Fuck it.
There. I said it. I dropped the taboo f bomb. I'm not a teacher anymore so I don't care. I don't really think anyone reads this blog anymore-- so I don't care that curse words are often an easy way out of saying something that is actually much more deep.
I'm a pendulum. I'm either depressed or manic (see my psychiatrist, he'll explain in more detail if you need it that bad) and I don't know which I'm more afraid of.
Depression is my even keel. I'm sad as hell, but at least I know where I'm at. My feet are firmly planted, true willow style. While my mania leaves me uncertain and unsure, and truthfully probably more depressed than my wonderful depressive state.
If for nothing else I need this blog, whoever may or may not read it, to document that. How crazy I feel like I'm going. A proof of that crazy girl's long line of oddness to look at after I crack up. Okay maybe that was a little melodramatic. But damnit I'm feeling rough.
So I'm going to rant.
Just some tidbits about myself.
The moon is the single most ever present symbol in my life. It has been since I was a very young girl, and every phase of my life brings a new, interesting look at it. Currently I avoid it with everything I am, because if I catch sight of it-- I cry. For some reasons I can nail down in my head, but for many more I can't.
I listen to crappy sappy country music on my way home from bartending. NPR isn't on anymore (classical music makes me nervous) and I'm looking for that perfect song to let me cry, to let me feel. To let me get in touch with whatever it was in me that I feel like has disappeared. And I just self edited that word in the process of typing it. Ten points if you can guess what I was gonna say.
My favorite flowers are lilies. Which are apparently toxic to my dogs. Things I love being toxic to me/my life/ other things I care about. Story of my life.
The theatre is my home, it's the only place I feel safe or valuable or allow myself to be vulnerable. And it's the only place I can't share those feelings with anyone else.
I have three tattoos. Three very meaningful tatoos. I can't think of any person who knows all the varying levels of meaning for all of them. But there's only one or two people who get the tattoos on any level other than the obvious.
I forgive everyone in my life for all the wrongs done to me, for all the circumstances that didn't work, for everything that went awry. I will never forgive myself. Ever.
I hope all my secrets go to the grave with me. But I can't keep a secret to myself, so I have to trust others. Thank god people in my life are good to me, even when I don't deserve it.
I feel intensely inadequate. And lost. And hopeless and helpless, and find as many adjectives that end in "less" as you'd like, they'll probably fit me. At this moment, and I'm well aware that I sound like a 13 year old, I feel like I can do no right, no one likes me, and I'm back to being that scared, insecure girl in the corner avoiding everyone else.
My life is compartmentalized. And I've forgotten how it got that way, why it got that way, or why it was so important to get it that way in the first place.
I'm full of some serious self doubt, self loathing, and regret.
I understand, on the inside, that all of this is stupid. That I can make it, that I should stop beating myself up. That I should just let everything be. Life my RENT mantra and take up "No Day But Today" as my attitude. I know.
But right now I'm haunted by ghosts that aren't dead, plagued by memories that never happened, and afraid of a future that's all I ever wanted.
And none of this has anything to do with the fact I'm getting married in three weeks. None of it. It's just me. Being crazy.
apparently I don't blog anymore.
I guess writing just doesn't cut it anymore. Just passing the buck. It's lost the cathartic feeling that kept me alive for a year. My journals are empty. Random pieces of paper I find in my car or desk are more likely to have monetary calculations written on them than pieces of poetry.
Poetry seems to have receded. Prose, I hear, is supposed to be more total in scope. Poetry captures an instant brilliantly, but prose can capture a lifetime. The obvious choice for a life, then, would be to live it out in beautifully constructed prose. In a prose that captures life in its entirety, in its raw, real, and ridiculous moments. One by one, accumulating a massive database as time ticks by.
Poetry is short lived. Its lines of verse burst off the page and tear the heart, but eventually even the poet puts down his pen and goes about living his life. Poetry is where emotion lives. Poetry is where passion lives. Poetry is where the world, too raw to be contained, explodes in one large mushroom cloud of fire, reigning down ash on all who happen to be near the blast.
But then life goes on. The dust settles, and everyone is left dealing with the fallout of the fire of passion. And so prose is born and lives and lives and lives and lives-- until.
One meant to live their life in poetry finds this prose a little unsettling.
I'm working the job I began working the day before I graduated high school.
Lonestar Steakhouse and Saloon.
I initially worked in the steakhouse portion, but now I work in the saloon portion as a bartender, and honestly I couldn't be more fulfilled.
I have a college degree. I have a brain. I can debate the public option, regulation of the free market, socialism, theatre of cruelty, modern art, and college football with the best of them. But bartending fulfills me in a way I can't describe.
I'm happy. I LOVE not coming home until 11 pm, and not having to be anywhere until 4 pm. I like having interesting conversations with random people. I like my managers. A couple of my co workers are some of my favorite people (though granted some of them belong on my "people who should not reproduce list").
And so I look at my three years in education, my three years in college, my four years in a nationally ranked high school, and my god knows how many years in earlier school and I'm lefto think-- was it all in vein?
No matter what difference I make in the world of educaiton. No matter what theatre production I do, rarely anything has the SUSTAINABLE (note this is what separates bartending from theatre) enjoyment that bartending does.
I love the theatre. I LOVE it. But it's also my poison. I love it and I hate it and I could never live without it.
I could live without bartending. But I wouldn't want to. It's fun. It takes more brains than any other job I've done (including teaching on the college level).
This whole experience kind of makes me feel like all those years of school were wasted, and that bartending + theatre = enough to keep me not only sane, but happy.
I had to drive back to my childhood home in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama tonight.
And as I passed familiar marker after familiar marker, I rolled my windows down and let the Alabama summer night air fill my lungs.
And for half a second, I felt like I was fifteen again and late for curfew.
And it was weird.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who wanted nothing more than to scare all the boys on the playground.
Once upon a time, there was a young girl who wanted nothing more than to get a college scholarship.
Once upon a time, there was a young lady who wanted nothing more than to be a theatre teacher.
Once, there was a young woman who wanted nothing more than to change the world.
It's funny how life sneaks up on you. My entire life I've been incredibly sure of myself, what I wanted, and how to get there. It seems like every step along the way I got what I wanted, and I grew.
Until.
Yes, that utterly life changing moment when you realized that what you got, what you thought you wanted, really doesn't make you happy at all. And then you do a nose dive, Wile Coyote style, and a little atomic cloud of dust blooms upward-- signaling the bomb that just went off in your consciousness.
All my sense of purpose seems to be lost. I know it's there, but I can't find it. I can't reach it, and I sure as hell can't see it clearly enough to know what it is.
All I know is that once I was sure what I wanted, and that certainty gave me the determination to get through every hardship that came my way. Every traffic ticket that had to come from grocery money, every bad night at the restaurant that meant no rent money, every overdraft fee-- it was all tempered by the drive to get where I was going.
But without a destination in sight, now I'm really not sure what keeps me going. I feel like I'm wandering around blind, clinging to the only thing I know (the theatre) hoping that someone delivers me from my exile, or that god willing, I deliver myself.
It's rather exhausting.
SUCKS.
I could leave it there, but I'll elaborate.
I'm currently involved in a production of Lysistrata that was designed to be a simple, outdoor theatre production.
Add sound, costumes, rain, noise levels, body paint, columns shattering, dogs running onstage, old people gawking at sexual innuendo, young children with perplexed faces, rain, extension cords, hiding scenery in bushes--
I could go on forever.
Basically, theatre out of doors is hell for those involved. And consequently my dining room now contains a very phallic fountain that I had to paint last night at 11 pm, because we open tonight.
But for anyone in the Birmingham area, Lysistrata is free to the public at 6 pm in Caldwell Park. Don't let all my nervous breakdowns be in vein folks. Come see it.
There's a lot of wars being fought on abstract nouns
War on terror
War on drugs
War on culture (well inverse the word order)
but one war I have beef with is
the War on Sex
I think religion has used and manipulated sex, and I'm tired of anyone in my bedroom other than me. No politician, no cleric, no moral majority need tell me about the sexual behaviors of my choice and their consequences.
I understand that sex carries with it an incredible bonding factor. It's called OXYTOCIN.
Personally, I believe sex can be beautiful and wonderful and magical (enter faeries stage left) in a loving committed relationship. It can. Perhaps it was designed that way. If not by a deity, by evolution. Something is to be said about a monogamous pair bond as it strikes out into the world to produce little genetic copies more adept at interacting with their environment. Or giving their kids a better chance at success than they had. (pick your poison: science or religion)
It can. But sex is also deeper than that; or perhaps shallow is the word I'm looking for.
Either way. Sex is an individual's own choosing.
Religion, Politics, Morality-- they've all taken sex hostage, and the ransom is marriage.
Whether it's a fetish or homosexuality, adultery or premarital sex: people seem to think they know what's better for someone else. Especially in the realm of sex. Because sex is so taboo we don't talk about it.
Sure you can talk about how much the media inundates us with sex images and suggestions. True.
But we as a society don't talk about it. We don't educate our youth about it, we send them to school where they get abstinence only education and are taught that condoms are virtually ineffective against HIV.
So what they learn they learn in locker rooms and bathroom stalls. And the teen pregnancy rate is on the rise for the first time in years.
We need to take sex back. Refuse to pay an arbitrary ransom and begin open, honest, even if uncomfortable discussion with youth. And perhaps with our selves.
