My First Improv

My parents enrolled me at a local Kindercare, shortly after my brother was born, when I was four. After a few weeks or months there, the Kindercare was going to put on a "circus performance" for the families by the children. The day that roles were cast, I was so excited! Kids were going to be doing the "acrobatic acts" as well as the "animal acts" and clowning and taming. It was going to be a ball!

Casting day came and roles were divvied up. Molly got bupkus. I wanted to be anything; I didn't care. As an adult, I now suppose there were probably reasons for divvying up the roles the way they did, but as a kid all I got out of it was: "sorry. not even leftovers for you." I'm sure some of the shafted kids didn't care, but as one who's always had a performing bug, this was an insult. (Seriously, it was a circus under the direction of amateurs, at a Kindercare in the Panhandle of Texas. It's not like talent or skill were important.)

During the next few weeks, the kids in the "circus" would break out in their groups to practice their parts. I remembered watching them thinking, "I could do that. Pfft. That's easy," and all those other armchair quarterback observations. I really did watch carefully.

Circus day came - must've been a Saturday - and I had been talking it up at home. I don't know how much my parents knew of it. I don't know if they thought I was performing ... they must've known I wasn't, but ... I was very eager to get to the Kindercare. Dad took me. Mom stayed home with my brother. The show had already begun when we walked in and almost as soon as we walked in, a volunteering mother eyed us and hurriedly waved us over to the entrance of the kitchen which was being used as a dressing room. "We have an extra bear costume," she explained worriedly, "are you a bear?" This was my in. Dad seemed not to know. I couldn't get busted! I nodded. Dad took his seat in the audience and I followed the mother into the kitchen. To this day, I can feel the excitement of vindication that I felt in that flourescent-lit kitchen.

The costumes for the bears were nothing more than brown paper grocery sacks turned inside out and cut with eye - and because we were so little, I believe arm - holes. In retrospect, it's quite clear to me there were extra costumes made because paper bags tear easily, so it would be best to have extra on hand. There was not an extra costume because some kid was a no-show. I remembered watching the bears rehearse quite well. There were three kids. There just happened to be four bags. I knew the routine. When these kids rehearsed, I didn't play with the other stage rejects, I watched them. I knew it.

It was time to go out. The other kids seemed to hardly notice that I was there. It was as if the other bear materializing out of no where was just as expected as anything else. Their non-chalance - and let's face it, lack of awareness - just played into my plans. We bears were called out to "the ring" and the tamer began giving us our commands. We stood on one leg danced or did whatever the hell it was the bears were supposed to do. But something happened that I didn't account for in my rush to get my just performance. The bear routine was crafted for three bears, not four. That meant, if we were supposed to stand on balls, there were only three balls to stand on, etc. The only part of the routine I remember with any clarity was the "bears sitting in chairs" routine. We walked over to the chairs and were ordered to sit. I had none so I sat on the floor. I remember the audience laughing, and feeling simultaneously embarrassed and elated. Embarrassed because my grand scheme at vindication clearly was ill-devised in the prop department, but elated because the audience was reacting to me, not the other three kids. I was both chastened and proud. To this day I don't know if Dad knew I faked my way into the performance.

I long considered that my most embarrassing moment. I don't any more, but yesterday, after years of considering it my introduction to public performance, I thought about it from a different perspective. It's kind of a metaphor for my cycles of depression and feelings of failure: I desire it. I'm denied it. I try it. It doesn't go perfectly and I end up embarrassed and without a proper chair. Sure, that's just life and that's how it goes for everyone, so I should stop complaining. But I've got a good personal anecdote to use as a metaphor.

marrying within one's religion: a response to a friend

This began as a comment to a post on Virginia Gal's blog. But per usual, I rambled, and felt like it would be too much for a comment.
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VirginiaGal, i know exactly what you mean about wanting to marry within your religion.

in my brief dating experience, i only ever really dated atheists, agnostics and generally areligious types. for the most part, all nice boys: good kissers, with whom i just did not ultimately click. marriage was far from my mind, but i assumed if i DID marry, i'd marry an atheist, agnostic, areligious type. when Honey and i started dating, the common religious faith was liberating. finally, i was with a guy who understood why i held dear the things i did. one of the things i miss most about going to church these days is holding his hand during the lord's prayer and resting my hand on his knee during communion. other boyfriends and paramours had attended church with me before, but i never felt connected to them during service. i'd feel like they were humoring me. with Honey beside me, worship feels more worshipful. had i married an areligious boy, i doubt we'd bless our meals the way Honey and i do at home. not everyone feels the need to do it, but it's a ritual that i feel keeps me daily contact with God, my sustenance and my family, for the moment we pray. so I'm glad Honey shares that value with me.

there is no doubt in my mind that many people's cultural lives and spiritual lives are immensely enhanced by marrying outside their religion. and who knows? if Honey and i hadn't met - at church, no less - maybe i would've been blessed by a great Jewish or Buddhist guy with whom i felt some spiritual bond. you really never know who God has in store for you. ... which is part of the reason why i think it's good to date without too much regard for religion. you don't have to marry every guy you date: that would be like feeling obligated to buy a car just because you test drove it, or a ball gown just because you tried it on. you need to see how other cars handle and how other gowns fit. you can still learn a lot about life and about yourself by dating people you'd not expect yourself to date. (you'll KNOW when it's right to marry someone. it'll be so mutually undeniable it'll catch you off guard.)

nonetheless, i do feel like if your religion is the guiding principle of your faith, marrying within your faith is critical. just a quick note here: i just realized i said "marrying within your faith." i could've said marrying within your religion. marrying within religion is easy. there are plenty of Christian guys i could've married; there are plenty of Muslim guys you can marry. people can share religions, but if they do not share a common faith, then religion is irrelevant. for instance: plenty of Christians i know are great people, but the focus of their faith is preparing for the second coming, let's say. my Christian faith is more focused on loving the heck out everyone i come in contact with, even when i don't want to; and social justice. we're still both Christians with common tradition and text, but our faiths are different. don't marry a Muslim guy just because he's Muslim. share a faith as well as a religion.

... now if you'll all turn to page 284 in your hymnals ...

sorry for the sermonizing. i guess it runs in the family. ;) all that is to say, VirginiaGal: i understand why you want to marry a Muslim. just never sell yourself short.

Okay, i GOTTA get ready for work.

Chicken or the Egg

After having burned Sonnjea with a picture of another cat whom she thought was mine, I figured I should make amends. To the right is a picture of CootyCat, strutting his stuff on our bed. Isn't he sexy?

This week was crazy hectic. I had to help get a proposal out the door at work which kept me there till 8:30 on Tuesday and 9:30 on Wednesday. I had a rehearsal on Wednesday which I was sorely in need of and looking forward to, and I missed it. Not to mention school in all this. Thursday and Friday are a blur.

For the last few weeks - maybe even the last couple of months - I've been feeling insignificant in my own life. It's a scourge that swells and remits in my heart from time to time and in the last 10 days or so, it's been particularly hard to ignore. Several times this week I've been on the verge of tears for no reason and have had to swallow them. That's not common for me. Yesterday morning, after a good work-out walk with my fitness group, I visited my therapist. I hadn't seen her for several months - I only go if there are issues I'm having problems resolving - and I thought, "it's not good to feel insignificant in one's own life; let's go get some help." She agreed. As this really is something that has been plaguing me on some level for the last several years particularly, we're going to keep meeting regularly until I iron out.

In the meantime, I've been trying to figure out exactly why I feel so insignificant and replaceable in my own life. My parents did an excellent job in making me feel worthy, valued, safe and loved. Certainly there were episodes with peers which made me feel devalued - that's the evil of adolescence - but my safety net at home was strong enough to carry me through to adulthood unscathed and able to live past those moments. I have never felt anything other than love and admiration from Honey. So this feeling is not from my most significant and intimate relationships.

Aside from the highly probable prospect that this is just some inherent malady that I'm going to have to treat on occasion for the rest of my life (like emotional plantars fasciaitis or something) is that this feeling of insignificance is social and/or professional in nature. And that I'm 30. Apparently, women are most likely to enter therapy for the first time around age 30 because that's the age when society has the most pressure on them (marry? kids? career? etc). Shortly after getting married, trauma touched our household which left me feeling completely incapable of affecting the world around me, among other things. A few years later, I was laid off from a job that I didn't like but didn't want to be laid off from. On top of that, we live in a metro area almost entirely populated by high achievers. And everyone is very convinced of their own opinions.

It's beginning to get me down that I have peers who are much further ahead in their respective careers than I am. I know I'm not alone in just schlepping through, but still leaves me wondering what I have to offer that at age 30, after 7 years in the workforce, I'm still at entry level admin positions.

As far as the opinonatedness: I too have always been an opinionated person, but since my youth, I've made concerted efforts to be more open to other peoples' opinions or at least the experiences that have shaped them. I don't claim to be 100% open to 100% of all viewpoints - it's certainly a struggle for anyone, and probably not necessary - but since youth, I think my sympathy for others' points of view has grown. However in the last few years, I feel that when I offer a differing POV or an argument or explanation for another POV (which even I may disagree with) in discussion with others, people just knock it. And it's rare that others actually argue against the POV, it's just an instant dismissal. Seriously? There's nothing you can learn from an experience that is not yours or that does not agree with your viewpoint? So, I've learned to be more quiet in discussions where I may want to offer an alternate POV; my viewpoint is insignificant and if it does not agree with the prevailing view of the discussion, then any "devil's advocacy" I may want to introduce is insignificant as well. ... of course, my worst fear is that I behave this way to others. I'm sure I do: as much as I try to refrain from the knee-jerk dismissal, which we are all prey to that I complain about, I'm convinced I fail more often than not at restraining it. I'm so un-self-concious.

Whew. Maybe I've had a "breakthrough." Then the question remains: how do I assert my own significance to myself? I'll have to save that for later.

As for now, I vowed I'd trek to campus and cloister myself in the library until I'd written some good stuff this afternoon.

Live long and prosper!

yadda, yadda, red wine random ramblings yadda

This will be a rather yammering blog. I've little of import to say (do I really ever?) and I'm drinking an uninspired Shiraz right now and will probably switch to rum and Coke soon. This reminds me of a funny moment relayed to me by a friend in college.

Rob, a guy with whom I went to college, was at a party with random and assundry people. He was (maybe still is) a non-drinker. He was having pleasant conversation with a drunk girl - mostly pleasant because, as was his wont, he was endlessly amused by the intoxication of others. At some point, she slurs the request to him, "Hey, can you get me a cum and roke?" And Rob, because he is wise, witty and hilarious, thinks for a second and replies, "well, I'm not sure about the roke ..." ... and that my friends is where to end the good story.

Things are looking up at my new job. Three weeks in, still at the bottom of the food chain, but now becoming more of a "team player." While I'm expected to clear a lot of the administrative backlog, I've also been recruited to help write the proposal for a multi-layered project that's been dropped in our laps with about a week's prep. The topic of the project is extremely uninteresting to me, and I know proposal writing is kind of like eating cold oatmeal. Nonetheless, I'm very excited because I'm writing for work!! My dream is to write the creative ends of work, soon, but for now, I'm psyched to be hashing out the perfunctory ends. Tomorrow, I'll dedicate a few hours to the proposal - which, since I'll be uninterrupted, unlike I am at work, I may actually finish in a few hours - and a few more to plunking away at my thesis.

Yesterday in my post, I included a picture of a cat napping between some be-denimed knees. My brief apologies to those who thought it was my cat. I forget that now I own a digital camera (one of the last households to get one; even behind my Flintstone parents) thus, so far, the only picture of my actual animal family online is that of BabyDog on my post-Christmas post. BabyDog is the Corgi in that one. I googled the phrase "cat napping in lap" or some variation thereof and grabbed one of the first pictures I saw. It does just so happen, however, that the cat pictured does, in fact, strikingly resemble CootyCat. The resemblance is so uncanny that Honey actually thought it was CootyCat. So, way to go, random stranger on Flickr: you've duped the daddy of a kitty cat!

It was highly satisfying to read that I made Sonnjea laugh. I wasn't sure I constructed that joke well, so I'm glad it flew. Yea!

A vacation I've been wanting to take for at least 9 or 10 years now is a week out to far west Texas, where I used to live. With graduation coming up soon, and friends and family in the Lone Star state starting to have babies more and our grandparents aging and ailing more (Grandpa has some surger coming up in March), I've fantasized that flying out to DFW or Houston and driving around the state would be a great summer vacation for a week and a half or so. Honey is averse to road trips, but I was raised on them. Unfortunately, I don't have the behind-the-wheel stamina that I had as a teen or younger adult. So we'll have to see. Nonetheless, Mom called today offering hers or Dad's car if we decide to pursue that route. That would mean flying into Houston, and borrowing their car to drive 4 hours up to DFW to visit our DFW gang, then 3 hrs back to Austin to visit our Austin friends and another hour to San Antonio to visit our San Antonio family and then another 8 to 10 hours west to far West Texas to visit my old stomping grounds where I need to make my spiritual peace. The 3 and 4 hour trips are nothing. Honey and I both have made those drives solo many times. It's the 8 to 10 hour drive west I'm concerned about. We've not done a trip like that in about 3 years. And even then, I was so unused to it that Honey did most of the driving. It's really unfair. When I was 18 I could've done that length with my eyes closed, solo. If we visit our Texas kin this year en state, it will probably end up being a triangle visit (DFW, Houston, Austin/SanAntonio). A trip far west takes so much time that if we ever get to do it, it will probably be years from now. For now, I think it may stay just a fantasy. ... especially since a good friend is talking about taking a joint trip to Disney World; and Honey and I are always up for a trip to see the Mouse. You've got to tend to your inner child, you know?

Funny: when I was growing up , Disney World was so geographically and financially beyond our means that a trip there seemed completely unattainable. It was far easier to drive 10 or 12 hours to Santa Fe, NM to drop $300; or 3 or 4 hours to Chihuahua, Mexico to drop $150. Nowadays, we are so airportically linked that Disney is far more attainable than say, the ruins of Bandelier, NM. The latter is too far beyond our geography and vacation clock. It makes me sad.

... now, off to the Cuba Libre! (Sonnjea, stick with what works for you. If you do decide you need to switch to rum, I recommend Capt. Morgan's Private Stock or some other Puerto Rican good stuff. Think of it as an investment into your future. Pay a little more to inspire your muse a little more!)

what i like about this moment

1. a cat purring in my lap and a dog napping on the floor.
2. the rum in my rum and ginger ale starting to kick in.
3. finally knowing what to do with a screenplay i've been writing on and off again for the last 4 years!

Useful Things I Have Found at my New Job

Specifically, useful things I have found in my desk drawer or the drawer of the front desk where I am normally relegated to in other jobs but not this one!

1. O.B. tampons. I don't use OB, because I like to have a slightly more formal relationship with my vagina during the days we don't speak to one another. However, in an emergency, I might open up that line of communication if I had to.

2. A guide to praying the Rosary. I am not Catholic, and my prayers tend to be free-form and non-regimented. However, I suspect this guide could give me something to discuss with the Pope if we were ever trapped in an elevator together and a conversation about condom distribution in 3rd world countries turned out to be a non-starter.

3. Dirty U Clean Cotton body lotion. It looks like something from Bath and Body Works that I wouldn't spend the $12 for but for which I would pine and mooch off of fellow coworkers if they had it. Most immediately helpful item so far. As our highs the last week have been reaching up to the mid-20s, my little manos are chapped like crazy. Thanks Dirty U for softening my knuckles back up!

What treasures have you found left behind from other people?

From one Molly to Another

Much has happened in the week since my last post. Windows Vista was release and Barbaro was put down to name a few events. But the news that caught me off-guard and that has stuck with me, was the untimely passing of Molly Ivins.

I was first introduced to Ms. Ivins' writing my junior year in High School. A beloved aunt and uncle of mine had been reading her for years out of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and after what I'm sure was a lengthy conversation about ways to fix the state, the country, the world, etc, they clipped a few of her columns and mailed them to me. Reading those columns was like fortified cake for me. Here was a woman who was arguing points of view I agreed with not only more in depth than I would or could - almost any columnist could argue any side of any point better than I can - but with a rich colloquialism that came straight from my front porch. And her use of the language, counter to what we're conditioned to think, didn't harm the argument at all. She was "speaking Texan." I later read several of her early books and all I could do was smile. Her eloquence in the colloquial tongue and her ability to retain argumentative credibility just thrilled me.

Her use of language in any context was like walking on sunshine for me. In the early 80s, toward the end of her stint with the New York Times, covering the southwest, she reported on a ritual chicken slaughter in a small western U.S. town and referred to it as a "gang pluck." Her editor was mortified and demanded she change it. She refused. He canned her. The Times' loss was everyone else's gain. Ms. Ivins secured her niche in column writing.

There were no targets off limits to her. She has been known as - and certainly was - a liberal columnist, but she was by no means a lapdog to the democrats. If she saw injustice or flat wrongheadedness she called it and it didn't matter if the campaign sign for the subject of her piece was in her front yard. That was another thing I loved her for. And if a conservative was doing something right, she called that, too. Too bad, just days after her death, news that Gov. Rick "the Hair" Perry made Texas the first state to require HPV vaccines for girls entering 6th grade. I would have loved to have read what her response would have been.

I don't habitually read the opinion page in news papers. Most that I read anymore are in our subscription to Newsweek or online at other news sites. In the last few years, I have only read her column sporadically. In May of 2004, I sat down to read Bushwhacked. The scandal about Abu Gharib had just broken (and was breaking my heart), the divisive ire surrounding the impending election was really beginning to percolate. I found my own blood boiling so much surrounding the administration that I couldn't finish the second chapter, much less the second paragraph of any news article about them. There are times in one's life when she must simply deal with her own anger before reading more on a subject. The last 4 years have been such a time for me. I will go back to Bushwhacked sometime, but once I'm done with my blind fury. When I do, I know there will be good information delivered in linguistic gems.

I did not know that Molly Ivins had cancer. This explains why in the last year, the photo alongside her column on the Star-Telegram website showed her with closely cropped hair. Her passing is almost more of a symbolic personal loss. In the last 4 months, Anne Richards and Molly Ivins have both died. These are both women who inspired me by their language, their larger-than-lifeness, their willingness to proudly be a minority voice and their beautiful ability to hang quite easily with the good old boys. They, like my beloved aunt who turned me on to Molly Ivins, are the Texas women I crave to grow up to be: bold, socially concerned, articulate good old gals whose default countenance is a beaming grin.

To hear an interview with Molly Ivins, go here.

Molly Ivins is one of those people I'd've always loved to have had dinner with. My opportunities to do that in this life, limited here are they were, are over. I hope we can catch up in the sweet by and by when I leave this world. ... in the meantime, I guess I need to see what I can do to get on the dinner guest lists of Jimmy Carter and Bono!