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.

Take This Job

Well, here I am nearly a week after my last post. I'm blonder, for sure. I told a friend that I feel like Amy Winehouse in reverse. If there was rehab for bottled hair color addiction, I'd be there, smoking cigarettes, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a trucker hat. The desire to be blonde was a good instinct. I've ended up with Aniston stripes on a Von Teese base--my for-the-moment homage to Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. The cliche is no bullshit--I do feel like I'm having more fun.

I'm taking my retro stripes abroad for 10 days where I'll once again be hawking lipstick to the masses. I leave tonight and nothing's done. I can't seem to get motivated. I'm reading email newsletters, slamming coffee, trying to G-chat my tech-poor father. I never do this. Usually, my suitcase is sitting by the door a day ahead of time, neatly packed, plane outfit folded into tidy squares on top. It's currently in the closet, screaming at me to fill it full of proper on-air wear, shiny baubles and shoes, "pocketbooks" and all manner of scrubs and sprays which I'll use to fluff myself into a presence.

Fact is, my head is elsewhere.

On Friday, I started submitting my resume. When I opened it up to print I saw that I'd last revised it in February. It's been ready to float out of my computer and onto the desks of eager employers for five months. And the funny thing is, the decision to finally get out there and start looking was so unceremonious. It wasn't a final straw situation or the dream of a Mary Tyler Moore hat-in-air moment that sent me to the fax machine at Kinkos. It was just. Simply. Time. I sent two resumes on the first day. That effort alone was enough for me to justify two agave nectar margaritas and a Modelo's worth of celebration to myself later that night. Just the doing of it--the breaking through the fear that there's nothing out there, that the search will be fruitless, that I still don't know what I want and won't be able to project it...the fear that someone might call me and I might have to go in and tell them who I am and what I want and represent myself was so drink-worthy, so "hell yeah, power to the people"-ish, that I felt satisfied.

And then one of them called me last night.

It's super early stages. A pre-screen. A you-tell-us-who-you-are-and-we'll-tell-you-if-we're-even-remotely-into-that kind of meet and greet. But after I took the call a billion little futures exploded in my mind: the submitting of notice, my first week on the job, buying a professional wardrobe. I'm going to let myself go there because I think it's good. I haven't been able to for 7 years at my current job and I'm pretty sure that's why I've been there for 7 years. Gotta be able to see it if you're gonna be it.

So, who knows? If it's not this one, it'll be another one. But there's no use doing what I usually do: immediately trying to bring myself down to earth, telling myself not to get excited, minimizing it, making it seem small so that if it doesn't happen I won't be disappointed. That just doesn't work. And if nothing else, it sure doesn't save me any difficult feelings. I'd rather feel potential disappointment on the other end than miss out on the great feeling of possibility now.

So, fuck it. I'm gonna get excited. There's light at the end of the tunnel...somewhere.
And if nothing else, there's light on top of my head.

Ciao, OneKate

Lighten Up

I've just been in California. I don't get there nearly enough and every time I visit I wonder why I don't just go ahead and vacation there. Why do I always feel I have to go abroad instead of packing up a Dodge Neon from Hertz and heading down the coast to sample tangerine olive oil and ride a bicycle barefoot in some funky yet upscale beach town?

Sadly, this was a work trip and I was stationed in the positively standard Hilton in Oakland. I found myself taking breakfast at that absurd business travel hour of the morning along with all the casual businessmen wearing cotton golf shirts, forced to listen to them talk about Body for Life over grapefruit.

I had some time to kill in the afternoon so I walked to Wal-Mart in hopes of finding beer to take back to my room. All I found was Red Bull and some diet tea with creatine that made me super edgy during an episode of Locked Up Abroad that I watched later from my flowered bedspread. If I were a real business traveler I'd be an alcoholic.

After a few hours trapped in depressive Hilton anonymity, I decided it was time to head for San Francisco. I arrived just as the sun was melting over the tops of the palms. I felt the familiar feeling I always have in California--slightly starstruck, oohhing and aahhing inside over the way the sun reflects off a particular window or a piece of fruit sits high in a tree.

From the moment the taxi picked me up at the airport and I scoffed at the driver's suggestion that I wait for the Hilton shuttle, I felt my east coast cliches slicing through that quality Cali air like a million little X-Acto knives. Hurry, hurry, gotta get to my supremely lonely hotel room so I can sit and watch crime television in the dark. As I walked up and down the gorgeous San Francisco streets carrying my unnecessarily large platinum patent purse I suddenly felt so...sullen. There I was, wearing all black in the middle of a shimmering San Francisco street. No light reflecting off of me, that's for sure. Proof of the sullen suspicion came when I reached Fisherman's Wharf and a "tourist sheriff" tried to arrest me for not smiling.

Since I've been back in the gritty city I've had this urge to shake off the darkness. It was pretty shocking to go somewhere else and act as wound up as people always say New Yorkers are. I do love me some edgy urban intensity, I do. But lately I'm finding myself fantasizing about Cate Blanchett's hair in The Talented Mr. Ripley--California crystal blonde. What if I just lightened up a bit?

(P.S. I got that little raise I asked for. It was little. And way more than a little late. But it might pay for a bleach job)

And Then We Came To...

So, I'm reading this novel, Then We Came To the End, by Joshua Ferris. A friend lent it to me about a month ago and I took to it immediately. To say it's about office culture wouldn't really do it justice, but it does embrace the intricacies of the office microcosm and explores them in squirm-worthy, knowing, lurid detail, all the while hinting at some sort of ending of magnitude. I'm not there yet, but I'm indulging in its many nods to the way functioning in an environment of unmemorable carpet and pressboard shelving can feel like a sort of robbery. Its cover is adorned, edge to edge, in blank yellow Post-It notes--a perfect homage to the empty confinement of spending our days sharing strange space with stranger people, and the surprising blankness of outrage.

I was engrossed last Tuesday night, as usual, when the following passage flew off the page and stopped my heart:

"There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make any of us still full from lunch want to lie down and insist that all those who remained committed walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their power bars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of any runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort. But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work."

I read and re-read that chunk of text three times before closing the book and nodding off. As I slept it rattled around in my brain like a loose screw I could hear but couldn't locate--irritating, tinkling, eventually banging and demanding I notice it. It was still with me when I woke up. The bit about microwave popcorn (someone's always making that), the reference to runs in the carpet, the way Ferris reminds me how it's really the tiny details that become our undoing in an office rather than the major committments of sin by management against underling. In the end, it's never really the lack of recognition, the passing us over for a better position, the eternal underpaying and overworking. No, it's more the cumulative nothings, like the the fact that The Company didn't invite us to dinner with the huge client even though we scored her in the first place, the sudden end of summer Fridays, insistance that we not eat Chinese food in our offices because they don't like the way it smells, and interrupting our meetings to ask for their messages (of which there are none). It's those idiocies, minor in nature and major in number, that have combined in my work life to numb me nearly to death.

Wednesday morning after reading the above passage, I woke up. I sat in another meeting listening to another spiel about another "opportunity to be seized" and thought, 'I will no longer be someone's opportunity-seizer without real financial compensation for it.' There's just simply a limit to how much work I'll do for The Company for free. And we're way over capacity. Way, way over capacity. So in the afternoon, I walked into management's office and told them that we needed to re-examine my "compensation to contribution" ratio. I have no idea where I got that phrase, but I think the looming fear of falling asleep on a floor covered in microwave popcorn and carpet runs was beginning to unzip me. In response, The Company offered the requisite passive-aggressive reminder of what they've done for me, reminded me of how underpaid everyone in our office is (that's supposed to make it fine??) and ultimately said they'd do something.

The deal is this: I'm building myself a bridge over which to walk into a different life. This job has its term limit, and we're nearing it. It's the next big makeover on the Chrysalis plan and is perhaps the biggest steel anchor of all, weighting me to my old life. It's a place where I regularly allow myself to be undervalued, understimulated, unchallenged and undefined. I've got to insist, no, fucking demand that I save myself from suckling for safety on shreds of blue carpet.

I don't know what'll come of my request for better compensation. In the end, I think it's most important that I asked for it. That I knew to ask for it. I felt it the minute I left The Office--the deep sense that I'd set off a chain of events that couldn't be undone. I guess that was the point.

This Is Me

-"Your self-effacing charms are shot/

-Wake up now to what you are and what you're not/

-You can run, run, run/

-But you can't escape"

-- The Helio Sequence, You can Come to Me

I got dressed to these lyrics today in my empty bedroom. How appropriate. This whole experience of preparing to move has been like having one of those police highbeams shot straight into my center, forcing it to be exposed. I feel like my insides are a maze of closets. Every time I open one up and dust off the bag of postcards or box of shoes at the bottom, another door opens revealing more dust and denial. I've got a deeper closet than I thought--both in spirit and reality. But I'm emptying it slowly, learning a few things along the way and dammit, I can finally see the floor in there.

Cleaning out seven years' worth of me from the inside of our apartment has been one revelation after another. I've reaped the mini rewards of what I call "closet shopping"--browsing the racks in the back of your closet for items you haven't seen in years. In my case, I moved in in 2001 with items I hadn't seen since 1997. A single visit to the stacking cubes in the back of mine yielded the baddest-ass purse ever, featuring a comically huge zipper on the front, 2 pairs of jeans that actually fit, some strappy faux-snakeskin sandals, and a sexy granite colored Calivin Klein v-neck. I thought, 'whose clothes are these? She has really excellent taste. Score.' Lesson: I am in fact capable of picking out "timeless pieces". Nobody will know that purse is over a decade old.

On the very same closet-diving trip, however, I found another me lurking beneath the boxes of socks. Hiding in the racks was a girl who once went to high school in the suburbs and wasn't afraid to show it. I trashed the following: a pair of white overall shorts, a Gap cardigan from...wait...1994 (I know it's that old because I stumbled across a picture from my sister's junior high graduation in 1994 where I was wearing the hideous green button-up with a pair of plaid shorts), and a t-shirt displaying the following identifier: "bad attitude", in splashy type. Gone, all of it! I was ruthless, brutal. That entire section of my life is now at the bottom of a Staten Island landfill. Lesson: it's okay to let go--especially if "letting go" involves overalls of any kind.

Closet also being timeline, I spent awhile browsing the the mid-late '90s. Those were my moving-to-New-York years and they're really fun to revisit. I unearthed: one pair of steel blue vinyl platform heels from Halloween 1997 (relics from my Pamela Anderson costume), my three inch t-strap character shoes (the most elegant dance shoes ever made), and the real jackpot: a box of letters and postcards dated from the day I moved to New York, all through my two years in school and into life after. I took a couple of hours and re-read every one. Pulled from the wreckage were: my mother's written explanation for leaving my father, a greeting card from my grandmother for every single holiday (she was so good), letters of love and adoration of the kind you can only write when you're 20 and single, and postcards from my friends who all took show tours right after graduation through Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska. They saw the entire country while I was busy figuring out how to install my first air conditioner in the summer of '97. Lesson: People have made my New York life what it is.

I'm starting to feel emptied out, liberated. I've held on to many things way past their reasonable expiration dates. Some of them need to be burned on a big, 'ol ceremonial pyre (hello, leather pants), some need to be dusted off and reshaped so they can be part of my life again, and some things need to go with me into the next dot on the timeline. Moving is exactly like those lyrics: waking up to what you are and what you are not. I'm definitely not my suburban high school shorts but I might still be a little bit steel blue vinyl. Whatever I am, I'm emptying out so I can make room for more life.