9:13 p.m. - 2007-01-11
To Wonderful Things, Long Overdue
I propose a toast: to wonderful things, long overdue.
I said that line at my father's wedding a couple of weeks ago. It was beautiful--the wedding, not just my toast, although my toast was probably the highlight of the evening. The minister was kind of scary in a dude-from-Poltergeist sort of way, and the chicken in rose-petal sauce was pronounced inferior to my own recipe, as was to be expected, but my toast to my father and stepmother, a toast that included the entirety of W.H. Auden's "Lullaby," because an English degree should be good for something, was truly moving. What can I say? I rule.
I chose the line--to wonderful things, long overdue--because my father and my stepmother have been getting married for about five years now. It was only recently--more than a year, I might add, after my father's brush with death--that they realized that it really was time, that they really did want to be married to each other. They had been waiting such a long time that my stepmother actually UPGRADED her engagement ring. When you've had your engagement ring altered, "overdue" doesn't BEGIN to describe it.
So I decided that, if toasting to love would be cliche, if toasting to the couple would be the easy way out, toasting to wonderful things, long overdue would be poetic, and also something of a personal toast. For, you see, I myself am hoping that this will be a time of wonderful things, long overdue, and today, on my birthday, in an effort to bring them about, I am enacting a wonderful thing, long overdue, and bringing back The Notorious RRZ.
And why, exactly, do you think I'm going to comeback?
Oh, come on, you know you want to.
You so don't deserve me.
Maybe that's true, but something tells me that you're not the kind of person who lets whether people deserve you or not get in the way of you giving it to them, whatever it may be.
MebbethestruebesumethetemmeSHUT UP! Are you always this aggravating or is this just because you're a year older?
I'm this aggravating when I'm happy, and when I know I'm going to get what I want.
Yeah, you're insufferable. So why should I come back?
Because I need you. I need you to say the words that I can't say. I need you to make me remember another time.
What, am I Jennifer Hudson now? Am I supposed to sing back that I've waited years to hear you say that to me and then launch into my solo?
Pretty much. You know you want to.
. . . shut up.
Look, I'm sorry I blamed you for my mistakes. It's just that I'm back in Austin now, and back trying to do theatre, and I look back at the past two years of my life--years that I haven't had you, by the way--and I feel like somewhere along the line something got lost. I got scared, and when I read what I wrote with your name I am astounded by how fearless I was. Fearless and funny and someone with a story to tell. I need you to tell my story now.
Well, I suppose that, if you need me, then I should respond to your address. That's what the Divine Judy B would say, no?
She sure would.
I don't come cheap, you know. There's going to be a price, some day.
I know. I'll pay it when it comes.
Alright then. Now back off, baby. It's time for mama to SANG!
By all means. God I've missed you.
I missed me, too. Ahem . . . is this thing on? It is? Anyone out there? No? well, I guess I'll just start and trust that sooner or later someone's going to show up, shall I?
I've been away for a while, Silent All These Years to quote a certain redhead I am still as fond of today as I was when I last wrote. It's been almost two years since The Notorious RRZ last graced the internet with his divalicious presence, but it's about time I got back in business. See, as I said, I'm back in Austin, which, truth be told, is not where I saw myself at 27. I thought that by this time I would have found a theatre and activist community in the Bay Area, met some fantastic boyfried through said community, directed a show or two, presented many a paper at many a conference, been well on my way through orals study, my dissertation committee set with Judith Butler somewhere on the team, maybe, just maybe, with a few chapters of a novel written. Maybe even the whole thing.
Excuse me, I need to go laugh my ass off at myself for a while.
Okay, sorry, I'm back. That was just too hilarious. The reality, I'm afraid, is far more bleak. Never got into the activist community. Attempts to find theatre community blew up in my face. Unable to find even a semi-suitable guy outside my department led me to crush on a guy inside my department with FANTASTIC results, let me tell you. I've been procrastinating on orals like you wouldn't believe, do not have a committe set up, except insofar as I know Judith Butler will NOT be on it, and although I did renew my love of writing I currently have a document going that resembles a novel in the same way that a pile of toothpicks resembles the Eiffel Tower.
I did present a couple of papers at a couple of conferences. That's something, right? Haha?
If you haven't seen the film Little Miss Sunshine, do so. Steve Carrell's Proust scholar is pretty much me if I were 10 years older, which is not to say that I won't be going through all this again when I'm 37, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't dream of assuming that I won't be as screwed up then as I am now, if not moreso.
Truth be told, the last two years have had a good bit of wonderful in them, particularly when it came time for me to be a teacher--my heart's getting a little warmer as I type that, AWWWWWWWgonnathrowupnow--but like those cold currents you get at the bottom of a lake even on a gorgeous summer day, there's always been something else, some false note that you barely notice but which drives you crazy, forcing you to kill and eat someone if you're Hannibal Lecter, whom I sympathize with on occassion. The cold current/false note is something that I hadn't had to deal with for a while, something that The Notorious RRZ was always able to overcome except when it came to talking to cute boys who worked at BookPeople.
Fear, folks. It's called fear, and it's like a tapeworm. It wriggles inside you at microscopic side and before you know it it's eating your tofu as soon as you swallow it, if you eat tofu, which I do, a lot.
If I had to trace it back, I'd trace it back to long before The Notorious RRZ ever went off the air. I'd trace it back to the day that StikiNiki told me that she and a couple of other women I knew were buying a house, and they were going to turn that house into an art space, and that they were thinking they wanted me to help them turn the back of the house into a theatre space that I would run, a space where I could stage any show I wanted.
Such is the stuff that dreams are made of. It was a dream come true. It would take guts to start a theatre company from scratch. It would take time and long hours, and no guarantee of income. But it would be the kind of thing that people wait years for and never get, and I looked that offer in the face and headed for the hills. The Berkeley Hills, to be precise, which while not as grandiose as The Beverly Hills certainly attempt to equal them in pretentiousness, BUT I'M NOT BITTER!
I wanted to go to graduate school. I wanted to be a professor. I think I still do, although I am no longer sure. I wanted to learn new things, and live someplace I hadn't lived before. I thought I could find another community like the one I had here, only this one would be in San Francisco, where God forbid I might meet a BOY! And he'd DATE ME! And all of that was true and is true but it was also true that I wanted to have my own theatre company and that I was scared, so between the two things I wanted I chose the one that was safest.
That . . . dudes, never again. And I say never again knowing I will choose the safe option again from time to time before I can stop myself--I did it just the other day with the first F2M trans boy I ever found myself lusting after, saying nothing only to find out later that he men as well as women--but in the name of God and Tori Amos let me stop myself when I can and be brave. Let me never fail to reach for what I want because I'm afraid I'll fall.
Falling is a funny thing. When I used to play original-flava Nintendo (this was before the Wii, children, back when graphics were a whole 8-bits and we had to wrestle our morning papers away from saber-toothed tigers) my total lack of hand-eye coordination (not my fault, never learned to crawl, I'm serious) led me to send Mario, Mega Man, and Samus Aran down to their fiery/toothy/spiky deaths in lava pools/piranha tanks/pits of, well, spikes. I hated when my characters died, though, so I'd always pause the game, get up, hop on one leg because one foot was usually asleep, and press the Reset button.
I have no idea if contemporary gaming systems have the Reset button, but they shouldn't. That button let me start things over from the beginning without feeling the penalty of falling. It prolonged my agony as I watched my little onscreen avatar suspended in midair, no doubt confused and terrified, feeling my own little pit of spikes inside my sleeping leg whenever it touched the ground. If I'd just let the guy--or girl, in Samus Aran's case, which you only found out if you won the game, which I never did, because, as I said, never learned to crawl--fall, I would have realized that even if you fall and die, you can still start over again.
And yes, yes, yes, I KNEW this. I did play the video game. This is a metaphor. Shut the fuck up. And besides, you usually lost points that you got back if you just reset thSHUT UP!
Right before I left Berkeley I threw myself off a cliff--again, metaphor, shut it. Remember a few paragraphs ago, when I wrote about a crush on someone, and I said it had FANTASTIC results, using the all-caps to simulate a sarcastic delivery? Well, for a very long time I'd felt feelings for this dude that I hadn't felt in a long time, and since he had a sorta-boyfriend in New York that gradually dropped the sorta, I never said anything, even when it looked like they were going to break up, because I wanted to play it safe. I didn't want to get hurt. So I just spent nights crying in a very Degrassi sort of way instead, because that was a GREAT use of my time.
A few weeks ago, I decided it was time to fess up, after a sequence of events that will get attention in a later edition of this diary because Notorious RRZ doesn't give a shit about revealing personal stuff anymore as long as the story is good, and is this a good one. But, later. I told him on my last night in town. It was relatively anti-climactic, and I won't go into specifics, except to say that he gave me a sympathy kiss that grossed me out because he is a mutant with no lips (that I adored, but still, no lips). But after telling him, I felt like this:
I had been in chains. And someone said to me, "You can take the chains off but you have to jump across this ravine." And the ravine was fucking deep and the rocks at the bottom looked fucking sharp. So I walked around with the chains, along with a lot of other people who had chains on like mine. And then I said, "Fuck it!" and took the chains off, and I ran at the gorge KNOWING that I was not going to make it to the other side. And I didn't. I fell. I fell and I landed and I broke every bone in my body. But I got up. And I healed, faster than I thought, although not as fast as Wolverine or the cheerleader from Heroes. But fast enough that I could stand on broken legs. And even though I was at the bottom of the gorge, I didn't have to go back to side I came from, with the chains. I could go up the other side, and it would take a while, and it would hurt like Hell, but I wouldn't be on the side with the chains anymore.
Neil Gaiman, as usual, put it much more succintly and much better: "In dreams, sometimes when you fall, you die. Sometimes you wake up. And sometimes, in your dreams, you fly." I suppose the corrollary I would make to that is, "The closest we can come to flying when we are awake is to fall without fear." Not a bad line, for a grad student.
So at the bottom of the gorge, I looked around and realized that, although I will never say that my attraction to the guy wasn't real or valid, I can also say I was distracting myself from the fact that I had chosen a safe route over a risky one. Or, perhaps, that I had fallen in love to remind myself that falling isn't so bad as never trying to fly. Regardless, the feeling I felt after I told him the way I felt--a feeling that, if I recall correctly, is known as courage--was one that I had not known for a very long time. It was a feeling that, once upon a time, made me an artist, and a good friend, and, if the older entries are any indication, The Notorious RRZ.
I've been gone a long time. But I'm back. And baby, I'm long overdue.
My goals for this year are many. I will write 300 pages of a novel, and complete 6 short stories that I will send to publishing companies and contests. I will direct two theatre pieces. I will take my oral exams and get my Masters in English and creative writing. I will learn to play 3 songs on the acoustic guitar, which I got for Christmas (more later). I will visit Tanzania, hopefully along with Sarajevo (or Belgrade) and Cairo, because people that I love are there. I will apply to MFA programs in directing and experimental theatre, even if I choose not to attend. I will, hopefully, find some answers or solutions where I've only had questions and problems, and I have no intention of fooling myself into believing they will be easy. The road will be hard, with a lot of lava pool, piranha tanks, and the occassional pit of spikes. And no reset button.
But, seeing as The Notorious RRZ would never think about leaving such an entry without a song, I'll let the immortal sounds of Dreamgirls (which, by the way, is the first musical that I ever saw, and therefore the thing that made me gay) let you know how The Notorious RRZ plans to handle the situation:
I am chaaanging; tryin’ every way I can.
I am chaaanging; I’ll be better that I am,
But I need a friend to help me start all ohohohver again.
That would be just fine.
I know it’s gonna work out this time,
‘Cause this time I am, this time I aaaaaaaaaaam . . .
I aaam changing; gonna get my life together now!
I aaam changing; yes, I knohohohw how!
I’m gonna start again. I’ll leeeeeave my past behind.
I’ll change my life. I’ll make a vow,
And noooooothing’s gooooonna
Stop!
Me!
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow!
