2002-09-11 6:41 a.m.
kneejerk circle-jerk mentalities and no sleep

I can't sleep. Or rather, I can't sleep when I want to. I headed home last night, filled to the brim with the urge to go work out, head to the Sunset Park gym and walk until my legs burned and my heart raced...but on the train home...I don't know what it was, the lull of the train, the crowd on the way out pushing me, yelling in Spanish, kids screaming...but I got home, got out of my clothes and put my head down on my pillow...

...and promptly woke up at 2AM.

If I woke up around 5 or 6, I'd chalk It up to exhaustion or depression. Nothing in particular woke me up, just a rattle of mind, asking myself, what are you doing in bed?

I'm not nervous about today because anything's going to happen, I'm nervous because things already have.

I spent hours this morning IMing with a friend in Sacramento (and mind you, the hours in question were between 2 and 4:30 AM, love that Pacific time), talking about the state of the country (she's a poli-sci person), the loss of civil liberties potentially coming our way (GWB is already encouraging citizens to rat on each other), the amount of psychic and physical damage about to be inflicted on Iraq the same way it was on Afghanistan (oh, wait, we did that already a decade ago), and the mood of this country shifting in general, growing colder, more plastic, apathetic. I noticed yesterday how profound the dichotomy of prepackaged pop culture and indie, DIY, heartfelt expression has become. They both score at the box office, and they both sell albums.

And all of this strikes me as transference. I realized this week what a shell of myself I've become. I've talked to friends of mine leading different lives than I am (Elizabeth and her dance/performance art, Jonathan with his juggling, Gretchen with writing plays and being a mom) and realized how profoundly wrong my life feels. Ramona, the secretary who sits next to me, heaved a giant sigh yesterday and told me how she feels Americans only live to survive, that we don't know any other way to be.

I don't think that's true, not entirely (though with credit card companies baiting college kids the minute they hit the dorms, it's not surprising we're all up to our ears in debt), but it feels that way a fair amount of the time. We forget about it when we're in love, when we're doing something fulfilling, when we volunteer, when we watch the sunrise. But when we work jobs that do nothing for us in any way, office jobs, static jobs, eyes glued to computers and phones, not even the comfort of sweating your ass off in a factory making something...well, I shouldn't speak for capital-A-merica, but I feel dead inside at the end of the day. While I want to finish this play about ghosts, I don't feel that becoming one myself is really the kind of research I need to be doing.

I stopped listening to new music years ago, except for stuff I get for free. I see little to no theater, movies much less often than I used to...but most of all, I've lost that voracious curiosity I had in college. I miss going to the library and taking out ten books, even if I only have time to read five of them. I remember using my freebie copycard at Woodruff to photocopy entire books so I could stash them in my room and read them at my leisure. I still have a boxful of aesthetics/criticism papers waiting for me in Florida for when I move into my new place and bring them up.

What happened? I look back on 2001 (and chunks of 2000), and I don't really know. All I do know is it's time to move. (My body, not my geography.)

I'm trying to find a good tai chi school in-town, as well as a place to study kuntao silat, Malaysian stick-fighting, among other things. One's for focus, one's for discipline. Mostly, I just want to move. It's hard enough to go dancing by yourself.

Amy, my new friend/landlord, took me to a theater benefit Monday night so I could meet some of her friends. Good peeps, as it turns out. The benefit was a karaoke slave auction (where you bid to have other people sing songs for you). From what I heard, I like the vibe of this company...none of the slapstick nonsense of Dad's Garage or the academic circle-jerking that TE could devolve into from time to time...but developing and staging new plays, relevant material. (They just did one called "American Maccabee," which sounded fascinating.) We (Amy, Richard (her friend), and Kim (the literary manager)) went out for drinks after the benefit...it felt good to just meet people again.

Granted, I've been meeting/dating up until now...but I missed talking to people who know what theater can do, can communicate.

Michael, my old mentor from Emory, told me that my play sounds like it mightwork better as a novel. Not this one, I told him, the next one's the novel! He laughed knowingly, as he always does.

Besides, no one ever said it couldn't be both. Look up Bradbury sometime.