Ice, Ice Baby

Hola, Chrysalis Cronies,
After my last post reflecting on change and why it can't just do its whole change business a little faster, I tried to send it into high gear myself. This is something I have a history of: being frozen, acting like that's a choice (worse, even saying it is) and suddenly trying to blast out of my own atmosphere in a little one-man pod on a mission to some new frontier. Blam! There goes five inches of my hair! Blaz! I really wanna be a travel show host! Blowie! I gotta quit my job! In like, eight months! Okay, that one's gonna be a process. But it's all proof positive, I guess, that I'm still trying to move under the ice.

Some of you know that one of the thought-amoebas I've been swimming around with under the ice is this notion of going back to school. I've been so busy trying to decide if it's a real idea that I've gone ahead and done absolutely nothing about it. As has happened before ('I'm gonna run in a race. On my 32nd birthday!'), a serendipitous moment involving Time Out got me off my mental ass. I saw an ad for a seminar on courses at NYU. The last of the series was on their writing program and I went.

Now, back to the ice for a moment. I've been thinking a lot about being frozen. Winter's a great time to think about that kind of shit. This glacier-thick sheet of ice I slip under and pretend is some important phase of development is self-imposed in every way. Duh. Moving on to the real revelation now...

I've been trying to figure out what it is. The ice. I think it symbolizes this big legitimacy issue I have. Are you asking yourself if you somehow wandered onto a Dr. Phil thread? I promise I'll avoid the pop-psycho language if you promise to stay with me.

When I walked into the seminar classroom in Cooper Square last Thursday my hands were shaking. I'd worked myself into a frenzy of anxiety about whether I should be there. See, I was wearing this sparkly shirt. I'd bought it before the holidays and hadn't found a proper occasion for it during all the mistletoe insanity. Still, it's somewhat fashionable and has its place with a pair of dark jeans. So I wore it that morning thinking I should be a bit fancy for the seminar. But it felt too disco-y, too lady of the evening, and I figured that out too late. When I stepped into the stark, fluorescent room to find a combo desk/chair, I swore I heard some sorta Sister Sledge or something playing underneath me. The point is, I didn't feel like a student. Which is ridiculous. I struggled the entire length of the seminar, shoulders up to my ears, feeling out of place--even in a room with several other adults who'd walked in late, carrying all their belongings in plastic grocery bags. Afterward I went to an advisor to ask a question and thought I felt his eyes widen and zone in on my shimmying shirt, instantly identifying me as illegitimate. 'Not a writer', he noted. 'A cocktail waitress.' Why do I do that? Freeze myself under the ice like that?

I had a great chat with a lovely person the other night. We agreed that this struggle for legitimacy might partially come from the duality of being an artist and simultaneously trying to make a living at a day job we don't connect with. For years I found myself apologizing for one entire aspect of my life, as if it wasn't the one that really sustained me: "well, I am an actor on the side", "well, occasionally, I may have to step out for an audition", "well, I do a bit of writing here and there." I've gotten so used to apologizing for what I love to do that it's become second nature to think I can't do it.

I'm really considering going back to school. But I'm gonna have to start thawing out. I can't go on believing my own bullshit about myself or I'm gonna turn into a fossil.

The Only Constant Is Change

When I started running four months ago there was no agenda. It was just a dare: "See if you can do this". I was slow and labored. But somehow the intensity of my feet pounding on the belt, the gasping for breath, the beading sweat gradually became an even pace. The drone became hypnosis. I did it: I adapted. I grew. At first, I simply wanted to be stronger. I wanted to feel faster, sleeker, more reliable; like the silky lines of a new car, hard and shiny and built for speed. But slowly, clawing to move the red decimals as they ascended on the treadmill screen in front of me, I moved forward and yes, eventually began to change in spirit and shape.

I just watched a magnificent PBS documentary, Savage Earth, about volcanoes--Mt. St. Helens specifically--and how they change their surrounding landscape in a fraction of an instant. But that's just the explosion part. The shift, the stupefying destruction and eventual overhaul of a spectacular bang is really the result of an agonizingly slow effort at growth. The split in the earth's crust where volcanoes form is visible, actually visible right now, in the shape of a giant chasm-like faultline somewhere in Iceland. It's separating Iceland from the rest of North America at a rate of one inch per year. It's taking forever, but it's expanding. That sounds more like the change I know: contract, swell, widen. Inch by inch. Slowly, slowly...slowly.

When I decided things had to change I thought it might be like a blitz. Lights out, head between knees, everything into sudden oblivion and then all quiet. I've got the all quiet part down pat. But there's a big faultline between deciding to change and changing. It's taking my version of millenia. I'm scared to leave my job. Not because it's a good job. Not because it makes me stronger or better in any way. I'm scared because I've been one dormant hill on a map for awhile and I'm not sure what I'll do if I become a glowing, ingnited volcano ready to crack and split and become something else.

Running's wonderful because change feels tangible with each forward step. Time is measured in seconds and minutes, not aeons. I need to see those little red decimal numbers ticking along to the beat of my stride. They remind me that I'm going somewhere. I'm closer to the exlposion than I think.

It'll be okay to contract, swell and break apart.

Who Am I Anyway?

God, I love that song from A Chorus Line: Who am I anyway/Am I my resume?/That is a picture of a person I don't know.

I've just wrapped up one of those office-heavy weeks that had me playing "phone-tag", commuting "off-peak" and performing any number of hyphenated professional cartwheels. On Wednesday I found myself in my fifth major identity crisis of the year when I received a solicitation, addressed to me personally, for a subscription to Office Professional magazine. Seriously. How general is that? It's not even as though it's a magazine for people who go to a certain kind of office. It's just for people who go to any office. Any Office Professional magazine. My left brain screamed "YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB!". My right brain screamed "THIS MEANS EVERYTHING. LITTLE PIECES OF YOU ARE SLIPPING INTO THE STRATOSPHERE AND YOU'RE BECOMING ANOTHER EMPTY BLUE SHIRT!"

I don't have a resume. I haven't had one, professional or creative, for many years. I've built my own work artistically, which means I've never really had to detail my every accomplishment for anyone on paper. And I've worked the same day job for seven years, so there hasn't been anything to update anyway. Yet, I've been thinking maybe it's time to put myself into black and white, get these last seven or eight years down into those tidy little resume paragraphs. Me, concise and easy to understand. But, shit. The resume. Professional or artistic, it's just a mere cinebyte of what I've done--fragments, flashes. I feel like a Picasso painting: abstract lines and skewed blocks of color trying to be a work of art.

So, if I'm not an office professional or a fading commuter, then who the hell am I? I'm thinking about all the "me"s I've been just this week...

Am I the woman on the cover of Scizophrenia Digest on the Scandanavian coffee table in my psychopharmacologist's office? Am I one of the detached, whimsical crazies who walk into her office in a fog and a baseball hat mid-morning on a Thursday?

Am I the woman I see in the reflection of the 5:30 a.m. Amtrak to Philly? Am I one of those commuter zombies staring back at me in the train window across the tracks? A single speck of beige and navy blue in one of two glass stacks on a steel train, surging forward.

Am I the woman thrashing about to Bulgarian dance music at midnight on a Friday, drunk on Astika and freedom and wanting it never to end?

Or am I the woman who just bought plane tickets to Honduras, mental bags already packed, about to embark on a new journey into the world of travel television? Producer, writer, traveler....am I her?

I've been all of these women just this week. I've been so hungry for direction, purpose; for some concrete identity for so long that I've felt panicked, desperate. I want to know who I'm going to be. Abstract painting? Empty shirt? Glossy magazine cover? Or can I just finally come down for a landing somewhere (urban jungle or Honduran jungle--I'll take either) and feel like myself?

The song goes on...

Dear 2007, See Ya, Wouldn't Wanna Be Ya

Happy new year, chrysalis comrades. So, I know it's customary to do the "year-end wrap-up" at, well...year's end. But the ride's just come to a full stop. I've only now pulled the tinsel from the soles of my shoes, reapplied my red lipstick and readied myself for daylight. Jesus. Year 2007: may it melt into memory without another murmur. I think the best way to reflect on just about anything is through a half-empty glass filled with something of at least 14.5% alcohol content. Champagne seems festive. Even now. Alright, here's how the 2007 mental smackdown's gonna go: in the gratitude tradition, I'm going to raise a glass of the golden and fizzy in its honor before I stub it out. I've long been paranoid enough to believe that proper gratitude keeps snarling years like 2007 from rearing their oozing, filthy heads again for at least six months. Barring that, champagne always works. What unemployment? What fiscal hardship? What self-doubt? What...the fuck was I saying?

With that, when I say "hey!", you say "salute!":

All hail Gogol Bordello's gypsy punk. I thank them for many sweaty hours, arms in air, fists clenched, inhaling the fleece coats of the self-conscious seventeen year olds in front me. Their raunchy, gawdy, life-affirming sound punished my ugly inner beasts and ran them out of town. "HEY!"

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Glory be the fiery red dust of the Grand Canyon's Hermit trail. I'll never completely understand why I go down carrying a forty pound load only to somehow leave enough of myself scattered about in the desert to walk out lighter. To me, it's the starkest version of paradise imaginable. "HEY!"

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I bow down to Gertrude Heiob Bland, my treasured grandmother. Even though she died just two days before 2007 dawned, her death became a wave I rode the crest of all year. Frankly, I probably learned more from watching her die than I did from watching her live. But she'd be okay with that. Life was pretty damn good to her. Dying was another story. "HEY!"

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Cheers to getting over myself and falling in love with Beirut and Devotchka. 2007 will be the last year I let too much buzz kill a band in my mind before I've listened because the hype-y, snipe-y music press loves 'em. I'm so into the feeling there are drunk, German ghosts in the room every time I listen. They're perfect. The bands and the ghosts. "HEY!"

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Cin, cin to a bit of feeling like an animal...in a good way. My annual backpacking trip into the great, looming lonliness of the Grand Canyon reminded me that I am in fact a beast. I can be faced with things that really fucking hurt, are at times totally demoralizing and seem without hope and still press on. When I came out of that hole in September I decided I wanted to feel that way more than just once a year. Suddenly, it occured to me to start running. I'm absolutely sure the metaphor wasn't lost on my subconscious. Four months later, the movement, the sense of going somewhere, the feeling that I'm built for more than apathy has created this clawing beast inside of me. That's the only caveat attached to finding out you're stronger than you knew: you have to do something about it. "HEY!"

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I suppose the real reason for an absolute Big Gulp of champagne is that this is the first year in my life I've risen on New Year's day with no resolutions. I resolved not to resolve. I just got up and walked into the day, as if, for once, it was actually unfolding moment to moment. I wasn't thinking about wanting to leave my job in March (which I do), I wasn't thinking about leaving for Honduras (which you'll know more about shortly), or fixing my ass, arms, or thighs (I just can't think about that shit anymore). I was thinking about what it's like to fold up a piece of aluminum foil and toss it into a fire: it's shiny and then it's crumpled and then it's consumed. When it's all over, the foil still exists but it's no longer shiny. It's covered in soot and blackened and sort of hiding under a pile of ash. That's you, 2007. You were shiny and then you weren't. And now you're at the bottom of a new, blazing fire that I can't wait to roast clean, white marshmallows over.

Here, here, 2008.