Away Message

Greetings Chrysalis Crowd,
Here I sit, awaiting my beloved Hillary Clinton and her vote-for-him speech. It's late, I'm bleary-eyed, I've got backpacks and trekking poles in the corner, ready to get dusty in the desert on my back. I'm watching the "Sound on the Floor" meter on CNN's overburdened DNC coverage screen slide up and down with the rise and fall of the voices of this or that speaker. I'm gonna take Hillary and the pundits with me in my heart as I leave. Perhaps I'll finally be able to meditate on all that's at stake.

I'm headed to Eugene tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, where I'll celebrate the wedding of a dear old friend to a lovely woman. After the festivities, I'm on my way to the desert to hike the Grand Canyon, North Rim to South Rim, with a group of my favorite people in the world.

The canyon is my sanctuary. It's a cleansing place--a place of tremendous desolation and hope, humility, silence and grace. I go there to be quieted and beat down. The effort is a battle with absolute nothingness and total abundance all at once. Mostly, the silence of the space between the canyon walls is bigger than the sound of New York and it's bigger than me.

We finished the Off the Radar rough cut this week. Over five months watching every detail of that one astounding adventure flash across my view in HD has me full up. I need to empty my mental hard drive, compress some emotional files, make more space. The night we wrapped, I drove home feeling a tidal wave of despair approaching, ridiculously in tears over Pink Floyd's Breathe. It's taken days to figure out that creating this show has been a beautiful and necessary distraction for me and that without it, my devil's mind gets busy conspiring against my reasonable self. Me in Honduras--me anywhere else, for that matter, is me, boundless. Editing the show has been like having dinner with another self three nights a week. Talk about inferiority complex.

So, with that, I'm gonna go dive into the red dust and merge all my selves into one. I'm gonna get filthy, get blistered and burned and get right again.

Onward and upward,
Onekate

This Chrysalis Week

This is going to be a frivolous blog post but this was a frivolous, shit week. Frivolous. Shit. Well, except for getting within one paragraph and a single sequence of the end of the Off the Radar script and rough cut, which is a milestone that puts other milestones to shame. But besides that, did I say frivolous shit?

In honor of a week that actually had me in a pathetic, cliche pile of 9 to 5-style tears at my keyboard on Thursday night, I hereby relenquish the following dribble:

1.) I want Kim Kardashian's ass. On mine. Like, as an ass-transplant kind of scenario. Where hers goes over mine and I no longer have mine.

2.) "I'm ready for my bikini but at the same time I don't really focus on those things." Thank you, Emmy Rossum. Only people who are ready for their bikinis have the fuckin' nerve to say that they don't really focus on those things.

3.) I've officially been a Facebook member for a week now. I'll admit that I joined to look up my high school best friend, whose typed letter to me on my 17th birthday telling me she could no longer be my friend because I'd gotten too "funky" wrecked my world for at least a year. Naturally, she wasn't listed because she's now a fancy corporate lawyer in London (information courtesy of Google) and doesn't bother with things like Facebook, I'm sure. But in just a short week I've started feeling like I'm a lowly Facebook "add"--a number in certain people's social tickers, helping them achieve some abstract total that indicates they've got a network as wide as the Sargasso Sea. I'm a hole in a social belt-notch, a face with a button attached. Never mind that I've got a profile listing all my little interests, that I'm a fan of dogs, I like travel and really love old art-rock. That navy blue "add" button next to my name is all they're after--like little social Pac Men and Women, eating up add buttons for breakfast. It's all about the "add", isn't it? It's just another type of consumption. It's fine. I'm glad I joined just to hear about the lives of two great women I used to know. But someone told me it's a slippery slope. She couldn't have been more right. I'm currently skiing down a few too many of those, so I'm gonna go easy.

4.) I dreamed that I was fired by Hunter S. Thompson, who screamed at me for not sorting things into the correct types of piles. "You know I don't use computers!", he seethed. I remember thinking in the dream that with the firing and all, the upkeep on these dramatic blonde highlights was gonna become a problem. Hunter S. Thompson. Firings. Translation: work. It all comes down to that. It's where I go during the day and apparently at night as well. Even in dreams.

If it weren't for the dream of seeing Off the Radar run straight through on a television screen and the idea of leaning over the edge of the railing at the North Rim lodge in the Grand Canyon in two weeks, I'd still be toiling away in that Hunter S. Thompson fantasy, dreaming of a gonzo boss' bullshit idiosyncrasies.

I can tell I'm prepping to go off the grid. I'm sorting through my mental wasteland and it's pretty much just fluff: a filthy marsh of asses, history, margaritas, and office space, all jumbled up together, accomplishing nothing. Time to go away and clean house.

Don't Call Us...

Alright, an update is long overdue.

I went in to be seen for the beauty job. They didn't go for me. And while it was exactly the type of brand I want (I think) to work for: upscale, modern, fresh -- it was also kind of high-intensity. It appeared to be staffed largely by a gaggle of fluttering under-25s and there was a distinct Hills-y vibe to the environment: everyone in high-end flip flops and those ubiquitous shirtdresses that I'm starting to loathe. Every time I'm in a scenario like that I just feel so...dated. Yes, I was wearing my standard-issue wrap dress but it was far more Van Heusen than Von Furstenburg and I knew it. My husband always tells me if I'm apologizing for myself on the inside, I'm apologizing on the outside. So, I basically walked in wearing a nametag that said "Hello, My Name is Sorry".

I think I presented well on paper but it was one of the most intrusive applications I've ever filled out. They wanted to know my monthly rent, the make, model and year of my car, whether I was in debt and if I had ever indulged in alcohol on the job (clearly they see the two as related). I was absolutely quaking when they sat me down next to the other funky flower applying for the job on a worn, artsy-looking velvet couch. Prior to going in, I'd carefully placed a single precious, pristine white Xanax in the coin purse of my wallet in case of a panic emergency. This is something I sometimes do to stem the anxiety tide as a sort of insurance plan. I pretty rarely actually take them because they're long-acting and that's a big 12 hour committment to feeling soft around the edges. But knowing it's nestled in there alongside my dimes and quarters is sometimes enough to get me through an episode of tight chest and racing thoughts.

As I filled in the date at the top of the application my hands started shaking. It occured to me that I hadn't filled out a job application in ten years. And it was down the slippery slope from there. I lost my grip on the pen, feeling unable to correctly spell the word "July". I was certain the girl next to me in the gold Roman sandals was way ahead on her essay question about her accomplishments and disappointments and that I'd be left behind, stuck in the mire of reasons for leaving past jobs and professional strengths and weaknesses. Then I remembered the perfect white disk in my wallet. Somehow, in the ferocity of the moment, it occured to me to take it. Right there on the burgundy velvet couch. Next to Roman sandals girl.

And then I came down for a landing. 'You can't take fucking drugs right here, in front of a prospective employer who just demanded on their job application that you list the prescription drugs you're taking!' 'You can't take drugs when you go in to be seen for a job, period, even if they don't ask you what drugs you're taking!', I silently screamed at myself.

Wow, the whole process got me in a tizzy. I spent a day wondering whether they didn't call me back because I don't have a bachelors degree from FIT or they didn't like my answer to the "do you think everyone is basically honest?" question (yes). And then I talked to my mom, who reminded me that I'm interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing me. Yeah! With that in mind, maybe I didn't like the absence of low-end sandals in their office so much.

.

Seriously, I'm 32. I'm not applying for a part-time summer job at Sam Goody. I'm looking for the right thing. And I'm getting this internal message that that "thing" is probably much different from what I think I can do and where I think I belong. The entire point of this year has been that everything I've thought was one way is badly in need of a monumental shift. It's time to be open to possibility. I'm so feeling that. Whatever direction this bird is flying, I'm hitching a ride.

I wanna know what's out there.