To be.

Today I am feeling very nostalgic and I wasn’t ready for it.  You know that head-space that makes protecting your heart a bit easier?  I’m not there today. 

A friend quit one of my improv groups today.  For personal reasons – he needs to focus more time on his family and wants to feel less over-extended, which I totally understand, but I am unreasonably saddened by his departure.  Not only is he exceedingly funny and smart and an overall awesome guy, I really like performing with him. I really like touring with him.  He is one of those people who the more you know them, the more you like and respect them.  Those people are very very rare. 

I am also feeling more than a little lost.  I’ve been working so hard during the day.  I’ve been so focused to make that part of my life a success that I’ve lost focus on what makes my heart sing.  I haven’t been auditioning.  I haven’t been self-submitting. I haven’t been sitting in at open calls.  

One of the worst slash hardest things about being an actor is that you can literally NEVER relax.  You can never take a break or a rest.  Because then people forget about you and you stop working.  If you stop hoofing it, even for one month, when you get yourself back in the game you essentially have to start all over.  

I am tired.  

But not so tired that I am wiling to stop trying.  Not so tired that I am willing to accept my daytime life as my only life.  My daytime life is making my hair turn grey.  My daytime life is sucking whatever kindness I have left in my heart dry.  My daytime life is giving me angry wrinkles.   My daytime life makes it hard for me to enjoy and embrace my night and weekend life because I’m so tired trying to do both.  I am exhausted.   My friend choosing his daytime life over his night/weekend life makes me sad.  I know that everyone gets to a point where you decide that what you love can either become your livelihood, a fond memory or it officially becomes just a hobby.  I am so close to (and have lived in) the livelihood camp that I just cannot imagine a world where I make the hop over the fence into the hobby grass.  

I mean, I can actually, but I would die a little every day.  I can see how much easier my life would be if I gave in and sold out.  I can see how much more free time I would have.  How much more productive my social life would become.  But I also can see that making that choice would kill me a little every single day.  I would become an empty hallow shell of a person and I just can’t. I just can’t. 

So I’ll take my big-girl pill today and accept that as an adult I will just always be tired.  My immediate desire when presented with free time will always be to take a nap.  I will be forever multi-tasking.  I will forget what it is to feel relaxed.  I will keep fighting the fight to be a balanced, secure AND artistically satisfied person.  I will keep waking up and pushing myself to be do more.  To BE more.  

To be.

Doritos.

Dear kid eating Ranch-Doritos on the 7 train,

1. Chew with your mouth closed. 
2. Chew with your mouth CLOSED. 
3. Don't lick your fingers and then grab the pole for balance. 
4. Definitely don't lick your fingers after grabbing the pole for balance. 
5. If you cannot talk with your mouth full without spraying slobbery chip bits everywhere, mayhaps don't talk while eating. 
6. More over, chew with your mouth closed.

Many thanks.  

-Humanity

Boss of me.

As I write this my dog is on my lap eye-balling the day old luke warm re-heated pizza slice that I’m calling my lunch.  She cannot understand why I won’t let her eat any of it. 

Is my dog the boss of me? Yes.  Yes she is.

I have an aunt who has spent most of her adult life adopting dogs and giving them more love than anyone could ever hope for.  When I was nine years old we drove (yes drove) to Texas from Michigan to visit her for a week.  During that week I got more sun-burned than a lobster, went to Mexico for the first time and was given a gold bangle that probably costs more than all my other jewelry combined.  I also have crystal clear memories of sitting down to dinner and watching her take a bite and then not one minute later stabbing some meat off her plate with the same fork and feeding it directly to one of her pups.  Even as a nine year old who thought bathing was for chumps and who washed her hands with soap so rarely that I’m shocked I didn’t die of foot and mouth disease, I remember thinking that was gross. 

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. 

There are things that I do so quickly and thoughtlessly now as a dog-mom that my dirty nine year old self would be appalled.  Well, suck it mini-past-me, because if I have to pull a dingle berry out of my dog’s butt to make her life easier, then I’m gonna do it.  If I end up spending more money on my dog’s food than I do on my own, then so be it.  If I schedule my extra-curricular activities based solely on how much time my pup has spent alone on a particular day, oh well.   If I occasionally brush her with my hair brush if hers is in the other room, then oopsies.  If my dog has more outer-wear options than me, or if I no longer have a “side” of my bed because I let my dog call dibs on what side she feels like each night, or if I no longer sit down on the subway when I have her because it means she can’t look out the windows, then tough.  Call a spade a spade I suppose because my dog is the boss of me.    

I will however, draw a line in the sand at sharing food off my fork.  That still, is just gross.

Another post about dogs.

When I was a little girl, my parents took me to see Black Beauty at the drive-in.  I cried for a full day after that movie.  I have distinct memories of being so upset when Black Beauty’s friend died (I think that horse’s name was maybe, Ginger?) that I crawled into my mom’s lap and cried harder than I had ever cried before.  After that, my mom started making the guys working in the video store fast forward the movies to make sure that all the animals were still alive at the end of the film.

There’s a video on YouTube of a little pug watching the end of that 80’s movie Homeward Bound, and it is one of the most delightful and yet heart breaking things I’ve ever seen. 

A) Because I know exactly how that little dog feels as he anxiously waits for Shadow to come over the ridge to find his family again.

B) Because I believe that little dog actually understands what’s happening in the story, and

C) Because even though I only watched that movie one time from start to finish, watching this 4 minute video of the last moments of the movie are enough for me to be a blubbering mess of tears. 

I just can’t do sad animal movies. Or books.  Jesus, reading the end of Marley and Me I thought my heart would stop I was crying so hard.   You want to kill off a person? Go right ahead.  You want to kill off or hurt an animal? Nope. No way. Not gonna watch or read it. Not in a million years.  I will google search the end of movies now to prevent any surprises.  I will read the last pages of a book before reading the middle so I can stop myself from connecting with the dogs before it’s too late.

Sometimes I look at my little dog and I want to cry because I know she’s going to die.  I started reading this book called The Dog Stars and there’s a section in it about how we have genetically altered dogs to be hypo-allergenic, and changed their DNA to adjust their size or sound or style, but why haven’t we been able to extend their life expectancy?  Having adopted a small dog, she’s probably going to live to be 15, 16 if I’m lucky. But that just doesn’t feel long enough.

When my family had to put my childhood dog to sleep, she was 12 (a wonderfully sweet golden retriever who never asked for anything but treats and more treats). My mom and dad and I were in the room when she took her last breath.  I remember thinking how quick it all was.  They carried her off to get her IV put in (because at that time her hips weren’t working very well so she had trouble walking on tile) and they wheeled her in on a cart.  She looked like a lioness; so beautiful and calm.  The vet asked us if we were ready and then injected the medicine.  Maybe one minute later she was gone.  Our barking, un-disciplined, love bucket of a dog was gone. 

My mom and I went to Kohls afterward, and spent $300 on who knows what. I carried around a throw pillow for a while, but I can’t remember if we bought it.  It’s been more than 10 years since and there are still moments when I go home that I open the door from the garage and expect that sloppy kiss and “scratch me” full-body lean.  Those moments don’t last long, maybe half a second or two, but a decade later and I still miss that dog.   How in the hell will I manage losing my long little odd-ball dog, that is only mine?  She has rescued me in every way and I am so grateful to have her.

And since this post was such a downer I will leave you with this anecdote.  My cousins’ had a leader-dog puppy for one year when we were all in high school.  They also had an adult golden retriever and this puppy – whose name I think was Josie, terrorized their older dog.  She was adorable, and ate everything.  I have one very specific memory of being at their house and both dogs were in the back yard.  The older one was pooping and little Josie followed right behind eating the poop as it came out.  I have never been more delighted or disgusted watching Nikki waddle/walk-poop while trying unsuccessfully to escape the gaping jaws of the poop-eating puppy.

Dogs are the best.

Future!

I am amazed by how often I think to myself “we are living in the future”.  Some strange technology designed to make our lives easier and make a job obsolete that amazes me.  We have TVs on the backs of airline seats. We have self check-out lanes in the grocery store.  Machines for recycling empty cans and bottles are now completely automated.  And our phones; dear God, our phones.  What the hell would we do without our phones?   I mean, my family had a rotary phone in our main room until 2000.  A rotary phone.  I remember typing my homework on a type-writer, and I’m only 33.  What must life be like for people in their 80’s?

It’s 2015 – and we really are living in the future.  I mean, isn’t this the year that Marty McFly fast forwarded himself to in BTTFII*? We don’t have self-drying Air-Jordan’s or hologrammed newspapers, but we don’t really even have newspapers anymore at all, so Hollywood wins that round.   

On New Year’s Eve this past week I found myself running in Central Park alone – freezing my ass off.  For the record, I was running as part of an organized race, and I was alone because my delightful friends were “wogging” ™ behind me, a combination of walking and jogging… they’d like me to clarify, they mostly walked. But beneath the awesome fireworks and in between convulsions of cold I realized a couple things.

1.  I am 33 years old.  I know, I know, I’m six months late on this one.  But shit. 33. Jesus was 33.
2. I am ready to live alone.  Be gone days of roommates. I want my own space that I can do with as I damn well please.
3. I would really like to feel like my life has a point.  That there’s a reason I’m on my own.  That there’s a reason I am still trucking along at the whole acting game with enough success to confirm my talents but not enough that I can bail on my daytime gig.  I would really like affirmation in the form of a steady and money-making performance gig.
4. I have never traveled anywhere completely on my own – and this year I’m going to do that.  Not to another country – but probably to Boston. I’ve never been there and I would like to visit.
5.  I work too much and too hard.  I need to relax more.

So, 2015. Here we are.  I am making a written promise now out to the ether, and to my mother who is my lone subscriber, that this year I will figure my shit out.  I’m a capable, single gal kicking butt in a city that eats people for breakfast, and I need to find ways to be happier.  There is a reason I’m here doing what I’m doing and this year, I will figure it out.  So in the actual future, not just the future in which we exist today, I can look back on this month and say “good for you, kid”. 

                      *Abbreviated to showcase my hip-ness. Back to the Future: Part II.