There's a riff in my head that is very exposed and simple, like the way (meaning what it is when) I want. It's from "Passing Strange." The song is called Amsterdam. And it is so pretty, and I think it says ME right now better than words can (not because it's pretty; that's not what I meant).

Tonight will be a process of growing thicker skin. Every night of the week, I bet everyone grows thicker skin, as a reward and a retaliation for living through another 24 hours. There's a scene in one of the Chronicles of Narnia books where the jerk kid Eustace has a dream where he keeps shedding his skin and it is very painful, but eventually he's better than he ever was before. I suspect this is biblical. There's a shake, rattle and roll to rebirth I guess--wipe off the water of the day and be dry in the morning, ya dig?

A New Era

Down with wallowing! Down with fretfulness and forgetfulness, fear and mock self-deprecation! Down with wasted time, passive aggression, list of worries and guilt! Down with excessive exercise! To hell with treating love like a quest, to whining instead of acting, to talking more often and more loudly than thinking, than writing! FUCK COMPARISONS! This is a new era. These are my resolutions. I am getting older, it is true, but so is everyone else.

These are some questions I have been thinking about:

Is a relationship "worth it" if it doesn't lead anywhere? Are we--am I--actually capable of enjoying transient things while knowing that they are transient, of actually living in the moment?

How is it that some people can make a relationship work and others cannot? What is the formula, what is the fear, what are the things that break our backs?

How is it that people you don't even know can hold power over you? What is a CRUSH?

How do the excuses we make hold us back? If we believe in our faults, do they actually gain more power? 

Do you really kill the thing you love the most? And how do you do it? Is it really you, having too high expectations and being disappointed and so killing it for yourself? Or when you invest so much in something, do you experience guilt and possession and ultimately face the reality before you face the imagination?

Is everything we do--no, more like CAN everything we do be really self-love? Are we masturbatory creatures by nature, do we idealize and put so much stock into everything because we want to see mirrored back to us only the most perfect versions of ourselves? Is this all love? Is this any love? Can love ever really be selfless?

The concept of being separated from everyone by six degrees.

Something I've Been Working On:

And all men kill the thing they love,
  By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
  Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
  The brave man with a sword!

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

MOVEMENT ONE: try-outs.

 (Girl. Wearing glasses. Looking sheepish and frumpy. Clears throat, unfurls piece of very messed-up paper, looks around furtively, clears throat again, begins):

THINGS TO SAY/ QUESTIONS FOR/ UNRIGHTEOUS FURY DIRECTED AT/ A LIST OF THINGS AND RELATIONSHIPS AND CONTEXTS I DO NOT/MAY NEVER UNDERSTAND/ AVOID/ TO THE WORLD, TO THE VOID, TO JESUS CHRIST (pause) No, not Jesus Christ (pause, push glasses up, take out pen and erase this part)—TO MY MOTHER, TO THE BOY I AM IN LOVE WITH ACROSS THE HALL, TO MY BEST FRIEND, TO MY CAT: I am here. I am…announcing my presence to you. Welcome! (Lamely, coughs, tries once more for emphasis) Welcome!

So I’ve been doing a lot of research, since last we spoke.  About beginnings and endings and the stuff in between. (Each line is a totally new thought)

I wrote a story.

It’s not finished.

You can’t read it.

I’ll tell you about it.

I’ll…show you.

(Scurry to a corner where she turns on a light, “illuminating” a table in a cafe. A big mannequin is sitting at. Loud mood music. I have to talk kind of loud above it all.)

This is the café where two people fell in love one night. This one (motion to the mannequin) is Hildegart Sanchez Ramirovelta DeLaSoul Lasienaga Lasagna Pastille Monroe DeMarco. All of her friends called her Hilda. She loved to dance and her feet were like ice, or velvet or something, because they were so easy. She was so good at it. (Getting into it)

I sat across from them and I watched it all. I was by myself. She sat like this (shoving mannequin off stool, getting carried away), she was beautiful. It was night-time. Everything she said was unintentional poetry. (affecting Bette Davis):

I just adore old automobiles. Means of time travel. Old hats, old kid gloves, old standards of beauty, old books, old perfumes, old movies. Anything that had enough sense of a past to be chuckled at fondly, or shrugged off, or re-invented in the new millennium through some kind of stupid fashion craze. I hoard old things I find: ticket stubs, baseball gloves, board games, lamp shades. I walk  into every antique store. I simply do not concern myself with now very much at all, I am that outrageous.

Not until Tim, that is. (Snapping out of it) I mean, I don’t think his name will remain Tim, but--these are just some ideas. This is brainstorming. This is fiction. This is not fact.

Tim was either ruddy and unremarkable with a good smile or very tall with shoulder-length hair he wore in a sort of pony-tail or had very good taste in music but no sense of style or jumbled teeth and a guitar case or steel-framed glasses or a secret or a rather large penis and bright eyes or he smoked while driving his Subaru and had all these piercings which she hated but forgave or was a writer or was a veterinarian or was a wanderer or was a drummer or just had nice air about him, I guess. They sat here and she was breathtaking, looking at him, and he was breathtaking, looking at her, so I looked at them, obviously and ironically, I looked at them for either a few months or days or minutes or years I can never remember, but then we all got older, were kicked out of the restaurant, and sort of started to think about more important things.

They were mean to each other. They did and said unkind things. I watched from the outside, completely helpless. Like my favorite television show.

One day she looked in the mirror: (draws the curtain back to reveal a ghastly skinny mannequin, drops the real thing, looks smaller, somehow) She screamed: (scream!) and she knew right then and there that it was all over, that it was kaput. Because when you’re carrying around someone else’s heart it is always fat, it is always heavy, it is every single thing that you do, it is a feast, but suddenly she was so skinny and she knew it was gone, the both of their hearts (but for some reason men never seem to get as skinny…) but anyways she was thin and drawn and no longer beautiful. She hated him for it, even though it was her fault, too.

Hilda wanted to be the kind of person who read the paper and played the mandolin, never the kind of woman who sat by the phone. She wanted to write long and lovely poems about nothing to do with love or lack thereof, but maybe baby rabbits, or Niagara falls, or you know, Presidents and the way Gouda cheese tastes. She wanted to see Havana alone, she wanted to cut her hair short and eat as much ice cream as she liked and most of all learn to cry, because it was so weird, she had never learned how to.  (Dancing with the mannequin) I guess she will someday.

She doesn’t want to now, though. Even being skinny did not make her want to do anything. (Dropping the mannequin)

Hilda could think of nothing but Tim even though her name was so much better. And this was the only thing she thought knew how to do, (unexpected fury) THE ONLY FUCKING THING...“this” meaning dance.

But the problem is, I can’t think how to make her real. Most likely, in fact, she was a dream. But I think it’s a good story anyways. Anyway, that’s what I have so far. 

It's the weirdest thing, changing. I guess by nature of being CHANGE, it's always so different than how I imagine it. Like how spending so much time wanting something, and then suddenly not wanting it and not even missing wanting it...that's change, right? Abrupt and bizarre and unexpected and completely unfor-see-a-ble, but it's not like you're blindsided because more than likely it's been happening slowly for a long time, and only feels strange and new when you really stop to think.

It is almost time to go back to New York. I have been home for almost four months, which is almost half of a year (kind of). My summers are like sandwiches, usually, and this one was no different: I was uncomfortable and bored going in, got adjusted and had fun, now I'm uncomfortable and bored going out. I guess that's just the pinch of transitioning; we are so adaptable as human beings, right?

THINGS I'M EXCITED ABOUT

-seeing my best friends. SOOOO MUCCCCCCCCCCHHHH

-working again

-auditioning

-being in New York

-going to yoga every day (if all goes according to plan...)

-cooking for myself!

-wearing exclusively cute outfits

-becoming a better actor and writer

-lookin for love in all the wrong places

-COW!

-being on my own again

-this image of myself I have where I sit and write away in cute little coffee shops all over Manhattan

-Park Slope picnic

-my birthday!

-familiar faces

-being a mentor

-new friends! NEWNESS!

hahaha what a goofy list. Well to be fair, I'm not exactly forcing these thoughts on anyone. 

THINGS I HAVE DONE, THINGS THIS SUMMER HAS MEANT:

-getting a driver's license

-learning I never want to work in food service or child-care ever again

-shopping in the excess

-re-connecting with old friends in the easiest, most lovely way

-coming in to sexual power muahahaha

-noticing semi-unpleasant things about my family and why I probably cannot do this (meaning stay at home for four months) again

-missing New York, and Adin, and Liz and Molly and Will, and all my dearest friends oodles and oodles

-The Brusterhood of the Traveling Pants

-most likely gaining 45 lbs

-not thinking very much, not writing very much, being lazy enough to let myself exist in a kind of staticky limbo

I'm declaring myself asexual. Boys stink. 

Adam Sandler, The Spinners and The End of Youth (Why I Guess I'll Have to Hold on to My Facebook, in any case...)

I went to see a movie today about living an honorable life. It was called "Funny People," and it was written and directed by Judd Apatow, and it had a lot of heart but I thought it was too long and not especially funny, all things considered. I went to see this movie with someone I used to know. We has gone to high school together and bonded over poetry in Creative Writing class. There was a time in my life when this person would come and sit with my friends and I during lunch and we would flirt obnoxiously; during this time I was also involved in a long-distance relationship with someone I loved. This all feels like way back when, but was really just a collection of months ago. Not even a developmental phase, or the time it takes between leap years. Note: everyone involved in this backstory (except some of the cast of "Funny People"... is still very young.

I usually hate "first dates" with a fiery passion, but I was at ease on this one. Maybe this was because it wasn't technically a date--but in any case, it was the first time I had been around this person outside of school, one on one. I thought there would be a lot of...something...in the air between us: worry or trepidation or chemistry or even a little bit of bitterness, maybe. I was probably being dramatical. We laughed when "Funny People" was funny, we talked easily during the previews. And then at the end, leaving to go home, we talked about high school and the way all of these people in our lives now are fading away. This is a paraphrasing of that conversation:

Boy: "I mean, it happens. Did you really think WE were going to get together? I mean honestly?" 

Girl: "No, I guess not."

Boy:  "And we'll probably never see each other again. Think about it."

Girl: "What? No!..."

Boy: "Think about it!" (Meaningful look).

People don't usually say things like this in my real life--at least not in common conversation. This is of course one of those brutally honest things that is pessimistic and not necessarily but probably true; as such, blind optimists like myself tend to be thrown off guard when they are spoken aloud, supposedly because this is what makes them become true. After he said this, I hugged my friend goodbye and I watched him walk away while I did the same, and suddenly it was like this emotional landslide just opened up in my chest: what had any of this (this being the worry, the excitement, the friendship itself, the 10 bucks-a-ticket), all of this, been for? 

I am a neurotic actress. Lately, I am always having an existential crisis. But walking away from me now was a year and a half of guilty flirting, a maybe-reason for breaking up with a boyfriend, a perfectly good non-date, a friend, a summary of my boy mentality in high school--and it was called 'over.' People do not call things 'over' where I come from; they watch them fade and pretend to do something about it or pretend to care as it limps quietly away. And what scared me the most about this whole transaction was the actual feeling I was feeling as we said goodbye, which was not much of anything, really. I was reaching out for a sadness or a fondness or even a chuckle that wouldn't come--it was like that song in 'A Chorus Line.' I felt...nothing. And true to everything I was told this year as a freshman in acting school, this emptiness was actually worse than anything else I could have imagined thinking.

We are told all the time to seize the day, and live for the present, and that is what I suspect a lot of people think of when they lament their lost youth: seize the day. Toke up. Ravage your body with alcohol. Contract STDs. Stay out all night. Find love, break hearts, steal cars, make rock n' roll, study what you want to study, travel, do it all fast before a mortgage can get you. But being young isn't about any of those things on a moment-to-moment basis; at least not for me--the thrill of all the action is actually in that promise of having a very distant tomorrow. We take risks because we believe ourselves to be invincible, and we need to test the theory to keep things interesting. No teenager I've ever met has "lived for the moment"  more than any bona-fide adult; they are simply living to make memories. We are living for the future, and when the future is limitless and seemingly unending, you can get as high as you want and there won't ever be a consequence. There's a reason it's not cool to be an old hippie or a Rolling Stone anymore--they're disproving our theory, invading our turf; this is how young people are supposed to act, we are supposed to "get it out of our system"--and our bodies are nubile and our minds fertile for just that purpose. Adam Sandler and the cast of "Funny People" seem to understand this truth more deeply than anyone else I can think of at the moment, as irritating as that movie was: in the film, Adam Sandler contracts a rare blood disease and is forced to figure out what he's living for before he dies. And there it is again, this phantom measurement for relationships: what are they FOR? And if something is not for anything, is it pointless? It not for love, not for sex, not for friendship, not for any visible end but only for the actual seconds of the now, the very day, the three and a half fucking hours of "Funny People", is it worth it? Is it worth anything?

I am young. I have not seen very much of life. The world has always felt so limitless to me that I'm not even, have never even been worried about the scant few hundred dollars I have in my savings account, or the fact that I'm a Drama major. I do worry about finding love and being crazy and L-I-V-I-N to make memories; I go about exhausting and testing my mortality as thoroughly and as gleefully as the next college freshman. I'm in that teenage girl limbo-land where I suffer from severe self-obsession via egomania but a conjunctive case of shit-low self esteem and image problems; I am hypersensitive to me, I am a paradox. And with this kiss, this relationship, this bad date I could have told all my friends about over cosmos that did NOT happen, I find myself at a loss: this is not a list, a meditation, adventure or experience, it was a moment, and it is over. 

And you know what? I think I would much rather stay invincible. I do not like this new sensation that jumps out like a light being turned off in a crowded room or (v. cliche) a window being slammed shut when it's warm outside: I do not, as I had thought I would, like this feeling of getting older. I do not like it at all. 

Old School

I was thinking about time today. It occurred to me, halfway through a post-hangover Chipotle run (you know how food tastes super super delicious when you first get over a hangover? Is that just me?) that there was a time in recent memory where it was like a big fucking deal to be able to finish a burrito in one sitting. We used to sit in awe of one another's ability to eat...and this was the same time in my life when my friends and I would hear rumors about people "doing drugs" and recoil in fear and shock. But now I laugh at the burrito quest as I demolish my carnitas: all of the causes I championed and things I believed in when I was, say, fourteen, are now little more to me, retrospectively, than overzealous silliness or self-righteousness. I even look at my little sister, who is this beautiful young thing immersed in a world very different from the one I occupied at her age, and I can't even find a shred of sympathetic connection. Do you actually forget what it feels like to be a certain age, once you move past it? Is it like pain in that way, as in your sense memory won't retrieve it no matter how much of the circumstance you recall? 

I don't know why but it makes me sad...especially during this summer where I have totally subverted the static of my pre-college life; I've been chasing the same boys, making the same money, doing the same jobs now for most of high school, yet everything feels different now that I'm older. If this is supposed to be "perspective" I feel shortchanged: it feels more like prejudice, a narrowing of my mind...like I'm growing out of my blissful, imaginative Peter Pan complex and entering Boringville and Practicalland (nyuk nyuk nyuk). I mean, I think about real estate and casual sex the same way I used to think about Good Charlotte songs and elaborate games of Barbies...and while the former are arguably more important now, they weren't then. It's kind of silly. Maybe maturity is just a really nice, fancy way to say "pretending we are getting cooler while really just allowing ourselves more leeway because we have power and are secretly shocked at our own inabilities to actually learn from our mistakes".  Maybe I don't believe in adults. 

MY FAMILY ON VACATION: LOVEBOAT MEETS CABIN FEVER

There is not really a dusk in New York City; not one like this, anyways. I tend to hate idyllic stories of country life and landscape paintings and nature hikes, but it actually feels like my heart can slow down sitting here, in a white iron-wrought beach chair with mosquitoes just beginning to swarm, as my relatives play croquet (cousin Chris strums guitar) and the ocean laps laps laps like…like nothing, really. There’s not a perfect simile for peace.

            It’s nice to see people smiling. It’s nice to see them free. That’s the thing about families, allegedly: we are supposed to be our most candid in the circles where we don’t expect judgment or fear dislike. It’s a hotbed of neuroses and faces without make-up and nudity with abandon crammed into this island house: we sit and kind of simmer in our most grotesque humanity as the world moves by slowly around us, it meanders, rather than marches or clicks or stomps impatiently, demanding things of us. It’s almost strange having nothing to do—I for one have to look for ways to keep my hands and my mind busy. My mind will wander to very dark places indeed, left to its own devices.

            In an old secondhand bookstore halfway between our house and Vineyard Haven I crouch uncomfortably in the biography section looking at the diaries of Anais Nin. I know nothing about her but her face is so easy to remember on the jacket: heavily made-up eyes that don’t look directly at anything I can see, the way they sit kind of sadly in her face. I buy a stack of plays (I’m supposed to love reading plays, as an actress, but I’m twinging with guilt as I reluctantly fork over my first twenty for a stack of August Strindberg that honestly just looks super-dooper boring). I wheeze biking home; this is embarrassing. There’s a roll of fat around my middle nowadays that I swear wasn’t always there, that I swear comes and goes according to my self-esteem. Today it rages and wiggles like a giant spoonful of chocolate pudding, I mean if you look at it up close and study it like only a teenage girl or a precocious, observant little kid could. Things like this drift in and out of my mind, slow travel of cumulus clouds and lines of poetry I love and the sensation of toothpaste swilling in my mouth before I spit it back into the porcelain basin I share with my sister and two cousins: it leaves a trace, though. Everything leaves a trace.

            My grandmother gets up ten minutes before the last person has finished eating dinner like clockwork every evening, tottering towards the kitchen where she begins a slow and steady and scrutinizing scour of all the kitchen surfaces. She moves with strain and caution, having been the harbor for a vicious case of advancing rheumatory arthritis for the past twenty-five years of her life, but the twitch of pain I think I see in her face as she lurches away from the edge of the table (where she perches and does not sit, does not ever fully relax…) just makes me mad these days. I wonder why she feels this is her cross to bear, why she shoulders this burden of cleaning up after a massive dinner for fifteen when every other willing adult in the room has offered at some point to help. I’m tempted to write this off as yet another thing I do not understand, could not understand, about being a mother, but people treat this daily exercise like we are humoring her and she soldiers forward like it’s expected. Is this a cycle? I pause to think through a mouthful of something, anything (we eat well here) and there’s that shaving nick again: I am overanalyzing. Looking too deep into the fibers of what is supposed to be a really happy carefree vacation, noticing. People use the term ‘dysfunctional’ often enough when describing these entities, these knots of folks, but the more I think about it in this iron wrought chair overlooking the ocean I think there couldn’t be a worse term: we function, alright. We are perfunctory, mechanical, we operate, we cover-up: only our gears are sticky, our employees unenthusiastic, our product questionable. We are churning away with the reliability of the ocean waves year after year at our island escape, generation after generation of pain covered up for this single week of acknowledged family bliss, we are operating and doing and being everything we are supposed to be and then some, because we are puzzle pieces either forced or destined to fit together somehow…I guess I just wouldn’t buy what we’re making, if I were…shopping for it. There’s no real freedom in people, I don’t think. It’s always a little darker inside a house than it is outside.