I (Don't) Have a Dream

Lately, I'm finding the treadmill and its running-to-nowhere metaphor a little too close to home.

For two weeks now I've stepped onto the belt, located Inside Edition, TMZ or another high-quality celebrity news show, increased the speed to my new target, dialed up On-the-Go playlist 10 (a choice blend of hardcore, classic rap, thrash metal and Brit rock) and attempted to hit the shit out of it. And every night, the same thing happens. About fifteen minutes in I decrease the speed and start walking. It happens before my mind even begins to waiver and the usual emotional walls pile up, brick on brick, burying me beneath them. Body trumps mind. Suddenly, I'm just walking. To nowhere.

I spent a lot of last week in a self-loathing stupor. After each workout I'd go a few rounds with my inner dominatrix and her humiliation stick, trying to figure out why I'm such an unaccomplished candy-ass. Emotional S & M always seems to work for me. After a bit of thrashing and trashing, I actually dug up a notion of value down there in the self-flaggelation swamp: I don't have any reason to run. Not really. Now, don't get me wrong, running feels good. In a bad way. And my secret Mistress Midnight loves that. Its payoff is so concrete -- the hurt to reward ratio a fine, exquisite line I'm constantly walking across on tiptoe. And for a time, its reliable drone and incessant pounding was good enough to keep me fighting the throb and ache. But I needed a carrot to chase. In November I found and trained for a race and that effort, the idea of finishing something in motion, became bigger than me. Seeing it loom there in distance made me want it in my hands to hold and feel the weight of and pocket forever. That image, the finish line, got me into running pants in the middle of a hoarde of healthy runners headed to the end.

I had a thing. A dream. I had a dream. Now I don't and I'm running to run. Well, really, I'm walking. And I'm not getting anywhere.

I think this might be what's happening in my off-the-belt life too. I haven't been able to figure out why I feel so plagued by sameness. There's plenty of change afoot but I can't shake the weight of routine. My mom asked me recently what my dream was. It feels cheeseball just writing a thing like that. But truthfully? I couldn't really answer with any authority. I told her I just wanted to eek out a living doing something I like, maybe raise a few kids and that's it.

What has happened that I don't have a dream? That's a disaster. Everyone wants to make a living doing something they like. That's not a dream. That's lowballing it because I a.) think I can't ask for more b.) don't think I'm up to it or c.) don't think it'll really happen so what's the fucking point? A dream is way bigger than making a living doing something I like. That's why it's called a dream instead of a potential outcome. A dream is what got me out of bed every day while I was washing dishes at Taco Bell in 1994. I saw New York City ablaze in my mind every minute of every day and I dreamed of being here. Hard.

I want to go one step further, though. I think it's important to posess a dream but a dream in and of itself is not enough. I think we should all be dreaming extravagantly. Otherwise, what's the incentive, really? Why fight for a potential outcome? Fights, like running, are only worth the throb and ache if the payoff is sensational. Even just the idea of extravagant dreaming teems with life and intensity. An extravagant dream is something you can adorn yourself with, touch and smell and hold like the estate jewel it is.

I'm not sure what my extravagant dream is yet because I've become too good at undoing dreams before they begin to float. But I'm sure when it starts to well up inside me it'll be ruby encrusted, fluid in organza and silk, shimmering like sunlight on rippling waves. Extravagant. And you can bet when I finally know it, I'll run my ass off to grab it.

Tiffany Blue Nail Polish Sparks Massive Internal Age Controversy

I hereby admit to an absurd nail polish color addiction. I love the milky, opaque Laffy Taffy purple on shelf 3 at the manicure salon. I'm insane for glinting, swirling green pearls and shimmering yellow liquid in square bottles. Gunmetal? Slap it on me. Black? Did it 20 years ago and did it again last year. 1985 Pontiac purple? A signature color. But blue? Blue's my weakness. If blue were a girl she'd be the one I smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey with in the backseats of cars after I dropped out of high school. That color's like a haze of everything dreamy, sexy and wistful to me and it screams rock and roll. So when I walked into a nail salon last night and spotted my crown jewel -- a bottle of genteel, sophisticated, starkly contemporary Tiffany blue polish awaiting my ragged square fingertips -- little tattoo swallows took flight above my head.

And there ends the fairytale. Even though the cosmo I sipped was delightful and my celebrity trash magazine appropriately devoid of humanity, I still ended up flat on my ass.

My nail technician raved about the color all through the pedicure. We shared fits of flighty laughter over its flirty hue. I let the therapeutic vibe carry me all the way to the manicure chair and then...she said it.

"Beautiful color. Younger girl." And there it was. Of course she meant for a younger girl. And naturally I did what I always do when people embarass me in public. I pretended she hadn't. I even took the time to craft a good humored reply: "I am a younger girl. In my heart." There I went again, overcompensating for my own discomfort by accomodating someone else's faux pas.

'And so,' I thought, 'here we are. I've arrived now at a time when people are going to talk about my age. In front of other people. Like it's something I'm fine with and everybody's in on. Like back in the day when everyone wanted to talk about my body as if we all shared the same fucking feelings about it.' I think I knew we were headed for this day last year when my boss reminded me that I'm just "not that young, you know." Or even four years ago when a dermatologist told me that "twenty eight is absolutely not too young for Botox."

So, I'm curious, do people say this kind of stuff to men? I mean, when my husband went to buy his skull and crossbones socks at H&M did the clerk say "funky cool socks, man...for a younger boy." Absolutely. Fucking. Not.

All the usual cliches have come surging forward. "You're only as old as you feel." "Age is just a number." And then I think of what my grandmother always said and I like it best: "growing old is not for sissies."

I really love the concept of aging with grace and a sense of humor. And I find that with each passing year I certainly grow into myself with greater ease. But I'll admit I'm shocked to find that I'm doing a fair bit more thrashing about than I expected to. I'm apparently not fine with a number of the things that accompany "getting on in years."

But let me be abundantly clear about one thing: that is not why I wear blue nail polish. For that matter, it's not why I wear red lipstick, red glasses, silver eyeshadow or an ever-changing array of hair colors. I'm not longing for my younger self or trying to capture a feeling I used to have. Nope. I wouldn't go back there. I wouldn't want the feelings I used to have ever again. My life is about now.

I'm looking at the color this afternoon thinking its a pretty righteous badge of the current me. It's not the angry blue black of my past or the hopeful, billowy blue my granddaughter might ask to borrow. It's just what I wear. Without apology. For the girl I was, the girl I am, and the girl I'll always be.

I'm in a New York State of Being/Honduras State of Mind

I remember a dream I had shortly before leaving for Honduras. I'd arrived in a desertscape version of Tegucigalpa with an empty backpack and no money. I'd instantly connected to the place, knowing I belonged there but feeling the sharp panic of having no resources. The dream seemed to have no end but was instead a sort of long personal narrative involving me searching the city for supplies. At the time I passed it off as an anxiety dream -- pre-trip preparedness paranoia. But now that I'm back in the land of Blackberrys and ballet flats, I see it for what is was: a dream about feeling spiritually broke; trying endlessly to draw on an empty emotional bank account.

I couldn't sleep the night we were departing. I was absolutely frantic imagining Tegus. It rose up in my mind, filthy, jagged, smelling of rubber and sweat and shrouded in industry smoke. I kept thinking to myself, 'This is the tradeoff. You have to suffer some to get the payoff. It has to be a little bit brutal and you have to be terrified or there won't be the afterlife of bus rides and beaches to transform you.' I guess I sort of realized in that tormented darkness that travel is about leaving a piece of yourself behind so that you can go out and fill that empty space with the richness of the world. I resolved to leave the terrified, emotionally bankrupt piece of me at home to go out and make a deposit of memory in its place.

I'm floating on top of my days now, not really in them but just slightly above them, my feet still (as my friend Kate says) in two places. I traded in my remaining Lempiras at the American Express office on Monday. Looking at the worn, crumpled pile of bills and their foreign president sitting in a stack on the clerk's desk, I felt the urge to cry. They seemed my last concrete connection to Honduras. As she sorted through each bill and placed them into an envelope I imagined my grip on little Eddie, our ten year old tour guide in Comayagua, and his angel wing eyelashes and fragile hands slowly dissolving.

I stared at the lifeless stack and thought of every bill as a snapshot: mountains of banana trees out the schoolbus window, bare feet and jungle vines, warm corn tortillas and Imperial beer on a picnic bench, the stone wink of a Mayan king, a hammock's imprint on sunburned shoulders, little hands and big cowboy hats, straw-colored dust and unpaved roads, backpacks, hundred degree afternoons shopping for jewelry, German Shepherd in the back of a pick-up, the cellophane sea, orange mud in a dripping green cloud forest, the camera's eye seeing something I missed, Mitch's dirty pant legs, Vicky's Mary Janes, and color, thriving, throbbing, living color everywhere. It's not a fair exchange: my American dollars for Lempiras, Lempiras for my experience in Honduras. Each of those worn bills is worth a million moments to me.

Honduras is rugged, gentle, hospitable, and raw. Travel there can feel isolating. Sometimes that's a feeling to be treasured and sometimes it's alienating. The country is extremely undeveloped and the environment lush but the cities are brutally urban. It's a place of enormous contrast. Still, the culture is clever and determined and we met wonderful people, Honduran and foreigners.

It's a country that got inside me, way down deep, and is now snaking its way through all my empty places and filling me with sound and scent and scenery.

We went and saw and captured our moments (22 plus hour's worth, to be exact) and Honduras captured us. I think it actually kept a piece too. That's the tradeoff, right? Leave half empty, go fill up, yes. But it's a bit like stealing if you don't leave some of you behind in return. I think I can speak for all of us when I say we'd be glad to go back and visit the Kate, Vicky and Mitch monument to Honduras anytime. Anytime.