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.
I've lived my life teetering on the edge of two extremes.
The Intellectual vs. The Creative
It's only here recently I've realized that my creative side does not come at the cost of my intellect. In fact, my creative side benefits a lot from the ideas my intellectual side has to offer.
But that's not true vice versa.
I spent years in a magnet high school, advanced classes, honors programs. YEARS. I've seen the intellect and I've seen there are some things it does not understand and never will.
And I'm getting rather tired of the indignant response I get when I tell someone, "You won't get it. It's a theatre thing." They act so aghast that there could be something in this world that they do not understand. Like the world would cease to spin before it would create a situation outside of the bounds of reason. It just isn't possible.
I don't want to come off sounding like the stereotypical "artist", but I'll stick to my gun that artists get things in a way that the rational world doesn't. Not that the rational world can't SEE it that way, but they can't be IMPACTED the same way.
It's the reason artists buy paint before food, theatre people skip work to go to rehearsal, musicians play their guitar on the street instead of getting a job that sells out.
The same reason non artist significant others of artists (sorry for weird grammar) sit scratching their head saying, "But you HATE the theatre. You're always complaining about it. You come home near in tears because nothing's going right. Why TONIGHT do you want to go back?"
and the artist keeps saying. "I don't HATE it. It's my sustenence."
And those of the rational mind set just don't get it. I don't get it. I just do it.
I don't know what draws me back to theatre even after it knocks me out, takes my money, and leaves me in a tub of ice missing a kidney. I don't know what keeps me sitting outside watching a rehearsal even though it's raining. I don't know what makes me cry when I hear the first note of a musical. I don't know why I smile when something beautifully tragic happens in a play. I don't know why I sacrafice personal treasures as props knowing the probablility they won't return.
But I know I have to do it.
I'm not discrediting the rational mind. It keeps the world spinning. It makes marvelous stides in math and science. It keeps the post service running, papers organized, files in place, and my tv spitting images at me. The ratioal mind does a lot of good.
But I'm tired of those rational minds pretending they can understand it. I'm done with the indignant response that assumes they get it at some meaningful level.
Because if they got it, they'd be doing the same thing.
So my old blog has been disassembled.
I'm ready to start a new, to improve myself. To use this not so much as a venting ground but as a ground to document myself. And the world around me as I see it.
Perhaps this blog will bring less introspection and instead bring more opinion.
Perhaps this blog will be less poetic and more practical.
Perhaps this blog will be less interesting to read.
I don't know where the blog is going. But I'm ready to start a new life and embrace it with passion and an unquenchable fire.
So here goes.
