Category: TODAY

getting OK

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You guys I'm still so tired. Moving really takes it out of me, it turns out, and having stayed in one place for such a long time makes it harder. It's not like money where you save it up; it's like a muscle I haven't flexed. I measured and measured and measured and moved a bunch of stuff from the old place to the new one only to semi-sheepishly return it a couple weeks later when it turns out that centimeters aren't the only thing that makes stuff fit. On the plus side, the young man I hired to help move the furniture over turned out to be quite nice and I hired him for other projects as well. In Czech, they call a handyman an "hourly husband" and I hired an hourly husband who came out to install some lights and didn't bring the right tools and broke one of the things he was supposed to install and and bitched about my taste and also stunk up the place, so he was kind of like a traditional husband except at the end I had to give him money instead of whatever a traditional wife does with someone like that. I was pretty bummed about the whole situation but then I called the mover to ask if he also assembled furniture and he did so I dubbed him my "hourly son" and I have adopted him as my own, in an hourly way. He does not stink.

The things we do and do not pay people to do and the things we do and do not get robots to do and which things we take pride in and would never delegate and which things we delegate as soon as our income bracket can afford it are very interesting to me.

Despite a pretty significant paring down of things I still have too many things. My sister, who is a much nicer sister than I deserve, came to visit and helped me put up my art in ways that make me feel surrounded by beauty and she tried to help me weed out the books but books make me feel safe the same way a stack of sweaters or a drawer of neatly rolled scarves does, so I need to look at other areas. Some years ago I saw a photo of Georgia O'Keeffe's home with just a few dresses (hung on nails on the wall, I think?) and I thought how much I would like to be like that. Not minimalist in all things, I think that ship has sailed, but at least in clothes. A few really structurally interesting pieces that I wear all the time. The problem is that I think I'd have to be structurally interesting in the same way O'Keeffe was, and as I realized when I recently saw a photo of myself, what I usually look like is a pile of laundry. Clean laundry, but still. But I don't think clothes is what I'm going to pare down either. 

A lot of things delight me lately –  I like my new home. I've dealt with some quite lovely people in the last couple of months. Work has been improving after what felt like a multi-month slump that had me really doubting myself. I auditioned for a play that I was not in charge of and got cast and enjoyed knowing that I can still learn lines (not a lot of lines, but if I can still memorize at all it means a great deal to me), and that I can still slip into a character in a way that pleases me, to stop being Anne for a minute and take on the heart of someone different enough that it's interesting but familiar enough that I can still say what I need to say. I've read things for pleasure and been pleased. I've watched some pretty good plays (Vanya was amazing; People Places and Things more disturbing but such a creative set). I've been irritated by people too, and annoyed by work, and frustrated with projects not going the way I want, and with my own limitations, and with the amount of crap that has to be waded through before you can swim at all. And I don't even want to talk about the amount of time I've wasted thinking about politics without feeling like I'm learning or growing in any kind of meaningful way. But in general, mostly good. And I'm optimistic that now that I (finally) have internet again and mostly know where things are even in the dark, I'll be back to a rhythm in which I sleep and live and get things done in no time. 

teeny tiny charcuterie boards laden with cheese

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sky walking away

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It is unfair how much of the work that we have to do in order to be fully human is necessarily devoted to overcoming false narratives. This sentence came to me fully formed while standing in a very long line and then I had to hope I'd remember what I was thinking about and how clearly I was thinking it if and when I was able to write it down. I am so easily distracted. It was probably better before. And I'm pretty sure now it's not an original thought. Letting go of the idea of The One after having been told it's true for years is an example of this, though that wasn't such a struggle for me. But I am of the age that was taught by books and films and television that almost every villain could be redeemed if you just practiced sufficient patience with them (and maybe sent them a ghost or two but mainly that you personally had to be patient and forgiving). This patience and forgiveness was not to be extended when they were sorry because they didn't have to be sorry and it wasn't based on them trying to do better and then you forgiving them because often your forgiveness had to come first, the first step in their redemption was yours. We set up generations of people to believe that "sensing the good in them" was enough. I was talking to a friend who said that she views people on the basis of what they do and she is thus less likely to be surprised when they act how they are. In that conversation, I said I view people on the basis of what they say they are, but even that's not quite true. In honesty, I think I often view people on the basis of the good I think ("sense") they're capable of, and then I'm always knocked flat when they don't do what I expect. But that's the mythology I grew up with. It's not a new thought even to me but apparently it's time for this seat on the ferris wheel of my recurring thoughts to have its moment of a clear view: today's a reminder that redemption arcs are considerably thinner on the ground in real life than they are in Hugo, Dickens, Lucas, etc. It's unfair that I've gone about forming my current view of myself as a "good person" in part because I make myself see the good in people even while their knife is hilt deep in me. I have found myself fighting back the urge (sometimes unsuccessfully) to justify for them how much they hurt me, as if I could somehow empathize them into good behavior. It's unfair because I don't actually think it's "good" of me and certainly hasn't been "good" for me, and yet part of my recent life has had to be devoted to tearing myself away from a dream narrative I was fed and consumed dutifully. I swallowed it whole. I'll see the good in them and then they'll be that good. Delicious! I do still want to be good and kind and empathize. I just don't feel like I can or should give people the unearned benefit of that anymore. It's so hard. You who already know this truth don't get why I'm struggling but take my word for it, it's a bitter pill. But if I'm going to live another five years, and those five years wouldn't involve this pain, feeling betrayed by my faith in people who usually never asked for it, it would be sweeter. Ten years twice as sweet. Maybe that sweetness would be worth more to me than pretending to myself that I'm good. Probably worth a try.

Strange Currencies

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In between working and a spiralled construction project, I've been watching TV which is one of my favorite things to do (I was going to say "favorite things to do to unwind" but no: it is one of my favorite things to do, period). One thing was watching Season 3 of "The Bear" which has given me Complicated Feelings and I wanted to write it down.

Season 1 of "The Bear" was, I think, excellent. It was intense day-at-work stressful to watch in the way that sometimes gets overdone (Aaron Sorkin I am looking at you) but here it felt fine, it felt real, and I felt that the characters were believable (for the most part) — nuanced, flawed, vulnerable, human.

Season 2 felt like the payoff earned for white-knuckle stressing over someone else's job in season 1. Episodes that would have felt saccharine (an aspiring pastry chef gets a fully funded trip to Copenhagen to live an absolute fantasy — a respectful and nurturing educational environment, a European city, living on a houseboat, a cat that doesn't sleep on your face) — because it was prefaced with the realism of season 1, season 2's sweetness felt genuine. I liked how they showed people grappling with how the decision to get better necessarily starts with seeing your own flaws, that insecurity, and how hope can be so terrifying. And season 2's "flashback" episode was gorgeously acted, beautifully filmed, hilarious and heartbreaking, achingly real.

Season 3… Here, I will summarize every episode: Go fuck yourself. I love you. A verse of a song you loved, started inexplicably mid-scene with lyrics that don't seem to connect in any particular way to the otherwise wordless scene (again), and the song cuts off after one verse or less. Go fuck yourself. I love you, but I can't say so.  A silent food montage. Go fuck yourself. I'm sorry, but I can't say so. Some nonsense with highly incompetent but purportedly loveable people who in no way would be allowed to stay if this job is really so precisely demanding and everyone is taking it more seriously than a cancer diagnosis. Why do we insist on these bumbling minor characters? Is it so we can keep calling this "a comedy"? I am tired of Carmy's profile. I am tired to my bones of characters who can't express what they are thinking and feeling. I feel like every actor in this is amazing and none of them are being allowed to reach their potential. For example, Oliver Platt can sell the corniest dialogue but I wish someone would give him better things to say. The way this show anvils its foreshadowing would get you kicked out of television writer school. Go fuck yourself. I was going to quit mid-way (see also: Ted Lasso) but then Jamie Lee Curtis made me cry and I'm on a full tangent of my delight in watching people I admired as a young person continue to be people I admire as we all age. Oh, can that woman act. And finally dialogue worthy of someone. I love you. I think, though, that I'd tell past Anne to just watch "Ice Chips" and skip the rest of the season and spare herself the Fak-ing aggro.

Season 4: Apparently there is a season 4. Why. 

as if

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So I am a director for a local amateur theater. Sometimes I take it very seriously and I have to remind myself that in a town of half a million only about 500 at most might be interested in seeing a play in English and half of those won't be interested in any particular play enough to come so even though it feels important it's only important on a small scale. Sometimes I have to remind myself that most people do things for fun and when they don't take it as seriously as I do that's really ok. Sometimes I have to remind myself about the value of acts of service. Most of the time I have a good time, it's like putting on plays in high school and college, low stakes classes or extra credit, hanging out with people who are fun and intense and creative. Most of the time it gives me some days of stress and some days of joy and in the end we put on a play and people come and see it. I find people I don't know exhausting, especially in groups; "does not work well with others" was on a fourth grade report card and little has changed. The fact that I've chosen this to do with my free time sometimes feels like a step toward insanity, but the truth is I'm older and tougher than when I was nine and if I pay attention I can usually make up games for myself and retain focus and manage ok, though it takes effort. Since it's difficult for me to socialize without a purpose, this is the most social I've been in my adult life and sometimes at the end of a rehearsal I feel literally drained. But sometimes I can see that we are working together toward a shared goal and then I feel like I drank a pot of coffee and sat on a soft blanket under warm dappled light and fell in love all at once.

Interestingly, because I've been focused so much on the plays themselves I haven't paid much attention to the process of acting. I haven't acted much in the last 30 years and haven't thought about it much — with amateurs, the focus is often largely on learning lines, so it hasn't been that necessary. For me, I just knew there was a part in acting when it clicked and I became a person who responded to the things happening in the only possible way I could respond.

But it's different for different people and a few actors have expressed interest in acting techniques and because I am not a people pleaser but a people dazzler I have set myself up to learn. Acting schools and approaches differ with culture and I didn't want to deal with that when we already, as a multicultural collective, have enough trouble agreeing when rehearsals start, but I learned to communicate about time consensus and I can learn to communicate about acting. To rectify my ignorance over the next six months (as I don't direct a play again until 2025), I bought some books on acting theory and started plowing through them.

I was on an airplane reading one of my books and trying to think of how to apply some of these ideas, which are targeted at people for whom acting is their calling and their work, as opposed to their hobby, and the man seated next to me commented that he taught theater at a university and thus noticed what I was reading and said that he thought this particular teacher had a better theory and approach than another, more famous teacher. Since the previous chapter had been a takedown of the more famous teacher, I ventured that this author certainly thought so, and we shared a laugh. Then they turned the lights off and we went to sleep, flying over the Atlantic with someone I wouldn't have noticed and who wouldn't have noticed me, now something in common. I wish people weren't so difficult for me but on the other hand I never take for granted the small chance encounters where for a moment we share something and for a moment we know our lines and it's easy. 

 

Curiouser

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I don't understand why we were told that curiosity killed a cat as if this were a reason not to be curious but a lot of people definitely aren't curious and it always seems weird to me. It's fun to know things. When I was younger, before the internet, I would call the library or go to the library to find things out. Flipping through card catalogs was fun. After the internet but before I could look things up on my phone I would write down questions that came up through the course of the evening and then send the answers in a next-morning email to whoever I'd been with when the questions arose. I thought it was a way of saying I'd been paying attention. I've been given to understand that not everyone finds this charming so I don't do it much anymore. But now that we all have libraries in our pockets, I'm regularly flummoxed by people who don't seem to actually care that there are answers to the questions they ask the air. And I'm even more perplexed when people lack curiosity not only about the world of facts but about the people they inhabit the world with. I am the sort of person who has forgotten things like birthdays since I started writing them down on paper, and I stand in awe of people who remember them (or most things like that) but more like baffled when people seem almost actively uninterested in a view of the world that is a different perspective. I have been in situations with people when I didn't want to hear their opinion because I thought it would change my view of them for the worse; this doesn't seem to be the case though. It doesn't seem like a fear of what truths are out there but an active lack of interest in any truth beyond the one they currently possess.

Maybe related: when people describe situations to me based on their understanding of those situations with no regard or interest as to what my view might be, even if those situations are ones I lived through and they did not.

To be curious about why people aren't curious is a Mobius strip that won't take me anywhere useful but at least I wrote it down, this moment of gazing, dumbfounded, at how little some people seem to want to know, even when it's right there. Even the cat got a good look. 

 

medium roast in a medium town

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One thing I kind of love about living in a medium-sized town is that there's always something going on. It's never so little that you're at a loss for ideas, and never so much that you can't manage to find what you want to do or choose (though sometimes choosing can be a bit tricky). When I was little I wrote a porquoi story about an earthworm that wanted to be at two parties at the same time, which is funny because my understanding of myself is pretty consistently that I want to be where I am. This indicates that even as a young storyteller I was working on developing empathy for characters quite different from myself.

Another thing that I love is that if there's a thing you want that doesn't exist, you can create it without too much difficulty. Imagine starting a theater in a small town or a big city. In one, you'd be hard pressed to generate enough interest to keep it afloat. In the other, the competition would be overwhelming. A nice medium-sized town and boom, in six years you've done twelve plays despite a pandemic, and each show is on some level better than the last.

One thing I'm struggling with a bit is that competition, which I have never understood, feels pretty personal on this scale. I don't mind if things are created that are different, but I don't like the unnecessary introduction of conflict. I'm not even talking about people who compete with the things that I'm doing, though obviously that's uppermost in my mind. But there are three hairdressers on my block. Within a few blocks of my apartment, there are at least five cafes, not including the hairdressers, which also serve coffee. I like a hairdresser. I like a cafe. And if the market can support it, I guess those are fine businesses to have. But I don't see a lot of difference between the hairdressers (in fact, they seem to all be one big business in three different storefronts) and I don't see much difference between the cafes, either, though I imagine I'm just not cool enough. How did the hipster burn his mouth? He drank his coffee before it was cool. I wish that there was more diversity and less competition. I wish that one of them would be, I don't know, a fancy cocktail bar or something. I wish people would imagine things that aren't in my neighborhood yet and then put them here.

One year I decided to go to a different place for a massage every month until I figured out what I liked and didn't like about massages. Maybe I should start going to all the cafes around until I figure out what makes them different. And maybe in the course of that I'll think of something else I want and either will it into existence or make it myself, whatever it is. I'm not changing hairdressers though. One shouldn't mess with perfection too much.

see what I mean

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I guess several newspapers (notably The Guardian) ran articles in the last few weeks about aphantasia, the inability to picture things in your mind. It affects, they conjectured, about four percent of people, though I don't know how they determined that. Three people in the span of two weeks told me they had it, therefore establishing it in my mind as the new ADHD or autism. It's not actually a disability, it's just an inability. I listened to people telling me this and thought "Okay, and?" and then I thought "Can I picture things?" I'm not really sure. I don't know that I need to. 
 
When I was in university we used to talk about things like this all the time, what was reality and how we perceived reality and what that perception might mean, how it might affect how we feel about it. Are we all seeing the same blue? Then I guess I started thinking about other things. When people tell me "picture this" I understand it as "I'm setting a scene for you" but not as something I'm actually expected to visualize until it comes to life. I understand that I'm expected to imagine something and I sort of do, but it's not, like, an image. It's a shared metaphor, or at least I thought so. Dunno. It's not a medical diagnosis (I'm not even sure it can be diagnosed — parts of your brain would fire up, I guess?). 
 
I have monopsia, meaning that I only look out of one eye at a time, and therefore only see things as two-dimensional. I didn't realize this was a thing (I thought everybody saw what I saw) until those "magic eye" books became trendy, early 90s I guess. I had a moment where I realized that quite probably a lot of things that I thought were a "personality" for me (like "not liking sports") were just the result of not seeing distances (so, for example, being unable to track a ball well enough to catch it or hit it or whatever I was expected to do). Also, a dread of uneven walking surfaces, such as stairs. It didn't really bother me until 3D movies were everywhere. Suddenly people were grabbing at the air in the theater, which was annoying, and the movies all looked out of focus to me. 
 
I think it's cool that, partly through the magic of the internet, we are able to learn things about ourselves without too much effort. I used to go to libraries more (I believe that I learned that I was only seeing out of one eye in my 20s, before computers were standard, though how common this was and what it might have affected came later and probably from the comfort of my own lilypad jumps across screens). I do worry at the amount of self-diagnosis that goes on, and more importantly the amount of conclusions that get reached. If I've made it this far seeing out of one eye and seeing very little in my mind, does it matter particularly? Not to me. Probably not.
 
I do note that I get a little impatient with some of the self-diagnosis going around, which is not particularly nice of me because empathy and patience really take so little effort. But I feel like sometimes we use these things to excuse us from doing things we might not particularly want to do, rather than as a reason that those things might be difficult and we might take a little longer to learn how to deal in a society set up for people to not have those challenges. Like being left-handed or something I guess. Less visible.
 
I thought I'd have more to say if I let this marinate but it has a ways to go. I'll put it here to remember that I was pondering ability and disability and inability in April 2024. 

birds of a feather

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The birds came back to start roosting in the trees in the courtyard behind the apartment. There are several large trees and by the middle of summer every branch will be heavy with them, I don't think they're supposed to be there but they are. They fly around the city during the day and I'm sure it causes actual problems, but for me personally it's just the noise. When they return in the evening the sky is Hitchcockian, the sound of wings beating, the blockage of light, the sense of something impending. They start calling to each other at the first light of day so in the summer it's a full cacophony by 5 a.m. A few of the neighbors have strung shiny paper across their balconies, I assume to keep the birds out, though it's also quite pretty, the flashes in the light. The weather keeps going back and forth between winter and spring, like it is also not quite ready to put away its jacket even while it is definitely longing for the sun. Everything resonates to me with the cusp of change. Two of the trees in the courtyard are in full bloom, white petals. Others are still bare from winter. The building next door is having the facade repaired and the workers all took a long-cut through the courtyard to get to the back rather than go through the building's own doors, so there's a slippery mud slope now where grass might have grown. They were pretty tidy about it, though, considering. Our facade was freshly redone right before we moved in, which means 23 years ago I think; it now looks pretty worn down, though less than most buildings did when I moved here and fell in love with the crumbling beauty of this town, which looked like a black and white photograph, filled with implied meaning where it lacked color. Someone yesterday said that our moving to this neighborhood was gentrification which while I am very gentrified is not, I think, what that word means. The neighborhood I'd been in before translates as Kingsfield, although no kings were present. The neighborhood I've lived in since was filled with students living four to a room and with lots of old people who had lived here through it all, the Velvet Divorce, revolution, before that Communists, Nazis, one woman in our building even before that. There are marks on the walls in the cellar from when they hid from Allied bombs, when they were occupied. But then one of the old people died, and his widow found the place too big for one person and she sold it and we moved in. When we fixed the broken holes in the floor we found newspaper scraps from when it was built. An article about talkies and whether they might replace regular movies. And now we have lived here for decades, longer than I've lived anywhere. I recognize that it is very funny that I will move to a different place on the same street but I do love the street and the neighbors, the convenience of the tram stops and the trolleybus, and I love the life that goes on in the courtyard. To which, by the way, I now have a key. With which to open doors to places that always belonged to me, so to speak. It's not bad.

chrysalis

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