Thursday, December 3, 2009

Read Between the Lines

It has taken me two weeks to have an emotional response to something KB said. He told me that he wants me to start dancing again. This morning, while checking out my darkening under-eye circles in the office bathroom mirror, I felt offended. I guess it’s not enough that my sleep is disturbed by his insomnia every damn night, but now he also has to drop hints that I’m getting thick around the middle. I know, dammit! I’m the one who has to squeeze myself into my clothes every morning!


I’ve just recently agreed to join a 3-person team for a friendly inter-office boys vs. girls gym games competition. So far, the exercises that we’ll be competing in will be pushing the water-filled sparring bags across the carpeted auditorium, jogging backwards on the treadmill and dead lifts (with the appropriate weight corresponding to each person’s ability). When the event happens early next year, there will likely be a few more exercises added. I’m using this competition as a little jump start to getting myself back into the groove. I’m determined to beat this constant feeling of exhaustion and sleep deprivation. I’m getting snarky (well, more than usual and uncontrollably). I’m not just sticking my foot in my mouth anymore, I’m just plain mean. I look at people who are happy and smiling and I want to say something to hurt their feelings. As is my way, something tends to slip out before I have a chance to turn the filter on. I’ve got to turn this trend around before I say the wrong thing to the wrong person or worse… I stay this way for the rest of my life.


I had an impromptu heart to heart with Twin Peaks yesterday about my attitude problem. Basically, my pessimism and cynicism have become huge roadblocks between me and what will make me happy. Those already dominant characteristics of my personality are only getting stronger as I age (and while I am pushing myself through this rough transition into tandem apartment living). Initially, when I decided that I didn’t want to pursue a career in anything relating to Physics, I dropped out of college and went to work at a theater in SF. I started working as an usher. It didn’t pay squat, but at least I had a chance to talk to people who were already working and try to get my foot in the door for sort of crew or production position. With a handful of rejections on my heart, I moved over to selling concessions so I could make more money working at concerts while still keeping some sort of link to the theater. Eventually I stopped working at the theater altogether, only visiting once in a while as a patron…this is where I still stand – on the opposite side of the curtain from where I envisioned myself ten years ago.


A few years back, while living alone in an apartment across the street from the one I am living in now, I made an attempt at breaking into the poetry nightlife. I was taking a class at the local community college that required me to write and read poetry. I surprised myself with some of the things I created in that class. I thought they were good enough to consider as performance pieces. Don’t get me wrong, they are good enough. However, the very thing that makes them good to me is what makes me unable to recite them. I couldn’t even read them in class. It’s too close to my heart. Just reading them silently to myself makes my eyes glossy. There’s also that pesky social anxiety thing… but that’s another blog. Today I’m trying to get unstuck.


Instead of looking for the holes in every concept and shooting everything down, I’m gonna just go for it and ignore those inner skeptics. I’m not going to become Super Yes Woman by any means (like Jim Carrey in that movie with the hilarious scene where he keeps prattling on about Red Bull), but I am going to put more effort into exploration. I’ve always liked to wander on a grand scale – from something as big as Thailand to as small as the spur of the moment road trips I used to take in the middle of the night when I was bored (and unattached). I have somehow dug myself into a bit of a hole here. I do have more responsibilities now, but that just means that I’ll have to pursue smaller bits of adventure. Perhaps those little things that I’ve overlooked up to this point are the keys to a bigger and better pursuit to come.