'what not to wear' for the newly unemployed

"yeah, i suppose black jeans are okay if you dress them up with a conservative shirt and heels. take off the leather cuff, though. and the necklace."
"really?! i can't wear this necklace? but it's so small and inoffensive."
"tuck it into your shirt, then. you don't want to look rock'n'roll. you want streamlined and professional."

i grumble, but i do as she says. sigh. i don't even want another dining job.

"can i wear my jean jacket? or does that have too much personality for the prospective employer, too."

she ponders a moment.

"no, you can wear it. it looks clean and preppy, with the rest of your outfit... you look like a gap ad."
eyeroll. "it's a sad state of affairs when the gap ad image is what's considered the epitome of hireable."
"look, you need a job, right??"

my roommate can be a hardass, but she's right, of course. i put on my jean jacket and study the results in our full-length mirror. "i suppose i should probably remove the north end, i love you button from the breast pocket."
"yes. you really should."
i do it, with what i hope is an endearing pout. i feel like a store mannequin.

candice laughs, in her carefree look-at-me-i-have-a-job-and-can-wear-what-i-feel-like ruffled skirt.
"relax. you can go back to squatting abandoned houses, after you do your interview."

"down here, we all float"

i look at my last post and i'm like, eye-ruh-neeee.

maybe i'm a low-level psychic or something. things have happened this way before - little echoes of the future, causing a stir in my mind that i can't understand or place. it's confusing, but also comforting somehow. almost like i already dealt with the fallout of this, before "this" became a fact.

stephen called to see how i was doing, for the fourth time. this was directly after i had summoned the courage to face my account balances. it had been a very grave and gruelling fifteen minutes.
"i don't have any money. none at all. i have negative-money. i don't own a cent."
"it's a good thing you have a me, then."
"i suppose i'm not going to die, am i."
"nope. you're not going to die."

then he said he was taking me out for dinner and i said, maybe i should lose my job more often. then i laughed the laugh of the temporarily insane.

well, hopefully the temporarily insane.

imagery:
i'm alone in the middle of a winter landscape which suddenly turns out to be a gigantic sno-globe. i only know it's not real because someone on the outside is shaking it. i'm weightless and tiny and bouncing off the glass, and the world is a flurry of plastic snow.

but sometimes, like say

right now, i just want a real life. a real job, with real people. who read real books. this false glamour of living in a world entirely made up of concepts and ideas gets so old.

i look at my hands, they've aged; they're these strange foreign objects now. my fingers scream of years spent in the service industry. not that there's anything wrong with that. my hands are so unpretentious, they've never even heard of nail polish or any of that cuticle cream jazz. i don't mind that. who gives a shit about cuticle cream??

i don't mind my hands, but i'd like to get to know them again. there has to be a new chapter around the corner somewhere, there has to... these days, my mind is always either on hold or in overdrive, and it can't be healthy and it doesn't feel good. it hurts, actually. all the time.

how did this take me so long to realize? i think some part of me honestly believed that i was living the dream. or a dream, anyway. well, i don't want it anymore. i want things to start being real.

i want that so bad it makes me cry.

i always look for the

sour notes first.

when reading a script, or when reading a person.

read once for content, and then once for texture. you'll find them in the texture read. sometimes they're less obvious, but they're always the most interesting. a situation in musical terms: perfect rendition of a 'moonlight sonata' where a finger suddenly brushes a wrong key, creating a dissonance that reverberates through the whole piece. a half-second delay, perhaps, which breaks the mathematical pattern of a composition.

the most beautiful thing about symmetry is the deviation from it.

have you ever had one of these moments; walking away from a conversation and realizing that one particular sentence is stuck in your head like a skipping record? it undulates in your mind and the more you try to milk it for hidden meaning, the more it refuses to yield? anyway, neither here nor there.

water to wine

and wine to vinegar
and vinegar to lye
and lye to honey
and honey to grapes
and grapes to wine
and wine to water
and water to salt
and salt to blood
and blood to power
and power to disaster
and disaster to bliss
and bliss to... to... i don't know what

but it never stops, goddamn it, there's never a moment's peace
i'm so tired
i just want to put my head down and close my eyes
and never need punctuation again to explain how i fucking feel

(use your words use your words your WORDS)

absolutely glorious

weather.

i am sitting at javablend on north street, and i just witnessed a very old lady walk by with a t-shirt that professed

i gave up DRINKING and SMOKING and SEX
and it was the worst 15 minutes of my life

oh, summertime.
:)

haven't been feeling like

writing anything lately.

mostly it's a time thing. i feel guilty spending it here when there's so little to go around.

but almost as importantly, i don't like the stuff that leaks out my fingertips when they get near the keyboard. nothing new is forming in my head, no stories, not even the tiniest anecdote. all the words that want out are visceral and introspective and of no use to anyone. your blog is all smoke and mirrors these days, anne said in a recent e-mail, and yes! yes it is! and i hate smoke and mirrors. well... in excess, anyway.

and with that, i welcome you to: yet another smoke and mirrors post.

i've always had trouble asking for things.
anything. stuff i fully deserve, especially. it's a strange, misconceived issue of pride. the more i deserve something - a raise, a break, help, a kind word - the more obstinately i refuse to ask for it; the more i feel that i shouldn't have to.

i guess it's really a fear of rejection. the more i feel i've earned something, the harder the fall if i don't get the payoff... so much easier to just sit around, stupidly full of pride, and wait for the reward to come to me - and if it doesn't, so much easier to walk away. a little angry, perhaps, but nothing compared to the ego bruise of having asked and having been turned down.

that's so dumb. i don't think i've ever fully realized how fucking dumb that is.

sigh. i suppose it is a silly time to learn to swim when you start to drown.

this living, this living, this living / was never a project of mine

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Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.


~ Dorothy Parker

so i used to be extremely obsessed

with other people's belongings as a child. right? i couldn't keep my hands off them. i would feel them and smell them and chew on them and play with them, sometimes inevitably destroy them in my enthusiasm, and i would become terribly upset if an adult tried to take away my toy. it felt like emotional robbery. how dare they??

i'm not talking toddler, either. i was completely infatuated with strangers' stuff well into my adolescence. not in a weird cleptomaniac way where i wanted to make it my own: i just wanted to be close to it. like, an all-senses-involved-kind of close. and if ever there was a time when a stranger noticed and graciously gave me the thing i was so consumed by, why then it instantly ceased to be of any interest to me.

i still vividly remember that feeling of rapture, and i think i understand the reason behind it, too. it was the foreignness of the objects that i found so intoxicating, the fact that they had a life within the life of someone else who wasn't me. like they carried within them the essence of another person; a neatly wrapped package of alien humanity that i was desperate to explore... well, it's hard to explain, really.

in later years, i've equated my infantile need to interact with the belongings of others with the need many a fledging mechanic has to take electric fans apart and put them back together. except in my case, it wasn't about the inner workings of actual things. what i wanted to experience was the people who owned them, and the only way i knew how - remember, i was a fairly socially inept child - was to attack the physical manifestations of their personality. maybe this also betrays an instinctively sensual approach to life in general, i'm not sure, but i do know for a fact that the pursuit was intellectual in nature: i simply wanted to understand how other people went about being... well, other people.

objects have stories, you know. they don't have to be especially dramatic or eventful, as most real things are not: they can be as mundane as that time you spilled a drop of wine on your leather wallet and it stained the edge, and now i'm looking at it and i can see the discoloration, but it's been years since the drop of wine was spilled and how could i ever wrangle a context out of it? yet the context exists, out there, beyond mine and even your own reckoning: the restaurant you were at, where they served a really awful pasta salad, and how hard your date laughed when you told her the story about your dad catching you masturbating in the bathroom at his birthday party, and a million other things besides. so many stories. and if i couldn't get them all from one hands-on reading of your personal effects, i would make them up, filling in the blanks. your life - or at any rate, my interpretation of it - passing before my eyes. for a split second, i can be you. i can imagine being you. it's the same thing.

this is most likely how i started being an actor. it begins in your gut. whether or not i would have ended up actually acting is a whole different matter.

the other version of my backstory to being an actor involves watching a really bad river phoenix film as a teenager and being moved to tears, but really i probably just had a crush on him - it's the novelty version that people always dig. i mean, there might be a modicum of truth to it, but i don't fundamentally believe people decide they want to act from just watching someone else do it and being impressed. i think, at that point, it's no longer a decision. you just need a good source of inspiration to bring certainty to the surface. river phoenix was my trigger factor.

anyway, this is what i've discovered, years since and many foreign belongings handled, characters dissected, and parts played:
1. understanding how people work and trying them on for size are not even in the realm of being the same.
2. playing is not exactly being, theatre is not exactly reality: but it is the next closest thing and, when come by earnestly, ought to be no further away than an entirely plausible version of it.
3. being everybody feels the exact same. how you think, reason, and react within the parameters you're given is all kinds of different. but how being a person feels is the exact fucking same, in the end.

so don't tell me i wasn't there, because i could have been, and my imagination is sharper than a pitchfork and i have spent my whole life learning how to walk in other people's shoes.
well, that, and sniffing their wallets.


Let nothing that is inherently human
be foreign to you
- Stanislavski

in my third year of university, i

took this contemporary studies class with the longest, wrongest name ever. from symbolism and surrealism to the new novel and beyond. does anyone else feel that if a course title seems to require punctuation, it probably indicates bad things about the curriculum? well, anyway.

i never did finish the course. i wasn't terribly attached to it in the first place, it had been an elective - and in the end, the credit was mine for the taking, i simply opted out of it. the class was an afternoon lecture i rarely made it to, and whenever i did, i always seemed to end up at the grad house afterwards, drinking wine with the prof and a couple of the other students. it was hilarious to watch the way they idolized him. he was this bohemian-looking british man with a glint in his eye, a bevy of ex-wives and a summer home on the french riviera. i remember once i was behind on an assignment and tried to make him give me an extention on the deadline: he listened to my excuses, flashed a very wolverine grin, and said a sentence i can't forget. don't worry about nonsense. do the things that exhilarate you.

because, really - isn't that what every 22-year-old with a discipline problem needs to hear? give me a break, mr validation.

perhaps it was his attitude, then, that made me pause and decide that i really didn't care enough for maguerite duras to drag myself through a year's worth of the coursework. his arrogance; the decidedly decadent notion that none of it mattered unless it made me drip with passion. the other students tripping all over their own feet in fascination over this man's unorthodox methods and ideas - i didn't get them at all. i wasn't the least bit taken in by the intellectual rebel act. surely, i was already rebellious enough without needing him as a reminder.

so, yes, on some level he completely failed to inspire me - if that was indeed his aim. he also failed to impress me, seduce me, and teach me anything that i might have found useful (i know for a fact he was trying for at least two out of three). maybe i'm being a little harsh here; i don't necessarily believe he was a bad man. but he was full of reverse psychology tactics and poetic pep talks taylor-made for impressionable campus co-eds, of which i wasn't one.

regardless, this isn't about him - although an introduction into his persona is necessary to fully appreciate the assignment that broke the camel's back for me in that class. i had been on the fence for a while about continuing to pursue the credit, procrastinating a term paper on andre breton's novel 'nadia' practically to the point of no return. eventually, there came a moment of truth: do i buckle down and write the damn thing? even though i really, really don't want to? or do i say to hell with it?

or...

the prof had called me into his office to discuss what "options" there were for me. this was confusing, as i thought i had thoroughly examined the options available, and there were exactly the two. yet here he was, telling me no - no, you can still have the credit. forget the term paper. here's what you do.

take three sheets of paper. put 'to have' at the top of the first one. 'to do' at the top of the second. 'to be' on the third. now write, in list form, everything you want out of life.

you're kidding, i said. you're going to grade me on that??

no, he said, and grinned that wolverine grin of his. not grade you.

...oh.

i didn't end up doing it, of course. too weird. and i think i had already given up on the credit anyway at that point. i mean, really: if you can't give away a bag of tricks, what makes you think you can sell it? shouldn't i have been more insulted at being offered special treatment in the form of a parlor game of sorts?

well, i just stopped showing up and dropped the class and that was that. never discussed why. but i did, later, ponder this curious notion: three sheets of paper. to have, to do, to be.

i did it then, just to see what it would look like. and i'm doing it again now, just because. and i wonder if the two versions would have been much different - i wish i'd held onto the first one for posterity.


TO HAVE
- permanent immigration status, for once in my life
- a career
- freedom to travel, move about, or stay put, and do exactly as i please
- fun
- love, in its many forms
- relative financial stability
- excitement - i go through phases where i tell myself it's overrated, but those never last
- good health
- recognition

TO DO
- act, direct, produce, create
- travel
- laugh
- love
- write
- hedonistically consume all the finer things in life
- meet everybody and experience everything (gluttonous, i know, but it's been my burning wish since i was a wee thing)

TO BE
- happy
- intellectually stimulated
- entertained
- appreciated
- working
- loved
- self-reliant
- free
- wise
- real

grade this, dr ***.