10:21 a.m. - 2007-02-12
Mess Spelled Backwards
New T-shirt slogan: I don't want a mindfuck. I want a fuckfuck.
I came up with this yesterday when talking to my friend, Panda Woo (the nickname's a long story, involving an encounter with an adopted Asian child who had actually been named Lotus by her white parents). Panda is without question the best friend I have in the Bay Area, someone without whom I would have left grad school long ago, without anywhere near the strength with which I walked away this time. She and I hated a lot of things about the Bay Area, and about our lives, but as Avenue Q teaches us, it sucks to be us, but not when we're together. I definitely needed her yesterday, because it was one of THOSE days.
I don't mean one of those days when everything was going wrong. Those days are bad enough, but they're nothing compared to THOSE days. THOSE days are the days when there's this strange false note in the music in your head, where the stories won't come together, when all you really want to do is go out into the middle of a field and scream. THOSE days are not characterized by frustration at the car that cut you off or the phone that isn't working, but by the frustration that you're not where you want to be, you aren't doing what you want to do, time goes really fucking FAST, and you have lots of crap to do and miles to go before you sleep. THOSE are the days when you really, really don't want to be a grown up. Panda and I call THOSE days ones where you feel willful and petulant. You know your feelings are childish, and that just makes them worse.
My feelings were not entirely without cause. I have been trying to sort out the situation with a trip to New York that I'm taking this week to see my hero and secret lover, Stephen Colbert, with St. Caroline of the Nickel Slots. I was planning on staying through the weekend, taking the opportunity to see my friends up north, but the lack of time to rehearse the show I am doing is screaming in my ear like an old vacuum. I have thought about cancelling entirely, but I know that The Colbert Report isn't going to be on too much longer and I don't want to resent the play I'm doing for taking that away from me, so instead I will be paying out the nose for a new ticket to fly home Thursday. Then there was my father's birthday lunch, which I prepared (I made a DELECTABLE chicken in rose petal sauce) that, while a good gift and something I enjoyed doing, involved its own amount of stress. I also can't leave out the fact that, the evening before, I partook of something that I hadn't partaken of in almost six years, and the morning after I realized why it was probably a good idea that I hadn't done so. Nothing too severe, of course, but nevertheless something that had my head spinning for a while.
Of course, all of these were only additional factors around the central issue. I think you can guess. If The Notorious RRZ is stressed, you can bet that there's a boy involved.
The boy in question was a prospective student at a performance program at UT. He was nerdy and Jewish, which anyone who knows me recognizes as a surefire way to make me stand at attention, so to speak. He also self-identified as queer, and we spent a good long time talking about experimental theatre, queer identity, and our frustration at finding it so difficult to meet intelligent men. This should have ended in sex, but at a certain point he said that he wouldn't want to date me because finding a potential boyfriend would mean losing a potential friend.
I never vocally said that to my own tortuous crush object, but I was thinking it all. The fucking. Time. It's why I never made a move. It was the source of endless frustration. I have had two dreams about it, including one last night, in which I was frustrated because my best gay friend was dating Tortuous Crush Object, not realizing until I woke up that I was angry in my dream because Tortuous Crush Object was dating Tortuous Crush Object. It has occured to me that I was trying to tell myself that my Tortuous Crush Object is really in love with himself, never fear. But mostly, I think it was just a dream about the thing that I was feeling ever since this cutenerdyJewish boy showed up; that I wanted to call my old crush object for advice. I missed spending time with him, talking with him about so many of the same things I was talking with this boy about, wishing I still had that connection.
I called him. He didn't return the call. Oh well.
It's funny what I realize when writing in this diary. For example, I realized that the Jewish boy didn't have any interest in me whatsoever, for whatever reason. I sent the signals out and they came back negative. I wonder whether, if I'd been writing about the Berkeley boy in the same way, I would have come to certain realizations sooner.
As frustrating as totally failing to get laid is, things got even weirder when this new boy told me that he'd just been accepted to the performance studies program at . . . wait for it . . . UC Motherfucking Berkeley. At that point I started banging my head into things and pretty much continued to do so through yesterday, particularly when my love of cruel irony made me secretly hope that he would start dating my old crush object, just so I could have an excuse to buy that sledgehammer I always wanted. Because, you see, all signs point to this boy taking the spot at Berkeley. He kept trying to talk to me about it, asking me how he could say no to Berkeley.
Dude, I don't know how you can say no to Berkeley. I don't know that I can say no to Berkeley. I just--yeah, I don't know. I have no idea. I wish to God I did but I so totally do not. I have no idea whether you should go or not. I have no idea whether I should go back or not. Sometimes I think I should just go back, shut my eyes, and finish as fast as possible, and sometimes I think I should get my two MAs and go somewhere that will let me direct. One of my Berkeley profs insists that I can still go on to a performance position even if I do an English degree. Can I? I love literature, and writing, and performance, and directing, and I want to be able to do them all but it keeps seeming like I am going to have to pick one if I am going to succeed at all. Is that true? Do I have to cut out a part of myself?! Can't I do it some other way?! HOW?! Can someone FUCKING tell me HOW?!?!?!
Mindfuck, people. Much, much rather have had a fuckfuck.
Don't think for a second, though, that there wasn't another voice in my head, one that said, "You do know that, if he goes, and he's happy, and he keeps doing theatre, it means that Berkeley and grad school are fine and it's just YOU that sucks, right?" Whatever said that voice is still watching me.
So between the stress of putting on a show, the stress of trying to study for orals, the stress of trying to get my rocks off, and the stress of trying to figure out what I had been doing wrong all this time, I was barely coherent. I wanted nothing to do with people. I called a bunch of friends and finally reached Panda. Panda said something great to me. I said, "I'm sorry, dude, I'm just a total mess." She said, "Yeah, but everybody's a mess."
That helped. It reminded me of something that used to be the sig line on my email. Tori Amos, in her introduction to Neil Gaiman's Death: The High Cost of Living, says, "I know that mess spelled backwards is ssem, and I feel much better armed with that information." Not for nothing is Tori most frequently associated with Death's sister, Delirium, but like Delirium she has a surprisingly valid point. One can look at it a number of ways. Vicki, I think, might go for pointing out that the word has possibilities, that ssem could become sseminal, like the mess is that seminal moment in your life when things changed for the better. I, however, think about how the word makes no sense. At least if you're a mess, you make sense as a mess; you have more meaning than a word spelled backwards. Or maybe you shouldn't worry too much about messes because all you have to do is look at them another way to see that they're just a lot of nonsense, so why stress about nonsense when you can just enjoy it?
I emailed one of my professors, who said that it sounded like I was doing well, progressing through my orals lists with rapidity. I was surprised, because I was sure I was doing terrribly, falling hopelessly behind and totally lost in the woods. It took someone else to remind me that, at the very least, I am going forward, and that there are more options available to me than I necessarily see all the time. I may look at my life as a disaster, thousands of miles away from my main source of income, trying to put together a show in a month, alone and confused, with failure waiting if I make one wrong move. Everybody else, though, keeps telling me that what I'm doing makes sense, that if I can take time off to figure out what I want to do, I should, and that doing theatre an looking at MFA programs while still making the effort to pass orals is reasonable. Even my own parents tell me that they trust that I will make the right decision. God, that trust is scary sometimes.
I look around me in this coffee shop, and I automatically assume that everyone's life is put together, that there are people happy and in love, successful in their work, moving on to bigger and better things. Then Blondie comes on, right as I'm typing that--"Dreaming," one of my favorite songs--and right as I'm going to type that a lot of these people are just as much a mess as I am, and that I'm probably better at sweeping the mess under the bed when company comes than I think.
At least, I'm better at it now. Because I'm doing theatre, and on my way to rehearsal I felt better than I felt in days, and I'm going to New York but I can afford a trip back on Thursday, and I'll at least catch some friends of mine, and see Stephen Colbert. The mess is getting smaller. I should spell things backwards more often.
