting cabin fever at the old twin buildings over in Woodland Hills. I roam the building like a caged animal sometimes.

I am beginning to see a few people for their patterns, and one clicked in today, suddenly changing my instinctive behavior around her. It has been a kind of domino effect over the past week or so, brought on by what I can only describe as a white hot focus on my own survival and the things I absolutely have to do. It's a little fireball of prioritizing things, so I found that my mind tends to switch things off.

Mi vida loca. I don't settle, apparently. It's my fear of mediocrity wreaking havoc on the things I do. It's also my practice of noticing patterns in everything, so...is it really weird that I can make abrupt turns and focus my attention in a completely different direction? Maybe not. I just thought it was funny.

Okay, maybe this didn't merit a whole blog entry. I just felt like writing.

Other People Do

2007-02-05T19:41:00.000-08:00

I had written the perfect blog entry, the one that encapsulated the moment and mood, and in the end it pulled together all of the points and painted a simple lesson for me, colored in with a palette of perspective. It was a bite-sized blog economically written, complete with a bathroom break and a deceptive beginning, and then....

You know, sometimes as in life, you click on "submit" or "complete", or in this case you click on "preview & post", and you end up somewhere completely unexpected. "Preview & post" took me to a page of advertising. Going back one page took me to blankness. What was fed to the MySpace blogosphere as an intricate meal of ideas and feelings came out as a silly litle fart. Funny, how these little things remind me of the larger things I've done with my life. I especially go through this at work - all preparation and no fanfare - but the paycheck seems to make things easier.

Anyway, I started this entry in my notebook, the 5x8 ruled book, of which I have a large stack from over a decade and a half of journal writing. I could take that anywhere and often needed it with me as an escape. That's where writing scripts and poetry were born, the kind of lingering gaseous cloud that occasionally gives birth to a few starry ideas. This little book combined with frequent "Ctrl + A / Ctrl + C" keystrokes will hopefully prevent another lost entry. I couldn't recreate it; It was late at night and had spent myself writing it. It's time to move on. I guess that was one of the central themes to that lost entry. It's the whole moving on thing that I keep talking about, with constant reminders to live in the moment.

I opened a play last weekend, the last one I intend to fully produce and direct at Playhouse West. We had a standing ovation on opening night and a full house the following night. It felt right. If I'm going to work on a statement play, I want it to be received well, and I want people to see my actors loving what they do. All professionalism aside, I want people to hear what I'm saying as an artist, that apathy is unforgivable. I, like everyone else will tell you about themselves, like speaking my mind, and I try my best to word things as carefully as I can so that people know exactly what I'm saying. I've been called blunt. I've also been called tactful, but this is all good in everyday conversation. As an artist - and I almost hate using that term, but I wake up every day with the need to be creative - I see things that need to be commented on, or I feel stories that need to be told. That's why I could never walk away from this life. This is who I am.

Last night I found myself in front of a truly inspiring girl, a goddess with a magnetic smile, telling her exactly what I saw in her in the most poetic terms, without reservation or doubt. I had only one thing in mind, that I had to tell her who she was to me. I couldn't lose the opportunity. I know we live in a world that instigates comparison and fear. I know we work in an industry (entertainment) that constantly tells you that you're not good enough, or that we already have people like you. The people who succeed are either those who persevere or those who are the current flavor. Now, it would be too easy for me to say that I'm going to champion those who persevere, but that would be taking something away from what I do, and especially, from this girl. No, I will speak up because that's what I have to do with a gift of communication. If I can express ideas, if I can translate, then I simply have to say something.

First of all, my job as a director is to make a play common. I want everyone to recognize what's happening, to relate to what's happening in whatever medium I'm working in. A statement is pointless if I'm the only one who believes it. I have to make sure my actors understand what we're trying to say. I have to make sure that every aspect of what I create contributes to the idea. I'm not sloppy that way.

Okay, enough about the technical stuff.

The girl is amazing. She's sweet, smart, beautiful, and especially unique. She's talented, and there's something about her...that's completely enchanting. I equate her with that elusive idea of something romantic, as if she's always shot with that soft lens that blurs your vision slightly. I made a connection last night as the full moon rose above the roofline outside the theater before I went on stage last night. There it was, perfect and mysterious, rising above everything with a glow that makes it bright enough to make your eyes adjust, but still, you had to look. Every time I see the moon - I've always looked for it - it's hypnotic. So is the girl. When I see the moon, I'll think of her.

Have you ever seen someone like that? Open your eyes...and don't let the moment go by. I may have lost a journal entry, I may have created or worked on things in the past that only had meaning for me and nobody else, but the girl knew for at least a moment that someone was inspired by her, and loved her completely for it.

I don't know how other people go through life sticking to a schedule, filling the hours with work, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and distractions scattered throughout the weeks that slip by unnoticed. I don't know how people maintain. That's not me. I have a different way of doing things, and it has everything to do with recognizing the world around me. That's the life I've chosen.

Ahhh wait...select all...copy...now, preview and post.

The Christmas Miracle, Chapter Three

2007-01-19T21:59:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the lessons are in the out of focus periphery, the things that solve themselves without our intervention. Well, really, that's the lesson itself. We're not superheroes. Not every miracle is a thing that requires our full attention and involvement.

The miracle lies in the moment. This moment. No, not the moment ago when I started saying "The miracle lies in the moment...". It's not even in the moment when I wrote this thought. It's this...right now...with you reading this very word, you taking breath right now, your eyes blinking as you scan this very sentence. It's the instant we share when we have the power of choice, where we are at this point in our lives.

I walked through a cold theater tonight, not cold because of our strange weather lately, but cold in the impersonal, forgetful way. There were actors in there - not my actors. They were old friends, but somehow strangers now. They are the victims of a theater company built on the scraps of peoples' hopes and aspirations, a huge monster breathing in angst and greed and exhaling competition and short-sighted loyalties.

I go to work every day with the feeling that I'm always catching up, and I'm still sitting with the struggle of knowing the difference between co-workers and friends. I get mixed messages sometimes, but ultimately, what everyone is most concerned with is self-preservation. Some people place that on the success of the whole company and others have a tough enough time with their square putty-colored living space. One wonders if that's the reason why I roam the hallways talking to as many people as I can and our temp was let go today. We all have different needs.

What gets me through these places, these strange situations I find myself in with people, is that moment after. I keep refreshing my mind and my vision...I kept looking for that miracle and kept getting distracted. That's when I found it. It was the moment I blinked and looked at my good life, and the past began to blur. I remember the weird trip through the theater I spent 10 years in now, only because I'm writing about it. Once I click on Preview & Post, it's gone. I write about the work stuff because it's a part of my daily life, but before I even leave the parking lot at work, these days I'm thinking about the play I'm opening in one week.

The miracle is, I'm lucky. Because I keep myself busy, my life constantly reinvents itself and keeps turning the topsoil over. I have my reactions and see the undeniable behavior - that's my training - but at the same time I stay focused. That's why it was so hard to see the miracle during my Christmas in Miami. It kept happening over and over again, and in the end, when I found myself back in Los Angeles, the whole thing was like dream, a month spent in Miami over the course of two weeks. Would that be the miracle, that life outlasts the little problems that sometimes slow us down and make us stop being a part of living it?

For all these moments, the big questions I keep throwing out there and my need to write about it all, here we are, sharing this thought together, this very breath. That, my friend, is a miracle.

The Christmas Miracle, Chapter Two

2007-01-07T23:17:00.000-08:00

I should have known. Stories in every form are never told without conflict. A writer just doesn't write about everything going well, and beyond that, miracles can't be recognized without a contrasting background. Did I really expect to find a series of small micracles scattered across boredome like stars in a black sky? No, I think every true miracle must be earned. The little ones and the big ones. It's part of our brilliantly flawed system of thinking and feeling. If it's not told to us in a relevant and blunt tone inside of 20 seconds, we might miss the point....

So I never really stopped to write over the holidays. Truth to tell, I was having too much fun. Maybe that in itself is a miracle (how did I spend a month in Miami while only two weeks actually ticked away?), or maybe I just put myself in the right frame of mind from the very start. It was pretty close to perfect, to begin with: I spent the first three days in Walt Disney World with my sister having fun going on every ride and then suddenly diving off into REM sleep the very second we got to our room at the resort. After that, it was stress-free Christmas shopping done quickly with a lot of time to spend with my parents and my niece's boys. Of course, this is family I'm talking about here, so believe me, I was already thankful for the little miracle that most everyone was on good behavior.

I knew that going in. Reality isn't defined by me living in Miami, nor does it assume that everyone I was visiting was going to remain the way I saw them. For one thing, life in L.A. was such that I first thought of looking for the Christmas Miracle before I left here. Life constantly moves here, and I run into so many business-minded people that it's hard to know where you stand sometimes. It's hard to feel things in L.A., so you become aggressive about feeling positive rather than slowing down to be happy.

The other part of reality that we have to see is that once the holiday season is over, the rest of the family goes back to normal, too. I won't even get into that at this point, but some people, it seems, will never change.

So what we have right now is that contrast. We have the beginnings of a backdrop for a miracle, and regardless of the timing, the miracle is still on my Christmas list. Yeah, I got nearly everything else I wanted, but I've got my eyes open for the things to come.

The Christmas Miracle, Chapter One

2006-12-09T20:34:00.000-08:00

I am admittedly an agnostic about a great many things: I would not presume to know a lot of things, from the will of the person next to me to any higher reason behind orange/blue sunsets. I do believe that there are a lot of things we don't know, can't explain, and aren't expected to understand. We haven't quite figured out how to be consistently good to each other; Why would we complicate things by focusing on concepts beyond that?

I do my best to abandon a lot of prejudices and keep looking for truth, but sometimes that's hard because of how fast life is and how commitment is such the hot thing here in L.A.. There are a lot of people focusing on careers. Wait - scratch that - there are a lot of people focusing on themselves. I'm not so different from them. My schedule has been crazy and I've forgotten to stop and look. That brings me here, to this.

I'm taking it upon myself to look during these last few weeks of 2006. I want to find the little miracles I haven't slowed down to notice and appreciate, and beyond that, when I get to the threshhold of 2007, I want to look back and see if I can string them together for a little perspective. This is more than just listing things I appreciate, or counting my blessings. I'm looking for small miracles. Who knows? I may only be successful in finding blessings that together form one grand miracle.

Have I already started? Did I experience magic in the smile of a breathtakingly beautiful girl I recently did a play with? (I often make the mistake of not censoring myself around people, her included. Maybe the miracle there was being able to speak in her presence.) Am I following a path of small miracles as I roam the building at work talking with everyone and expanding the scope of my new job? Was the miracle of the past few weeks sitting next to 9 month old Luisa and feeling as if I was talking with an old friend?

I don't know. I already told you I'm a practicing agnostic. I'm a curious one, but I would never tell you that I know more about fate, faith, or the universe than you do. I just know at this point that I'm open to the very next moment. I know - and maybe this is testament to the truth being inside me from the start - that there's a good chance that just looking for miracles will allow them to happen.

This is the story of one Christmas Miracle. It's just chapter one, and tomorrow is a new day.

The Habit of Change

2006-11-25T09:51:00.000-08:00

It's time for a new entry. It would all too easy for a novel reader to look at that last entry and asume that I've been stuck on that beach, when the opposite is actually true. That entry was the emptying of the cup, the burning of feelings onto the nearest medium so that I could free my mind and heart up for the next thing...

...and the next thing came as it did years before with the same subject, the habit that has fueled healing within my life: more hard work. As always, the hard work pays off immediately, either as an affirmation of who I am and what I can do or just the distraction I need to be open to what's immediately going on around me. What's happened since then? I got a promotion and a nice raise, and I got involved and immediately overwhelmed with multiple creative projects at work on a company-wide scale that resulted in crazy recognition and mad overtime pay. I still have the play I'm directing and at each rehearsal my actors are reaching new plateaus that make me even more proud of who they were when they came to me and who they are as actors right now. Best of all, I'm dating now. I never quite made the time before, but you know, baby steps are important.

All this change aside, you know I'm the same person, just a little more involved, maybe a little more responsible because I have that much more to do. I still hear the voices from my past, I know I protect myself and still get those tingly spidey sense feelings when I go into certain situations. I still do things that have a huge potential of making me look like an idiot, but at the same time, I do them with the knowledge that other people won't even try. Yes, I'm becoming even better at taking in some things, discarding others, and not even giving the rest a second thought. It makes my load lighter.

In this crazy new world that keeps turning itself inside out and finds me constantly moving, I have an abundance of things to look forward to. Ohhh optimistic blog entries are boring to read and nowhere near as entertaining as the painful ones, but as I see it, the pieces define the whole. I have a pretty clear vision of where I stand now.

Where I'm going is another story...the habit will decide that.

Osmosis

2006-10-27T22:49:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to blog for a little while now, and I have pages and notes and...well, much unfinished business. Something happened recently, and - wait, let me retract that - a lot of things have been happening lately, and I think it's all good. It's the one thing that's a little confusing to me, so indulge me for a moment here. I'm putting myself out on the beach to ask the ocean a few questions.

The sea quietly hisses and churns, performing it's little chore on the sand, smoothing it out here and there but otherwise remaining quiet and reflective. Not knowing what to ask, I look down and pick up a little black rock.

C: Want to talk about it?

S: Okay, when I said sea, I meant sea and not "c".

C: Women are weird like that, aren't we? We hear what you say but understand what it is you really mean.

S: This is a beautiful little rock, isn't it?

C: Yeah it is...I like how it sparkles. Look at the little lines that go around it. Nature has the whole world for a canvas.

S: I know this rock.

C: What, intimately? Do you...want to be left alone to catch up? Wait - were you in a band together? A rock -

S: I know it. I recognize it. It's a little older than it used to be, but...it's beautiful. Those lines you like....

C: Yeah...

S: They're carved in there by experience, by being rolled around against things, into things. It doesn't look the way I remember it, but it's the same one. I know this little rock from all the others.

C: She's gone again, isn't she?

S: Yeah. It's almost as if I just imagined the conversation.

C: It's weird. I'm with you - I don't understand it.

S: It's because you're with me on this that you don't understand it. I think I'm...well, I keep saying I'm different, but I'm assuming it's true. This conversation is taking place, so right there you have an argument for....

C: And you know what I really don't get? It's always an abrupt departure, right in the middle of a conversation.

S: You're looking at it the wrong way. It's all one long conversation with three year gaps for every two topics of conversation. I thought that was obvious.

C: No, it's not.

S: It's a matter of perception. I think that after we talk about it here, I'll feel good enough to leave it alone for a while.

C: Do you know what your problem is? (pause) You have a great memory.

S: That's really interesting, Christy! Some people would say that's a good thing to have. How is having a good memory bad for things like wisdom and experience?

C: Tell me five things you remember about her.

S: Easy. Her favorite movie is Sound of Music. She loves Lucky Charms. The song that was playing the first night we kissed was "Space Oddity", by David Bowie. We once slow danced in a parking lot to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes". I once stood on a balcony with her overlooking Hollywood, and I heard her think "I love you".

C: How many times do you think about those things?

S: Every time I see the Sound of Music...whenever I see Lucky Charms in the store...every time I hear "Space Oddity". I just identify those things with her, though. Are you trying to say that I hold those memories too close to the surface?

C: I'm not saying anything, really...

S: I can tell you five things about anyone who has seriously influenced my life. I have a million things that I identify with people and experiences.

C: But there's one thing you don't have.

S: Don't pick up where she left off. It's not important.

C: I'm playing Devil's advocate here!

S: Look at this rock.

C: The one you know?

S: Look at it!

C: Okay! I'm looking at it.

S: This is what she wants me to do with her!

I throw it out into the ocean and it disappears in the night sky before it even has a chance to fall in.

S: Here's something you're not seeing. Out of all these rocks, I picked that one. I held it in my hand, admired it, and loved its beauty. We had a moment in time together because I was meant to pick that rock and it showed me its beautiful flaws.

C: You're sounding...idealistic, I think.

S: But I threw it out there, respecting her wishes and abandoning anything I wanted. I threw it out into the unknown, losing it to the ocean. Do you think it worries me?

C: Honestly, no.

S: Right - because I know that I'll keep walking, and I'll see things that remind me of it...the lines, the shape, the feeling in my hand. That's something...private...something I put away in a quiet place in my mind...and the most unusual thing happens.

C: What thing is that?

S: The ocean keeps bringing the rock back. It's not something I ask for, not even something I expect. It just happens.

C: ...and then in mid-conversation, she disappears. (pause) I know it's hard to place, or to understand...and I honestly don't think you're putting more importance on it than you should. This is just a part of who you are.

S: That's easy for you to say.

C: Well, you typed it.

S: Yeah. Well, on to the next thing. This is why I love being busy. It's time to go play again.

C: The play is the thing, isn't it?

The ocean cleans up after us, erasing our footsteps and leaving pristine, flat sand. I don't even need to turn around to see the rock rolling back onshore, but I always...

...I always feel her there, somewhere, with those brown eyes looking out at the ocean when I'm not there. Are both of us looking for answers neither of us can find? I think so. It's part of what my life is made of.

I'm a Frayed Knot

2006-09-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

The day is held in check. In the wake of a difficult stretch of time, I sit in pause taking a break from everything and watch the people go by. For a brief moment in time, I am merely using this wall as the saddle for the planet I'm riding. Sometimes you just have to go for the ride.

It's a strange equation, the additions and subtractions, the divisions in all of the ambiguous intentions of the people who parade by. What are they fighting for? Why can't they talk to one another? What would they say if they tried? Most people, I'm afraid, are just unprepared for the feelings they might discover. What would happen if...

...you really told people how you feel...
...you reached for the things you want rather than wait for them to come to you...
...you found the strength and clarity to stop doing things that harm you...
...you allowed one ray of light in...
...one sight to touch you...
...one leap of faith to fling you into the unknown?

What if? Can you afford to never find out?

Inner conflict is like a knotted rope. It's thick, tight, and heavy, and you have to untie it to see its simplicity. The very reason that it becomes so knotted is because the rope itself is a blend of many smaller parts, and yes, even in there you can find simplicity. We just see the whole knot for what it is, and most of the time, we accept the whole mess because we feel it defines us...but the opposite is actually true. The fact that we hold it defines us. We can ask the questions. We can unravel the mess and lighten our load. We just choose not to.

Last Sunday, I began the process of resigning as the managing director at Playhouse West. I am walking away from my home of ten years because I want to see what it is I'm meant to do next. I'm taking responsibility for myself and myself alone, and I'm putting a stop to the selfless support of other peoples ideas, projects where they intend on keeping full credit, and the act of filling in the cracks only because I'm able to. I'm making a push towards self-fulfillment, and that includes partnerships, unique situations where people will meet me halfway. That's where my creativity needs to live from here on.

My resignation was received with surprising understanding, healthy encouragement, and a pledge for Playhouse West to remain a part of my life. The offer was re-extended to teach, and endless support and resources when I'm ready to evolve into filmmaking.

Sometimes, in order to go where you want to go, you merely have to believe you are already there. Is it really that simple?

The Cycle of Rebirth

2006-09-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sitting outside still navigating the path of my heart, an old friend reappears in my mind, right when I'm trying to write but failing miserably:

C: What are you trying to do?

S: I'm...well, I had an answer for you, but I caught it. That was weird.

C: Want to know what I think?

S: Of course.

C: I think you're still trying to spin the experience. You want to recover a loss by creating something from it.

S: Maybe.

C: You can't force it, though. I feel like you're trying to force things right now.

S: I don't know about that. It's a little different. What you just said sounds...mental...cerebral....

C: Heady.

S: Yeah, I think that's better. There's stuff inside me right now and it almost feels like it needs to be cut out.

C: Or maybe...

S: What?

C: Have you considered the possibility that you don't feel anything about this latest change?

Pause. The fountain trickles and people silently exist in the distance.

S: Do you think...it's possible for me to feel nothing about it? I was debating with co-workers over our stupid advertising campaign yesterday. What do I really care about our ads? I think I was just choosing an obvious side for the sake of argument. I think I just feel too much sometimes.

C: Maybe you just feel...differently about this one thing than you expected to. I know you're very sensitive about transitions.

S: So how do I feel about this? You, as a direct connection about my subconscious, should know.

C: You know I hate it when you tag me like that. This works so much better when we can just talk without defining our roles in your brain.

S: Right. Sorry.

Pause. Thought.

C: You really want to know what I think?

S: Sure.

C: I think you're a searcher. Most artists are.

S: Meaning?

C: It would be too easy for me to say that you feel let down by people, especially people whom you're invested in. You tend to search for moments of truth, like looking for food with a specific flavor, and when you come across something surprisingly bland or predictable, it actually leaves a bitter taste in your mind. You're left wondering if it's an acquired taste or it just tastes like shit, after which you get frustrated with the honesty of the whole situation and whether or not you wasted your time. As you let that linger, you start searching for whatever you think is now missing as a result.

S: That's an interesting theory.

C: You asked....

S: It's a bit of a bohemian approach to relating to people, isn't it? I starve myself to filter out the things that are false? Is that how that works?

C: No, not at all. I think you're perfectly normal to sit out here and seek advice from an imaginary person.

S: That's convenient, how you can point this stuff out and I can't.

C: It's about context, my friend. So what do you do with all this now?

S: Just walk away. Rise above. Grow again.

People come into your lives because there is something in us that is ready for them at that time, ready for the lessons they have to teach us. Sometimes they're a test for the mistakes we've made in the past, and sometimes they're a warning about the future. Either way, each person is priceless, like the raindrops that reflect the world around us for the few seconds before they fall on our shoulders.

Just walk away. Rise above. Grow again.

Like Any Other Day

2006-09-11T21:19:00.000-07:00

I sat in the courtyard today, too distracted to read, staring at the reflection of my building in the twin adjacent to it, with my sunglasses on and my iPod isolating me from the people around me. I looked at the reflection, recognizing it, but thinking about things thousands of miles away. With thoughts the size and consistency of clouds hovering over me, I sat for fifteen minutes not really putting anything together. I just looked at images in my mind.

Of course, I did spend the whole day with a perpetual TV broadcast at my desk, the bells constantly tolling in my mind at ground zero. I was here, alone, when the attacks happened five years ago, and two months after that I lost my job with thousands of others in the massive layoffs that followed. I did a lot of writing and rehearsing in the year that followed, but the thing that came back to me today was the numbness of that whole period of time. I looked at the people at today, and I wonder if they've changed since that time. I wondered if they actually experienced more emotion when the company started laying off people in huge waves. Specifically, I'm talking about the people who say the same things every single day at pretty much the same time: "Howdy howdy" in the morning. "How are you?" repeated five or six times in mid-morning. "See you tomorrow / Have a good night" connected as one thought at 4:45pm. Are those the same people who want to put this particular anniversary behind them?

If there's one thing I can't stand, and this climbs under my skin like that little creature from "Alien", it's indifference. I'm not just talking about the big things, either. I'm talking about the little details, like the store clerk who feels largely ignored, the unlucky person who spills change or a stack of papers, even the person walking towards a door they're going to have difficulty opening on their own. These people slip through the cracks, and on a daily basis I see people complete a transaction, walk past a person in need, or glance back and allow the door to close anyway. I work with a few hundred people who, if they can't figure out how to do something, will walk away leaving something undone. They'll ask me to do something I can complete in front of them and watch me do heavy work without offering to help.

What happened to the people who suddenly awoke in September 2001? What happened to the community that stood up, lit candles, and had to console each other through months of flooding reality?

I think, maybe, people find comfort in the recurring pattern of indifference. It could be that people find safety in isolation. It could be true, that people are afraid to connect, afraid to make the commitment to a stranger, because life is unpredictable, and we're all so damned sensitive.

As I looked up at the reflection of the building behind me, I realized that yes, I've chosen to break off contact with some people in my life. Yes, I'm sitting there with music in my ears, hiding behind sunglasses while I sit in the shade. It's also very true that I'm learning not to make such a commitment to people I could know better, because in many ways I've been let down in the past. It's all so very unavoidable if you want to experience life...

...and today might be just another day to some people, but because I remember what it was like back then, I can consider myself pretty lucky that I'm still here to remember it. With all that in perspective, I shouldn't be afraid to try again.

Never Looking Back

2006-09-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the middle of multiple projects, some dominating the schedule, others taking a moment to breathe, and a couple more sitting to either side of me, with notes and tasks waiting for me...just waiting for attention like a hungry child. I'm ultra aware of all of them, and here I am, a full six months after I promised myself I wouldn't drive my schedule to an insane level of drowning in schizophrenia. I only had two shows to support and worry about in the last quarter of 2005. I now have four.

When this kind of thing happens - and if you know me well, you know that it's unavoidable - the urge to reach back to my past for support is distracting. The load I carry with me becomes an object of examination.

So I stop...for one weekend. I think about where I'm spending my energy. I think about how I'm spending my time. I take slow, deliberate steps towards things I have to do rather than things I'm expected to do. Where there's waste of effort on my part, I cut off excess. That resulted in breaking off contact with one person tonight, a decision that wouldn't be obvious if not for the deletion of one friend on MySpace. (When did this website become a social resume?) It becomes a measurement of who and what is part of my future, versus what only exists in my past. If you're a friend here, you're obviously not merely a part of my past.
Look around you. Who is real, and who is a ghost of your past? Who will exchange with you, and who has already moved on?

If this kind of sounds like a sequel to previous blog postings, or maybe a recurring theme, rest assured that this is one of the only side effects of chasing this manic creative life. It's a cycle of re-evaluation and awareness that can, on one hand, make me a little cold and blunt, but on the other hand, where I conserve energy, I give more of myself to the parts of my life that remain. It's hard to let go sometimes, but I find comfort in the fact that my life is full of change. As I just wrote in a play, the holes and cracks that sometimes form in my life will often be filled with surprising things. That cycle keeps moving forward, churning the ground after the harvest and always waiting for seeds to be planted and fresh roots to dig deep. I pull out the weeds, the dead plants, and I keep the soil fresh. I think that makes me an optimistic gardener.

To the people who truly exist in the present, I feel you here with me. You are a part of the safe feeling I create from, part of what makes me hungry to try something new. You help justify the life I've chosen, and in my constant re-evaluation, I never lose sight of you.

A Translation Through You

2006-09-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

I saw this in a friend's blog and feel compelled to share it. Actually, this friend has a lot to teach me about the creative process, but even more so, she's a validation of the support that artists have for one another.

This is an excerpt of a letter, a piece of advice from the great Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille.

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. you have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

No artist is pleased...there is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

The Do-ality of Man

2006-09-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, I made a choice to lead a certain kind of life with little actual knowledge of where it would lead me. I literally reacted to a life that was and ran into the closest door of opportunity I could find, distracted from failure and self-doubt by raw emotion and fear. I was at the back door of a failed relationship and a reputation that did a spectacular supernova in the wake of it. It took me three years to wander, to wade, to slowly shed a skin before I could start again. In July of 1996, I joined Playhouse West.

For the next ten years, I functioned without any knowledge of that alternate life, the one I had failed at and could have chosen to attempt again. Everyone does, but my fear was that everyone compromises somehow so that they wouldn't be alone, and I, on the other hand, would much rather resign myself to being alone and being comfortable with that. I hold all the cards. Nobody gambles with me. Everything I get, I earn. I work, I create, and when I'm done, I walk away.

Of course, there is that other side. There's that dark side of the moon that I never revisited. Well, no, that's not entirely true. I shared the moon on brief occasions (brief, when you look at the 13 years from the supernova that changed my programming). That dark side...or is it on the dark side that I live? That other side haunts me sometimes. I've noticed it more lately. Sure, I've mentioned eHarmony (which still scares the living shit out of me sometimes - I'm compatible with her? 29 dimensions my ass!), but that's more the product of good intentions from my family.

So enough about me.

It seems that whatever decision you make, when it's a bold one you always find a moment to wonder what your life would be like to swing back in the other direction. Or maybe you just wonder what it would be like to swing away from this particular place, to wander off the path you've been travelling for so long. I've said goodbye to so many friends at Playhouse and at work, some with a heartfelt goodbye and a kiss on the cheek, others with silence. It's those people who make you think about alternatives, about all the options you have and never exercise. There is a little death in a goodbye....

Somehow this is different. By "this", I'm talking about the departure of my conscience and greatest champion - Andrea - from Playhouse. I'm using the word departure prematurely, because what she's actually doing is trailblazing a path that others will follow, and...here's the difference...I'm going to follow her. I have walked through the Playhouse theaters many times with a lump in my throat, because I knew someday it would all come to an end. I haven't exactly given an indication that I would leave, or that I'd slow down my involvement, but at the same time, I haven't seen many reasons to stay. For now, I'm planning on straddling the boundary line. I'm not making this change because I'm disgruntled, or just for the loyalty I have for Andrea; This makes sense for the evolution of my artistic life. I can do more than I'm doing now. I should start moving towards places that will support me more than expect me to fulfill imaginary responsibilities.

Did that sound disgruntled? Can I flip it and make it sound gruntled?

So all this goes towards an indication that I'm restless again. I can foresee at least five more drafts of my adoption/foster play, then there's the production of "the Shape of Things", a one-act festival, and the return of the musical possibly hanging somewhere in the balance there. Next year...more productions, more self-imposed challenges will come, but I have a feeling that they might not be lost in the blur of other priorities this time.

I am, after all, always thinking of alternatives, about the things I can create or help create, with inspiration from the trailblazers and the people who I think chose the harder route of making relationships work on the way to creating a family. How my friends have made that work is beyond me. It's amazing. The life I chose for myself has a completely different set of rules.

Where the Heart Is

2006-08-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

There are many things that a study of acting will teach you, both good and bad. I wrote a play once - actually, a collection of ten plays - about all of the bad qualities that appear in an actor, and that includes forgetting the good ones. Among them were: Only being human and responsive in the temporary reality of a play, forgetting the simple joy of playing for want of business, and the jealousy between actors. I've seen a lot of the worst, most of which has thankfully been forgotten and packed away with old pictures, clothes, and ideas.

The art of acting, something I still believe in and promote with unyielding faith, is nothing short of miraculous to be around. I've been very fortunate, with all of my opportunities to direct and write; I love the actor and absolutely respect the honesty which they work towards. The earnest actor in our society shows the average person that no, they're not alone. Other people feel the same things, have been through the same experiences, and will, as Jane Martin once wrote, "lacerate self-exposure" to get closer to the truth of any given moment on stage or in front of the camera. It's a testament to the idea that we're all the same in many ways, that we understand basic concepts, and that our dedication to the piece is really a dedication to the viewer...to reach them...to tell a story. It's a charge to defend the truth - as serious as that sounds - but that's what the rehearsals are all about. It makes you think, doesn't it? The next time you see a play, think about this battle, whether or not the actors can demonstrate it on stage.

There is my love for actors. There is my love for the viewer. There's my love for the process. In the end, our part in a production changes us a little, alters the course of our lives, and it makes a unique connection to the moment between all of us. That's why it's so hard to walk away from productions that we get emotionally connected to. You know, as you approach the beginning of the next one, that it's going to affect you and change you in small ways, and that eventually you'll get to that closing night with a lump in your throat and many quick goodbyes. What follows is usually an unbearable silence, and then the next production picks you up. You still do it. There are more stories to tell.

It bodes well for me that the title for my latest play came to me in a lucid moment, and sat in me for a day before it became the title for the subject for this entry as well. As I feel this play begin to take its final shape, I have that emotional connection for having given birth to it. Even today, as I started explaining to a friend what it was about, I had to turn away for a moment and feign a quick distraction, and in that breath I knew I had given my heart to it. The question in the play is about defining "home" and where the people who mean the most to you truly live. It's not a place, it's not a phone number, it's not even email address. You can find that idea of home...right here, where I have my love for actors, for the process, for the story, my family, and the people who have influenced me the most in my life...

...and there lies the truth I defend, from the periods of chaos where everything is spinning around me to the quiet moments when I'm alone with my decisions and something to write with.

The Tragic Line of Cars

2006-08-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

If you were to ask me how I can describe Los Angeles, I think that tonight I'd give you an unexpected answer. Today, I thought of the perception of my city from my friends in different countries, and they're pretty much right in line with what people here think; This city has no soul. You look around at the forced and borrowed culture, at all of the traffic and especially the dark corners everywhere, and there's proof positive.

As I was walking through the supermarket today, seeing all of the other people like me with their iPods on, filling their lonely carts with food for one, and the very next track in my ears connected it all in the innocence of a song. This city's soul is concerned with housing people who have nowhere else to go.

The next time you're in traffic, look at the person next to you. Chances are, they're emotionally not in their cars and mentally miles away. They're in a rush, or they're resigned to the wait. They're thinking about what they have waiting at home, whether it's a house full of responsibilities that leave them no room to breathe, or maybe it's just a quiet home with a dormant answering machine, and ramen noodles in the cupboard.

Look at stolen moments when you think a whole group of people is having fun, there's always someone who looks away, puts themselves miles away, looking off in the distance to see if their heart is intact. Look at how nobody in line at Starbucks talks to each other, and how people in a movie theater will almost always put a seat between themselves and somebody they don't know.

You have to ask; Does it hurt to make a connection to another person in this city? I think it just might. There are enough people, if you just pay attention, who ache for someone to bridge the gap, but then once the connection is made, there's no knowledge or experience...no intuition...that tells them how to keep it alive. I think it hurts somehow, but beyond that, I believe that it's just more obvious in Los Angeles. If it only happened here, people would stop coming. The wound runs deeper and farther than the city goes.

People look for something familiar, something that validates who they are. If it's not immediate, there's an abandonment and a continuing search to match the wound in the heart to the shape of the next person. It's sad, but I think it's true, and there lies the soul of a city whose name has been shortened to two letters for convenience. The angels...the city of angels...has a wounded soul that breathes in the lonely shopping carts, the little bubbles of existence on the 101 freeway in the morning, and in quiet little blogs for the reader and writer to make a connection and feel, if only for a moment, that they're not alone.

Irrelevant Distances

2006-08-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

I weighed myself yesterday, in the middle of the day, and discovered to my surprise that I have lost ten pounds. A little later, I weighed my life and discovered I've lost a lot more. It's both amazing and heartbreaking how life changes sometimes. As you grow, you connect with people, and somewhere in their existence you see another clue to the definition of you. You understand yourself better in the reflection of a friend, a family member, someone you loved but somehow you feel differently about them now.

A friend of over a decade was altogether more recognizable thousands of miles away than she was in the same city. We tried to squint when we looked at each other, tried to see our old selves in context, but after a few years I realized we couldn't. The long goodbye I dreaded never came, and in one misunderstanding I didn't recognize her any more. We let go at the same time. I never saw her again.

I had the opposite problem with another friend (whom I found here on MySpace but haven't contacted). She sees me and immediately defines me with a past she doesn't want to be a part of. Who we were to each other is a huge smear, a blurry drawing of good intentions and love. She's completely different now, and the funny thing is that I never knew how bad she was back then, nor do I know how good she is now. I sort of knew the girl in the middle.
In a breath of unexpected change, another friend recently redefined himself, going from a familiar face to a shattered picture. He left a trail of debris behind him, and that, too, I'm afraid, will become an unbridgeable gap.

These are people in the long parade of souls who I find myself missing, wondering if they were healthy for me in the first place. Does this make my life lighter? Am I stronger with a dark, cloudy belief that everyone I know will soon become a stranger? I don't know. I just keep moving, and sometimes that results in creating space between me and people whose paths aren't quite parallel to mine.

It is pointless to wonder if they remember the reflection of themselves in me, or their affect on me and my life. I think...I've learned how to keep my eyes forward. I did just lose ten pounds, after all. I think it means that I'm carrying less baggage.

Conflicted

2006-07-31T21:32:00.000-07:00

Trying to manage a schizophrenic schedule is a manic dance of manipulation, constantly feeding the fire of creativity and somehow powering the passion to get past obstacles of self-doubt and the unexpected. Have I already mentioned why I write? Did I already threaten to quit this blog? Okay, forget it. I quit.

No, no...I write because I have to. I play music because it's another language I'm forced to speak. I work on plays because that's the world I can see clearly in. I write blogs...keep a journal...because it's my only chance to drill a hole and drain the mind. When I'm creative, I'm totally mindless. I guess everything else I do is a waiting game while thoughts and feelings cook and simmer...come out in colors or shapes...and the residue is what happens here. It's obsessive.

This play I'm writing right now is not only intimidating the hell out of me, it's also pulling me into the chaotic center of emotions it's naturally wrestling with. I've tried to explain this to my sister and my niece: I can't write secondary characters, or people with singular intentions and dimensions. Especially with a play like this, where the whole point is the involvement of everyone in the story, I have to map out where everyone stands and trust my emotional attachment to them. I have to embrace the hurt and confusion, and push through for the hope I'm going after. To be completely honest, I know what it can be and I know I'm the person to create it...but the difficulty lies in controlling the palette of feelings that can easily bleed through to real life.

Such is this demented world of imaginary circumstances, where I can't hide, or repress, or deflect. It's all there. If there's one thing I learned from working for the actress (who shall remain nameless for those who don't know), I have to lend myself to it, not give. There needs to be, after all, something to come back to when I'm done.

So I write because I have to. And I'll tell the story because it needs to be heard. I'll keep my commitments, and try to stay sane, and somewhere in the distance I'll have a moment to see what I've done.

(deep breath) Wish me luck. Light a candle. I'll see you on the other side.

SPF 500 in the SFV

2006-07-22T11:33:00.000-07:00

...and life moves past, especially when you take a moment to breathe and see who's been running with you, standing with you, quietly waiting for you to simply turn around to say "hi".
Hi. It's been weird. I've been good.

Truth to tell, I've been really good. It's funny; Last night I had a dream where I was in a tall hotel with no curtains on the windows, and outside there was a freak storm with high winds making some windows bow in and out, and the ground was repeatedly getting struck by lightning. When I went back to my room, I saw my reflection and was shocked to discover that I had long hair again. Not just long hair, mind you, but really long hair. I thought: "That's going to be hard to maintain." Somewhere off in the distance I could hear my computer calling, and I went to respond, knowing that distances mean nothing on the Internet...or in dreams....

That's when I woke up to encounter an apartment slowly baking in the sun like an adobe oven. Immediately, my thoughts were six thousand miles away, two thousand miles away, and ground zero. There I watch - in my waking dream - a girl seeking love and family, a family battling storms but waiting for a hurricane that may never come, and a whole city of individuals moving past, especially when you take a moment to breathe...and watch...and consider them.

Is it possible to miss people whom I've never met? Do people who have moved on still help us? There are no answers. There is only work to do, things to learn, and new people to meet. It is all about evolution, about constantly moving past the scenery, admiring it all along, and when you see someone stopping to catch their breath, know that they are learning something from your movement and direction.

Here's to considering them as well:
Happy birthday, Maxine

Safe journey, Robert

Godspeed, Bear

Blog in a Bottle

2006-07-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

I have a brief pause right now to write this - since they deemed at work that MySpace is not good for business - so I need to just get this down and then race off to work.

Well, if you know the freeway at this time of day...it's not actually racing. It's more like racing to the onramp and then parking my car on the freeway for the next hour. Yes, I should be taking the bus, but I digress.

There is so much going on right now. After just having finished the best film festival we've had in ten years (at least on the organizational side, even though half the crew were never around), I'm now standing on the hilltop of my next projects, and believe me, I'm not just talking about theatre any more. Yes, we're ramping up the rehearsals for "Shape of Things", but real life is now beginning to color the landscape.

Last night, as I sit in bed to catch up on notes for the adoption play I'm writing, I'm watching the shows I recorded and the play begins to happen. I can feel it forming, hurting in my stomach, with the loss, the confusion, the pain, and hope. I can feel it taking shape, and my obligation to it begins to grow. And then I get the email from my friend Michelle.

Years ago, when I was writing the musical, I was doing research on cancer and then I met Michelle. We knew each other before, but I caught her in a weak moment, and after spending a little time to listen to her, I found out that her brother had a severe case of colon cancer. Stage Four. We talked about what is being done medically, and then when we got past that, we talked about validating the existence of his life. She was determined to beat the cancer, and I, having just lost two friends to cancer at that time, was as supportive as I could be. We became very close friends while we worked together. The news came after she left that he had beat the cancer, and that was just...an unbelievable feeling. They had parties. I felt like we were beginning a brand new time, one in which we could finally fight it, and that if there was a chance for me to raise awareness, raise funds, now is especially the time to do it.

Last night, her email came after a long time of not hearing from her. On Monday night, the 17th of July, he lost the battle after two months of a resurgence, and I hated that cancer for fading and giving us hope again. The only great thing is that his life after beating it the first time was like a second life, when he got all the love and support that he would, in the end, need for his transition to wherever we go when we die. As much as I damn the cancer, I would love a second chance to reconnect with my family before I go.

In the end, he wins because of that second chance, and cancer can't reach him any more. It can't wither him away, it can't hurt him, it can't change the way he looks, making his family and friends suffer.

This Friday is Maxine Carnegie's birthday. She died of breast cancer shortly before I premiered my musical two years ago. I'm going to take her some flowers and ask her to watch over my friend's brother, and then I'm going to call my father and not talk about our argument a few weeks ago. It's been two weeks since I lost another friend to an auto accident, so I'm going to continue to validate my own life and not necessarily make work the main priority in my life. How will I be remembered if I only have a resume and a list of plays to leave behind?

That is the question. I'm an artist for very specific reasons, but the main reason has to be the celebration of life as we have it. There are so many distractions in this world, in this city, and it's hard to recognize where the fertile ground is. I'm going to try to pay attention, and give time to people who ask for it.

We are here for each other, not for ourselves. That's what I'm going to go on.

Scaling Back

2006-07-07T21:18:00.000-07:00

What a strange week.

I'm sitting here, leaning against commitments, ready to take on a weekend of creative work and relieved I have the past ten days or so behind me. I'm exercising the usual mind dump into this blog so I can use that extra space and energy to brainstorm, but for the sake of posterity....

I've been to the gym 3 times a week for two weeks now, levelling off exactly where I am right now at 195 pounds. My mission, through exercise and continued attention to the food I eat, will be to reach 175, which is crazy but not impossible. I can feel my body changing, but I can't see myself going to the extreme of holding a magnifying glass to the kinds of food I eat and when I eat them. I just want to make sure they're healthy for now. I'm not going to be fanatic, especially to the point where I preach to someone else that the food they're eating is bad for them. I don't get the heavily cheesed nachos and condiment violated fries I saw before the fireworks on the 4th of July, but that's their business...and their belt notchers...their blood pressure...you get the idea.

As for me, I'm happy about the fact that despite things that are completely out of my control, I've been able to weave past distractions and manage...I use that word carefully...manage my schedule. Of course, I have help. Oh, and of course, I have some good friends.

The end of this difficult, strangely shaped week, has come to this: a crossroad from where I can look at my three major projects in relation to all of the changes in my life. Wait! FOUR major projects. (pause for awareness) I don't know if I can really do any one of those things, but what I'm banking on is that I really have my doubts that I can't do any of them, so I believe - as always - that the odds are with me.

To think, all of this, this struggle and journey towards my future will in the end add up to fewer lines than any name in the Spoon River Anthology. That's why the journey matters. That's why the failures and mistakes always flake off and fall to the side for want of the gilded successes and triumphs. Whether or not anyone else can immediately see the world from my perspective is kind of moot; That's why I believe I'm an artist.

So enough about me. Where are you standing right now?

Transformations

2006-06-25T23:00:00.000-07:00

How long has it been since my last entry? What? Has it been that long? Certain habits surfaced and disrupted the pattern of self-awareness, but thank God...life always has a way of holding up a mirror when you least expect it. This time, it was one insensitive comment from a new friend.

You might know how private I am. I don't hang out with a lot of people, make lifelong friends at work any more (not since Kristin left), and when I go out, I usually love to do it alone. I also hardly ever - okay, ignore the picture to the left - allow myself to be photographed or filmed. So much for a career in acting. At the request of a friend, I forwarded a picture of myself while in Vegas a week ago. That's what she wanted. Just yesterday, in a public chat room, she said I was chubby.

Chubby. Chubby? Is that how everyone sees me? Is she the only one honest enough to say something like that? In response to my shock, she said that I shouldn't flatter myself. What? Or, as we like to say in chat, wtf? I was speechless. Maybe she was kidding...or maybe...ohhh shit.

And then guilt set in.

It's been a year since I had a membership to the gym. A few months ago, I was determined to start building one here at home, so I started looking into equipment. Then my boss chimed in and offered to give me her treadmill. I gave away a sofa chair, went through a massive spring cleaning project at my house, and made space. I bought dumbbells. I knew I was on the road back to health, especially once I had that treadmill. I changed my diet. I took elevators less. The treadmill never came. There's an empty spot in the second bedroom.

So my stagnation was fed by waiting for others to have a hand in my transformation, and in a difficult week punctuated by ignorance of people at work and coming off a sickness, this came from nowhere. The denoument was that stupid word - chubby.

In an instant, I popped over to my gym's website and renewed my membership. I called over there to see if I could come over right away. I spent two hours there bouncing from the comments, replaying their cruelty so I could build in the opposite direction. I came home after the gym, showered, then treated myself to a movie. Today, I was back at the gym, and then, while doing two of my largest loads of laundry, I went on a little photo safari.

The great thing is that I'm losing the ability to dwell, to crawl around in the mud of self-loathing. I'm recognizing the unhealthy nature of indulging in harsh criticism, and moving in the opposite direction. Does it bother me that this friend hurt my feelings? Sure. I sent her an email about it. But as I sit here, on a Sunday night before work and my meeting with Maria (a local new friend, whom I'm working on a project with), I feel pretty good about myself. I see potential. I think about my control over my own happiness.

It was a good day.

You know something else? I don't feel the need to celebrate Independence Day in a huge way any more. I always needed to celebrate it with huge fireworks because that was my anniversary with the one true love of my life, but the real truth is, it's been years since I've heard from her, it's been about that long since I last looked at a picture of her, and my heart, I think, has finally been healed by good people who have come and gone in my life. I don't need to distract myself on that holiday any more. I've got a clean slate. The mistakes of my distant and recent past are still with me, but I don't carry them. I hold no grudges and no ill feelings towards anyone.

Of course, it's still Sunday. Monday could be a completely different story.