One Show Left, or The Post About Everything Ever

So much... so much... SO MUCH has happened, is happening. There are so many things to say. And I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this, except that I want contact with someone, something, and half the apartment is cavorting at a bar, one quarter of it is cavorting in the shower, and the other eighth (excepting myself), is in some sort of catatonic state on the floor.

The problem with writing after so long is that I feel an obligation to catch up, and if I tried to do that now, I would be here for the next several months.

My God, the Fringe. The Fringe, my show, the Fringe, the apartment, the Fringe. Can I just say I feel everything about it? I feel everything about it. I feel that it is going wonderfully and horribly, and I love it and hate it, and all the gradations and shades in between. I know I couldn't keep this up for that much longer, but the fact that tomorrow is our last show might also break my heart. For good reasons and bad ones. Good reasons like love and wonder and delight in what we have done, are doing, in the talent and energy and the amazing women all around me. Bad reasons like panic over Philadelphia, and fear, the terrible cankerous fear of the moment when we all are definitively split. Fear that the moment has come and gone already, and that I am singularly disposable, less-than-ardently loved.

My own need to be loved haunts me. There's very little I can say about it without cringing. It follows me like a child, like a parasite... the more I hate it, the more it grows in power.

Well, and. And I saw a wonderful show tonight. It said lots of things, some things beautiful, some difficult, some weird. It was about terrorism, I guess, but about the terrorism in our hearts, too. Some of the things it said were so much like the things I was trying to say in my play. It was extremely frightening. I loved it, although it was sometimes extremely hard to handle. I think I sort of want to talk about it, but Crista has disappeared, and Rachel hated it so much she practically fled through the streets of New York to get away from it, which was extraordinarilly irritating for those of us trying to keep up with her. (I think you got that message from me, anyway, Rachel, but if not I apologize, because I don't want to be one of those weird passive-aggressive types who vents her frustration only in a private-public forum such as this one.)

So whatever... I mean, I'm annoyed... in fact, there are lots of little annoyances adding up to a little flame of anger inside of me, though the anger is not for anyone in particular, it just... is. I think mostly I'm lonely. Which is an odd thing in an apartment full of people. Or maybe it's to be expected. Why am I so concerned with having a place? Why do I need to be loved, not just at all, but in the right amounts by the right people at the right times?

I mean... it isn't all the time, but it's enough. The strange squeezed feeling inside, and the way I click, suddenly, into some kind of tunnel vision. I want to feel important! I may as well be honest. But inside I feel greedy, and grasping, and strange, for wanting this. And I hate being angry, but at the same time I can feel myself making decisions about it. Like, going down the street after Rachel, I could feel the anger come and offer itself, I could feel the warring desires to move toward it and away... the need to stay with the depth and the open space in me from the play vs. the need to be tethered and responsive to other people's feelings. What I don't feel is the moment of decision. I just seem to slip by, from one to the other, and then it has occurred, and my distress at that fact serves mostly to entrap me the more.

What is it that would be enough? When I was walking down the street, I had a moment of clarity, and before that while sitting and watching the play. In the play it was about compassion, about the tricky, particular nature of compassion, and the simplicity of it, that it is compassion that is holy and filled with truth, and compassion that tells the truth to our hearts in the face of horror and confusion and pain. Walking down the street, I was arm in arm with Crista and I realized that connecting is what matters, connecting with whomever is beside you, with as many people as you find... that it isn't who or for how long that detirmines connection and love, but only the magic that happens, between so many people. Like that old footprints on the heart thing, I guess... but it was very powerful. It made me see that I have not lost the people I loved, that the love is real even if it is only for a little while.

But somehow I moved from that to the complete particularity of anger, self-pity, grief. Anger at being abandoned, self-pity at same, grief at losing. Perhaps I am just afraid to be alone with myself... not to tangle myself up in my feelings but simply to be with them. I don't know, but I want to tell someone, Please don't go. Please don't forget me, Please love me. I'm here, please love me enough, love me with an ardent sort of echo in your eyes. Notice all the things about me that no-one has, and tell me so that I should know.

Am I talking to a friend, many friends, a lover, someone I want? Am I talking to God? No, I don't think it's God. Am I talking to me?

Weechee-in. Help me.

At the play there was a warm certainty. You must pray, I thought to myself, you must pray, pray and be full of compassion. But when I thought of prayers, of praying, of the supplicating act, that was not it. That was not what the warm certainty was asking for. My faith is perhaps being shredded by claws. Perhaps they are divine claws, or my own. Perhaps I shall make scarves out of the tatters.

The woman in the play said that great things are seen, are built, are understood through bodies and bloodshed and seeing such things. She did not name the cross, but I thought of it. She was wrong, I know that she was wrong. Or... that's not it. She was right. But there is another way. Make eyeholes in the mask of my beliefs, let me see it, let me see.

Then there is the voice that says I am afraid to see, that I am afraid always, that I am... Well, you know all about it. My God-- just realized I've turned into Professor Dilexi. Stuck between going forward and going back, between the unknown something and the known purgatory. Limbo! Like Bingo only less singing involved.

All right. Starting to ramble now. One show tomorrow. One show left. I'm scared. I feel sort of pierced. I will see my aunt tomorrow. Why doesn't my father call me back? Why doesn't he want to see me? Well, that's another thing.

One show left, one show. I do love you, you know.

Hippodick Day

Things that sucked hippodick about yesterday:

1. 93 degree weather (probably about 10 degrees hotter in the apartment, or so it feels. I was literally short of breath from sitting in one place, and my very light weight dress was like a skin-burning suit of armor!)

2. Being told that as of next week, my fellow phone operator and I will be uncerimoniously cut to half-time, given that the theater is not busy enough to support us both full-time. This apparently is a routine thing, which was never mentioned to me before. I can't afford this now... I've worked hard to save a little money for NY, and if they go through with this, I will be forced to use it, when what I really need is to save more.

3. Having NO information WHATSOEVER about the PR job I applied for, which I was supposed to hear about on Tuesday.

4. 93 degree weather (and having to eat in it)

5. No more visiting twins.

6. Being told that my job performance has somehow gone from "great" and "wonderful" to "ok" in the last several months, without any further explanation. Perhaps it's because I am less desperately needed.

7. 93 degree weather (and having to do laundry in it)

8. Not being able to get ahold of a single living person actually connected with a venue... and trying to get ahold of 20.

9. 93 degree weather (and having to sleep in it)

Things that did not suck hippodick about yesterday:

1. My new stuffed panda bear, proud supporter of Variety Children's Charity.

2. Rachel

3. Patrick Stewart

4. Cold showers

5. Having food and lots to drink, and I suppose a place to live, though it is very much like the pit of hell and less like a home at the moment.

Mayday, I'm on the fringes...

Wow... what a strange couple of days it has been. Before I say anything else, I want to say this: WE GOT INTO THE NY FRINGE! And it's my play, and the admission is based purely on our merits!! Though the news is still hitting me, that's helping make life a lot better right now. "We" for the uninitiated, is The Uncut Pages Theater Company. www.uncutpages.org. Please go, and donate money. ;)

The news about the Fringe couldn't have come at a better time, literally right on the heels of May Day, my first May Day as an alum. I had a really good time for most of the day. For some reason I decided to get very drunk in the afternoon, but not (I hope) obnoxiously so, or to the point where I got sick or could not speak or walk. I hope I continue with the record of never getting to that point, because I would not like to see the scorn I tend to have for other people who do (more the obnoxious than the sick) turned on myself. But... it was a beautiful day, after a coldish and cloudy beginning. The sun came out right in the middle of the May Hole dance, as the vigorously shaken purple parachute launched flower petals into the air and everyone danced around in giddy feminist circles. (Sometimes I am struck by how much of what we do/have done at Bryn Mawr seems like the kind of thing that only happens in movies or books. But it's real. These things do happen. Does everybody have such moments in their lives? What does it mean that the cinematic or literary creations, mirrors, and takes on reality become the reference points for our real lives? Especially interesting since so many, many people commented on how the events of September 11, 2001 felt like a movie, or they thought they were actually watching a movie. Anyway. Bryn Mawr is like this in a much more lovely, idealistic kind of way.)

The rest of the day was lovely. I went dancing and skinny dipping about, and generally did all things appropriate to May Day.

I did not see my flower fight girl, who I have had a flower fight with every year since I came to Bryn Mawr. Katie told me she was there, but, superstitiously, I did not seek her out. I guess it felt like a cycle had come to an end, and I should not interfere.

That feeling is probably also why I felt so strange at the end of the night. Like the cycle of being at Bryn Mawr and leaving Bryn Mawr had completed its course, and now I was really and truly gone. Sometimes I hate so very very much that I have been out of college for a year and I'm still afraid of leaving college, which, after all, I have already done. I feel so inept whent that fear comes over me...

But this entry has been going on forEVER, and it's time to end it before I get kicked off here as has happened about 500,000 times when I tried to finish it.

More when we fix the internet at home. :(