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.
Category: TODAY
Strange Currencies
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
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
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
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
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
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
When feeling bad, as I have been lately, one of the things that helps me is to think of what I want and then try to put that into the world. Yesterday I wrote a thank you note to someone who had written an article about music that I enjoyed reading. Sometimes I stop people in the street to tell them I love their outfit. I wonder sometimes how this must seem, this randomly intense appearance of a stranger gushing over the good you've put into the world. It's funny because it starts as a sort of karmic wish, I'll put it out and then maybe I'll get it back, but of course often the act itself is its own reward.
I have a bit of a cold at the moment, which wants tea and soup and to feel sorry for itself. There's a lot of mouth breathing. Last night I took a pain murderer to knock me out, which was wonderful because honestly everything hurt quite a lot and I would have been in bed exhausted and sniveling otherwise. The result was a full night's sleep, glorious, and unfortunately extremely vivid dreams which I am still untangling from reality. One involved social shunning and it really made me sad, even though it didn't happen. Thanks brain.
Every once in a while I take a run at imagining my life if I changed it in a drastic way that pleased me and not necessarily others. What if I stopped saying "yes" to anything I was asked to do. What if I just holed up on my own and read books and watched movies and worked and wrote. What if I gave up on initiating human contact. When I was young I sought very few people, figuring that if I waited until they contacted me then I'd know they wanted to see me, and thus I managed my own fears of being unwanted and when I showed up I did so wholeheartedly. Some years ago I started initiating more, not because my own confidence went up particularly but because I was suddenly able to see other people as being, perhaps, also a little self-doubting. And it takes nothing to let someone that you want to see know you would like to see them. But what would happen, I wonder now, if I stopped? If I stopped carrying my weight, would someone else lift me? Or would I be seated quietly in one place, and would that feel like meditation or abandonment?
I'm on the cusp of some things, and it makes me feel like everything could change. It doesn't mean anything more than what it is, I'm just pondering.
players gonna play
I have a task manager on my phone where I type in things I want to do and every week I have a fresh notebook page where I write down the things I want to do (different parts of the page for different things) and I also have alarms to remind me to do things I want to do. Like there's work and there's performance stuff and there's just looking after my own well being, like "do a load of laundry" or whatever. Despite all this I often find I don't get as much done as I would like. And yet I do things, I wouldn't say I just sit around looking at the walls, although that is also something that I like doing very much. I am often very tired and I thought for a minute before I started traveling in December that it was because I was doing too much, specifically working too much, and I thought that when I was away from work I would finally get some sleep, and then while I was traveling I sometimes thought that I was tired because I was seeing and doing so many rare and unusual things but that when I got home again I would finally get some sleep and now I am home and I'm not really sleeping. I gave myself a week before returning to work so that I could do things like organize the paperwork that came in December for my taxes and get a haircut and check in with some friends without worrying about the inevitable hangover of such reunions and its effect on my productivity. I've been home a week and one of me says that I'm doing pretty well for just one week in (I am, for example, unpacked, which often takes me a month) but the other of me is a little disappointed that at my age I have learned so many tricks for doing things well and I don't do them. Today I read about knitting a sock for a sense of accomplishment and I really thought "Shit, do I have to take up knitting on top of everything else?" but then I mopped the bathroom floor and I guess that counts for something. I would like to be able to give myself credit for doing things, finishing things, and even doing some things well, even though I also want to hold myself to a reasonably high standard and keep striving though maybe not striving so hard that the striving itself exhausts me. Dude, I don't know. I'm going to practice ukulele for a while. It's the weekend, after all.
More than 59 probably
Briefly, as I sit in another airport on the next to the last leg of this. I am primarily thinking that it's funny how much humans in general annoy me, for example the woman seated behind me loudly on her phone, and yet how what brings me the most happiness is people. The people I've traveled with, the ones who have welcomed me into their homes, people who took time out of their busy lives to clear a space for me to come in and occupy the whole space for a meal, a day, a weekend. I read a story about someone who used a rosary not for prayer but to remind himself of all the beauty and wonder in his life. There is a lot of beauty and wonder in nature, trees and flowers and for example the moon last night overhead and concealed by clouds, then bursting forth with a host of stars in the crisp night air. But it's people and the beautiful things people do, large scale and small, art and kindness, that would fill most of my rosary. I am so blessed, I am so lucky, I am so grateful.
tuckova 