Next Year All Our Troubles Will Be Miles Away

So, this is Christmas.

If I hear it again I will move to Yemen. They can't possibly be playing it there. And yet, it is. It is Christmas. We've known it since the day after Thanksgiving. The relentless holiday carol battering ram beating on my mental door has weakened me. This morning I was rattled into consciousness by a rousing, world-music version of "Oh Chanukah" blaring from my indie music station. I'm slip-sliding through the streets on sheets of broken ice, bags in hand, wet mittens straining over raw knuckles.

So, this is Christmas.

I keep thinking of Christmas the year my mother left my father. I flew home for the holiday as I'd always done. The day after I arrived my father drove into the Colorado mountains to cut down a Christmas tree and dragged it through our front door to hoist it into its old metal stand by the fireplace. It was a handsome, fragrant piney beast--a blank canvas awaiting our traditional adornments. But nobody felt like making the effort. So instead of pulling out the endless strands of nearly antique colored glass bulbs and handpainted pine cones from the fourth grade, we just let the boxes of ornaments sit under the tree like gifts of apathy to our Christmas greenery. And so it went for days, a week even, the stoic empty tree a symbol of our family's sudden blankness. Finally on Christmas Eve my sister and I, drunk on too much mulled wine from the neighbor's gift basket, decided it was time to break the tree's silence. We opened a single box of ornaments and hung them without precision from its front branches, finishing with a flourish of the bright glass bulbs we'd had since childhood. The final result was uneven and full of holes, which was exactly how we felt that year. But in the dark with the lights plugged in it looked as though each glistening star and miniature sleigh was a single shiny band-aid over a hollow place and I suppose in a way, that's what they were for us too.

So, this is Christmas.

I can't stop eating the shortbread cookies that one of our vendors sent to the office. A five pound tin of the same exact cookie, row after row, stacked on top of eachother. This is the worst year yet for office gifts. I was praying for the chocolate-covered almonds from our air conditioning repair people. But they didn't show this year. Nor did the hand-dipped yogurt-covered pretzels with the Christmas colored dots and sprinkles from our packaging manufacturer. They must be pissed about the lip gloss bottle recall we did earlier in the year. Oh, the office gift. Such a pithy traditional effort at aknowledging that we're all tied up in the same "sucker" boat together. At least we got the PLINKO-esque jelly bean dispenser. A turn of the knob releases a single pink bean that bobs to and fro through a variety of little mazes until finally, it reaches your hand. That oughta keep me busy for the entire month of January.

So, this is Christmas.

I'm thinking of raiding my 401k so I can quit my job. I just can't see how the coming two weeks off will make it in any way easier to face another year of this continued identity stripping when I return on January 5th. I wanted to do this last year when my 401k had way more money in it but no, I waited for a more ideal time. Right smack in the middle of a global financial crisis? Yeah, I'd say that's pretty much ideal.

So...this...is...Christmas. Well, I will say this: I'm starting to relish the notion that my Christmas tradition is to pretty much have a different tradition every year. My non-linear Christmas heritage is evidence of the fact that life never ceases to surprise and amaze, even as it sometimes crushes. This year I'm going to look at my own Christmas tree with nothing short of astonishment. We got one up, felt like decorating and even slid a few beautifully wrapped boxes under it. The effort is its own little miracle. Here's to not doing the same thing next year, or the year after that, or the year after that.

Screened-In

It's official: I'm depressed. I spent all day on my loveseat in the dark yesterday trying to confirm this suspicion. And even though the episode of Top Twenty Five Unsolved Crimes I watched couldn't have helped matters, it's true, I'm under a bona fide cloud.

We screened Off the Radar for an audience two nights ago. It brought phase one of this project to a close. Phase two will be harder in a way because we have to figure out just what the hell we're gonna do with it. But now I've landed in a weird sort of limbo. I know I have to take a few weeks off to come down from the freefall of the last year. My brain has gone dull and mealy like cold oatmeal. I'm useless. I can't multi-task or self-motivate or any other hyphenated word combo. I've forgotten how to have a decent meal at home. Instead I'm piling up points at local restaurants while my beautiful new black stove sits untouched except for cat paw prints. And my closet smells like smoke--a telltale sign of too many late nights standing outside too many bars trying to shake off the days.

I have to wonder how long I'll last before I start itching to tick my way back up the roller coaster and descend down into another rush of late nights and limit-testing days. The fact is, I'm addicted to the mayhem of my double life. I have been for over a decade. And when I'm in these "interim" periods, this in-between, I don't know how to be me. I've built an identity around overextending myself. Who am I if all I have to do for awhile is make dinner at home?

And yet I don't feel ready to enter phase two and read the audience response forms we handed out. They're sitting in an envelope next to our hard drive, a hundred potentially heart and mind changing sentences peering through the seal. So, I've decided to let them sit for a week (or maybe more) until I can regain my footing. I can't stop thinking of what it looked like to see Honduras up there on the screen, in some ways just as I remembered it and in some ways even sharper and more alive. I want so much to feel that moment and let it sink in before I leave the audience and go back behind the scenes again.

I both need and don't know how to use this time off. The screening was a blur of names and faces, handshakes, shrugs, cringes and comrades. There's no way I could have prepared for how it'd feel to be there and no way to prepare for how it'd feel to be past it. So here I am, December 10th no longer looming and a crater of uncertainty lodged at the base of my spine.

I think Sam Shephard said that right smack in the middle of contradiction is where you want to be--that's where the action is. I think I'm there. Maybe that means something good is gonna happen.

Aging Disgracefully

Many of you know that I've just marked another year's passing. I bid it farewell from a Bulgarian bar and watched it ooze down into the horizon like a melting sun, all gooey and shiny and eventually gone, leaving only a slight blaze behind. It's a good thing I was nice and lubed up on Astika beer and apple vodka sangria because I didn't feel any sting. But that was a couple of days prior to my actual natal day when I was still in the early part of my particular decade, lightheartedly referencing When Harry Met Sally dialogue:

Sally: ...And I'm gonna be forty.
Harry: When?
Sally: Someday.
Harry: In eight years.
Sally: But it's there. It's just sitting there, like this big dead end. And it's not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was 73.
Harry: Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up.

I never thought I'd be such a disgraceful ager. I had a good model. My mother is so well adjusted about her age. She's let her hair go entirely gray, colored it, then let it seep back in, strand by strand, with great sophistication. And my grandmother faced her eighties like a Viking warrior wearing a steel breatstplate and studded armbands. She was a beast, grabbing age by the proverbial turkey neck and sending any "visible signs" of it whimpering to the sidelines to lick their wounds.

But here I am, a year older now. And why does it feel so catastrophic? I've always celebrated surviving another harried twelve months, feeling grateful to have more years in which to make an effort at thriving, "finding my bliss", knowing what I want to be when I grow up. But this birthday felt different somehow. I couldn't get out of bed. It hit me like a windstorm, blowing in hard and swallowing me up. Suddenly I couldn't breathe thinking about another year dissolved into the distance. I suppose it's a glass empty thing. I see aging as loss of years instead of gaining perspective, years in the can instead of years ahead.

Now, naturally I know that this is an issue loaded with conflict and symbolism. And I feel of two minds about it. On the one hand, why the hell should I accept the war of time on my face, body and spirit? Why wouldn't I do anything I could to defend myself against its attacks? On the other hand, why shouldn't I ease into my earned wisdom and battle scars and stop defining myself by yet another specific aspect of who I am? I'm certainly not the number I see on a scale or the number of zeros (or lack thereof) in my bank account or even the number of years I've worked at my job. Why then would I be simply...gasp...I can't hear myself say it...thirty....t...oh, fuck it.

There are some things I'm just not gonna accept. Or rather, some things I'm not gonna accept without railing about the injustice. Adult acne, aching knees, cynicism (okay, I already had that), and thinning eyelid skin (it's a concern, okay?). I do not accept these things. I know, I know, it doesn't make them go away. The eighties being twenty, almost thirty years ago? I do not accept that. But marriage, death, birth, loss, change? I can work with those. I'll take those marks of the passing of time as the acceptable part of aging. Not gonna stop me from considering Botox. Not gonna stop me from coloring my hair. Not gonna stop me from donning my own version of the Viking breastplate so I can snatch up more minutes and carry them off in my chariot.

In the end (no pun intended) I hope I can be a gladiator. I hope I can juggle the demands of age with a little bit of the pizzaz my grandmother had. She always told me aging is not for pussies. God, please don't let me be a pussy.

Please Mr. Postman

On Thursday, news of my future career as a student arrived in the telltale plain, white envelope.

I held its contents in my heart as I walked down the hallway toward our building's mail table. The rigid corner was sticking out from under a pile of coupon circulars and I could just make out "The New" in partial view on the return address label. Before I even pulled it out from under the stack of junk mail I felt the burn of tears in my throat. I brought it into the apartment and slid it gently onto the butcher block in my kitchen where it sat next to my vitamins and spatulas for close to an hour before I opened it. The ceremony felt so necessary. It was as though every word inside that mailer had the power to baptize me in a bottomless sea and thrust me forward, scrubbed clean.

I used a butter knife to slice through the fold in the envelope and, slowly, the stack of papers clipped tightly between my thumb and forefinger, I pulled them into the light. My eyes scanned for the one word I'd promised myself would be there if it were an answer in the affirmative: "pleased." They'd be pleased, I'd be pleased, we'd all be pleased. But it wasn't there. Black type on a white page, saying nothing. Then further in, deep into line five, simply, the word "pleasure." I'd so planned to see "pleased" that it almost didn't register at first. But of course! Of course it's their pleasure. Modern language, naturally. "It is our pleasure to welcome you." And there it was. A simple "yes" to so many feared "no"s.

I wanted to share this news with you first. Walking down the spiral staircase of uncertanties on this blog is how I have come to some very concrete truths about what it really means to change. So thank you for plumbing the depths with me. I promise plenty more risk and rationalization ahead.

We can start with financial aid.

SWAK,

OneKate

Stress Management

Our CFO has three CDs which he likes to alternate bi-weekly and which have become a form of mid-level office torture that feels pretty extreme these days. It's one thing to not like your job. It's another thing entirely to not like it, find out that it's possibly going to become obsolete at the hands of the same machete-wielding employment Grim Reaper who's cutting his way through all Manhattan office buildings and then be thrown into a weird sort of needing it/hating it/questioning why you even care about something that has given you acne, a drinking problem and anger issues in the first place conflict--all accompanied by the easy melodies of a.) Barbra Streisand in concert b.) Lionel Richie or c.) Genesis' Greatest Hits. The things is, he doesn't even switch them out. He'll just play one, all day long, over and over, for weeks at a time. Working across from him feels like being trapped in a retirement community's elevator with a ringing phone and a coffee maker.

As my personal hero Ellen Griswald would say, "under the circumstances", I have chosen to manage my stress in the following ways:

1.) By eating two bags of spicy Asian cracker mix, which is guaranteed to produce at least three canker sores before I'm outta here at 5:00.
2.) By using a paperclip to pick away at my perfect manicure, freshly painted yesterday with OPI Moscow Nights, a dusky, chocolate shimmer that, when chipped, makes my fingertips look as though I've dug them into someone's skin and begun to rip past the muscle. Freudian desire, perhaps.
3.) By reading the lengthy and pretentious accounts of visits to my dream Punta Cana resort on tripadvisor.com. Travel research is my weapon. The minute I see "10:00 a.m. conference call" in my email inbox, I go right to Google Maps and pick a destination. It's faster than morphine--a mantra that slips right into my veins and up to my brain: 'you are not trapped.'
4.) By trying on and wiping off every lip gloss in my desk drawer and then analyzing the color in my little gold antique mirror. Frost makes me look old. Pink makes me look cheap. It's decided, then. I pretty much can't wear lip gloss.

What I'm coming to realize is there's a sort of freedom in the intolerable. The absurdity of functioning too far beyond your limits feels like breathing inside a snakeskin right before it falls to the ground. But the unbearable itch of shedding a life that's too small does eventually give way to a brand new skin. Keeping this truth in my pocket as things begin to unravel is money in the bank. And yes, I think things are gonna have to unravel and possibly even break into a million little shards at my feet before I can build myself a bigger glass palace. But it's gonna be okay. If I get a slick new snakeskin me outta the deal, then I'm in.

Happenings

I thought today would be a good day to post some updates since I left you all hanging after my last post, wondering if I'd secure myself a proper rack and become an eastern medicine convert.

Alas, I have (and I did). I'm now taking all manner of herbal detox tinctures and monitoring the activity of my spleen. See, evidently (and according to my acupuncturist, who is fantastic) I have "Spleen Qi Deficiency". Apparently this is a malady quite common among New Yorkers. I've now had three sessions with this brilliant practioner and in that time I have to honestly say, I've begun to feel a bit buzzed. I would assume this energized, fluid feeling of buoyancy is Qi, which is finally becoming unblocked. So far I've had needles in my jaw, neck, the space between my first and second toe, my wrist and up and down my calves. What amazes me most is that everything is diagnosed by simply looking at my tongue and feeling my pulse. Then somehow this wicked maze of pointy sharp objects winding its way along my acupressure points drains out pain, anxiety and toxicity, all the while stimulating my muscles and stoking this internal Qi engine . It's bizarre and I'm totally willing to submit to it. I feel oddly centered and calm-- a feeling so foreign to me it almost seems like a new disease.

I'm still waiting to hear from school. I realize it's ridiculous to get anxious (which I am). Three weeks is not long at all. I just feel like everything hinges on this one possible turn of events. I need to make some major changes if I get accepted and I'd like as much time to totally upend myself as is possible. When I'm bored I like to keep busy by angsting over whether or not my essays were pedestrian.

On the fluffier side, I did in fact get the professional bra fitting. I won't go into lurid detail but suffice to say that perhaps the biggest lesson of this year is that making changes, however minor, creates emotional momentum and emotional momentum creates external progress. Even if it's progress in the form of something frilly. The whole femme fatale experience of the fitting started me thinking about overhauling my autumnal image. It's definitely gonna involve something purple and patent leather. Perhaps this is the year I'll finally try to pull off that sleek and age-defying Blade Runner look. On second thought, that would have to involve bangs. Back to square one.

The Off the Radar pilot is nearing its New York City debut. We plan to fully honor it with bells, whistles and wine. Every time I watch the footage I thank Honduras. I can't remember a time when I heard my own voice more clearly than on its silky shores.

So, all in all, more balls in the air, more balls in general and absolutely nothing certain except uncertainty. Time for another dandelion tea.
Cheers.

Celebrate Good Times

Well, at least I'm really good at waiting.

It's official. I applied for school. The notion that came to me in a dream as I slept in an island bungalow in Honduras now sits in an envelope on the desk of an admissions counselor at The New School--a mass of GPAs, demographic information, essay responses and course plans. Me, in matte, flat black and white, hoping to leap off the page into appealing relief. Truth be told, I'm so deep into this "living the life you wanna have" kick that I'm not even allowing for a plan b. It took me too damn long to figure out plan a. It's gotta work. I have no idea how long it'll be until I hear something. At least I've got Facebook to keep me company.

My mom told me once that if I can't learn to celebrate small victories, I'll never learn to celebrate the really huge ones. I can't believe how many things she's right about. This particular one, though, is so dead on. The morning that I walked into that school, transcripts in hand, and stepped onto the elevator with the leggings- and-scarves set was so...anticlimactic. I'd imagined the moment of handing my paperwork to the young woman behind the desk in Admissions and racing out to throw my hat in the air millions of times. 'I'll buy myself a fancy five dollar latte immediately after', I thought. 'I'll mark the milestone with that cement-colored nail polish I've wanted since May.' 'The treasured bottle of Moet I've been saving will finally be uncorked and I'll drink it straight outta the bottle.'

What I actually did was spend twenty minutes on the MTA and grab a shitty cup of Maxwell House at the office. God forbid I really have something to celebrate. I might just get excited enough to make a bowl of tuna salad and watch a rerun of Matlock.

So with this little lesson in mind and thinking ahead now, I'm gonna have two mini celebrations this week. That way when there's something really big to leap for joy over (i.e., getting IN) I won't have to ask how high. I'm gonna do two things I've always wanted to do that I hope will be like the milestone submitting my application was. One, I'm finally gonna get acupuncture. The list of reasons is too long to list here and anyway, who really wants to talk about indigestion and difficulty sleeping? I'm hoping it'll be a centering experience and that I'll get hooked and wanna go back. Two, I'm gonna get a professional bra fitting. Oh yes I did say that in this blog. I've always wanted to do it--actually see what they look like molded and sculpted by professionals into two shining orbs of glory. So, I've made an appointment at a little Upper East Side boutique to surrender my rack to a woman with a measuring tape and a handful of possibilities.

Bring on the celebrating, big, small, poked and perky.