miscellany

I post so rarely it hardly seems worth the effort to try to catch up on everything that's happened since the previous post . . . but let's do it anyway.

I'm in the middle of "Arabian Nights" and I'm liking it very much, though there are a couple of people in the cast I'm a bit leery of -- I'm not sure they're ever going to quite "get it", and that means spending a lot of time working with everyone else and getting the good ones to cover for the not-so-good ones, preferably without realizing it. Nothing is more irritating than realizing you're babysitting someone on stage and not getting any glory for all your hard work.

Lost another cat -- poor old Weaver, whose story I told in an early (and much better) post. He died on Valentine's Day. It was a good death, and an interesting one, and I'll talk about it next time, when I've had a little time to catch my breath and work through it all.

I've started my new position, and so far I like it a lot. The only thing I don't like is the way my new department is so damn friendly -- people say "hello" to me dozens of times a day, and it's getting on my nerves, frankly. It's the hell of Cubicle-Land -- no doors to use to get a little privacy and keep the world away.

Enough. I'm having far too much trouble writing today. It's just not worth the struggle . . .

Nice People Die.

Fact of life -- nice people die too. Maybe even more often than not so nice people, who seem to live forever (just to piss me off, it seems sometimes).

In the last month, my friend Pam's husband died -- 50 years old, no illness, strong as an ox, would give the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it. A prince of a man. Then Heath Ledger died -- ok, I didn't know Heath Ledger, but his death affected me strangely. I'm not sure why, I'm not a particular fan of his, but I was truly saddened by his passing. And then this past week, my friend Badger's father died -- I didn't know him either, but he raised a terrific son, so he's got to have been a nice guy too, and Badger's sad and that makes me sad.

I'm hoping the old adage about deaths coming in threes is true, because I'm not sure I can handle anyone else dying around me.

My oldest cat died this past month too. OK, she wasn't a person, and she certainly wasn't nice, but she died and I cried over it. Her name was Asia and she was 19 years old. She was trouble from the first day I got her, and she never got any easier to live with. She hated everyone, except me, and in her later years she became quite vocal about it. My nephew Paul was afraid to go into the kitchen from age 8 to age 13 because Asia was lying in wait for him on top of the refrigerator. Yeah, she lived on top of the refrigerator for a few years. I had to carry her to the litter box every day, otherwise she'd just do her thing up there. I've never had a cat who was quite that crazed. She might have been psychotic, or perhaps just obsessive. It's hard to tell with a cat. Regardless of her mental state (or perhaps because of it), I loved her. She was bad-tempered, she held grudges, she attacked without warning -- what a great personality! Hey, at least she had personality, not like some cute brainless calendar kitten . . ..

RIP, Asia baby.

Eating the Dark

"They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe."

That's a Ray Bradbury, and pretty much sums up how I'm feeling these days -- gobbling up great swaths of darkness, and pretty much stuck. Of course, I'm not just standing and breathing, I'm careening from event to event, gasping for air. I'm just not making any headway.

That sounds so depressing, but I don't think I'm depressed. I've been depressed, I remember what it feels like. No, I'm just facing facts. I have too damn much to do and not enough time to do it in, let alone time to enjoy it.

I shouldn't be directing the show I'm directing right now. I can't give it the time and attention it deserves, and I can't back down and stop doing it -- I'm stuck. And the people who are working on the show deserve so much more than what they're getting from me. But we all keep soldiering on, pretending everything's fine, pretending I know what I'm doing, pretending we don't notice how completely inadequate everything I bring to this show really is. The people who know me trust that I know what I'm doing, the people who don't know me trust that I *look* like I know what I'm doing, and none of them realize how badly I'm abusing that trust.

Badger's father is dying, and there's no way I can get to Oregon. I don't have the space in my schedule, I have too many commitments.

I haven't seen Zach for months, or spoken to him in weeks. No time.

Haven't had dinner with Rick & Steve since Thanksgiving, and only see them for "official business" otherwise. No time.

I'm still obligated to my class -- they're emailing me constantly, asking about their final, which I have to give this Friday. I can't *not* talk to them, but where do I find the time to answer them thoughtfully & helpfully? I don't. And when shall I grade their finals? Beats me.

Work? Let's not even go there. Let's just say work is not going out of its way to help me free up my schedule . . ..

No time to spend with the cats or my dog, and they're craving attention so much that on the rare occasions I do have 20 minutes to spend on them, they fight with each other to see who gets me. Or worse yet, they *don't* fight and wander away to sit alone, feeling unloved.

I have a niece & nephew I love dearly, just a few minutes away in the Goshen area, but do I get over to see them? No time.

The house? No time. I haven't even gotten the big plastic ornaments hung in the lilac bush in the front yard -- it would only take 5 minutes to do, but when? And how dare I when there's carpets to be vacuumed and dishes to be washed and dust to be dusted?

And on top of it all, or perhaps because of it all, my body's falling apart. I have a raging toothache I can't shake, despite taking antibiotics the dentist prescribed (yes, I *did* find time for pain). My stomach's in bad shape from the antibiotics. I'm covered in bruises from the dog's enthusiastic greetings, I have a cut on my thumb I keep re-opening, and the nerve damage in my leg (damage that was nearly healed 18 years after the accident that caused it) has begun to regress and I've lost much of the feeling to my right foot. I'm always cold, I can't sleep, and I don't have time to cook a proper meal so I'm surviving on McDonald's and bananas.

I'm not just eating the dark, I'm having it force-fed to me. Intravenously.

Is there an up side? Well, of course there is. It's called Change. Nothing stays the same, everything changes, and this too shall pass. Hopefully before I do .

It's the End of the World

When a cat person starts telling sickeningly endearing stories about her dog, it's a sign of the Apocalypse.

I realized that this morning as I found myself sharing a long, rather pointless story about Pansy with my boss -- who was *so* interested. Why? The dog got dirty, I gave her a bath, end of story.

OK, OK, I *did* talk about Pansy "sashaying" through the house like a little lady once she was all clean, and how she "sat pretty" on the sofa to show off her fluffy tail, and how she played leapfrog with the cats, and . . .

Oh, lord, please don't let me turn into a dog person!

My self-image may never recover.

Julie

Oh joy, oh rapture, oh bliss! I got an email today from my niece Julie -- guess who just picked up her PhD from Harvard, thank you very much! I'm so pleased for her. She also mentioned that she and her husband are having a second child, in January I believe, but frankly, that doesn't thrill me nearly as much. *Anybody* can have a baby, but how many Harvard PhD's are out there? Well, probably a fair number, now that I think about it. But there are a lot fewer Harvard PhDs than there are parents, that's for darn sure!

I always liked Julie -- she's not my oldest niece, but she's the oldest one I know well. I remember her as a baby -- so skinny her Pampers slid right off her hips as she toddled around the house. It's surprising she ever learned to walk at all, she got tripped up so often. A less determined infant would have given up, I'm sure.

She got interested in Chinese languages as an undergraduate at Northwestern, and ended up spending a number of years living and teaching in China. Her first husband was Chinese, now that I think of it. He was a lovely man -- an actor, very handsome. But her current husband Fred is even more handsome, so I think she traded up. And their daughter Hannah is a little long-legged goddess -- almost as skinny as her mother was at that age, but even more beautiful. And incredibly intelligent -- well, she's in my family, she'd have to be, right? Oh, dear, this new baby's going to have a lot to live up to.

Babies. Better them than me.

#13

According to the blog, this will be my 13th post. Oh, gee, I'm not at all superstitious or anything, so this should be a snap, right?

Maybe if I write really fast . . .

Someone I knew died this week. He was young (younger than I, anyway), had a lovely family, a good job, and the respect of many many people in the community. He was one of the few truly *nice* people I've ever met -- and that's not faint praise, there simply aren't enough genuinely good people in the world. His loss is a real tragedy.

When I heard the news, my first thought was sorrow for the family, naturally. My second thought, I'm a little ashamed to say, was to wonder who was going to take over directing the show he'd just cast. Maybe I shouldn't be ashamed to have had that thought -- I know I'm not the only one to think it.

That's the nature of theatre. The cliche is, "The Show Must Go On," but it's a cliche for a reason -- it's absolutely true. No matter what happens in the real world, theatre people will move heaven and earth (with an Occult Hand, thank you very much Ed Ronco) to make sure the production continues. And that's kind of odd, when you think about it -- we wouldn't necessarily scramble to keep a work project afloat in similar circumstances, and we'd consider postponing weddings, graduation parties, and family reunions in the face of tragedy, so why does a play get this kind of concentrated effort? It's not that it's more important than anything else going on -- work is pretty important too, for most of us -- and it's not that there are so many people involved, because there'd be lots of people involved in a party or a family reunion as well.

It might be that people are more committed to illusion than to reality, and we resist giving up our golden tickets to that other world. Or maybe theatre people are just naturally stubborn, so used to doing everything with inadequate resources and inadequate time that they just keep plowing on, no matter what.

Or perhaps our respect for the man we've lost drives us to keep his dream going just a little while longer . . .

Unhappy Families

Wasn't it Chekhov who said all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? Words to that effect, anyway.

Well, it applies to the workplace too, doesn't it? My evil, anal-impacted, micromanaging boss may be nothing like *your* evil, anal-impacted, micromanaging boss, right? I speak purely hypothetically, with the assumption that our IT department is reading what I write as I write it. Of course *my* boss isn't evil. Or anal-impacted (that's the next step up from anal-retentive, btw). Or even micromanaging. *My*boss is a paragon of virtue, a delightful gent, a hail-fellow-well-met type, a gentleman and a scholar. In fact, my boss is a god. I burn incense at his feet. I sacrifice goats to him. If I were, or knew, a virgin, well -- oh, let's not go there, I'm starting to turn my own stomach.

Generally speaking, however, it is awfully difficult to get any work done when your boss feels the need to A) receive a written proposal for a particular project (even though this is an ongoing or repeating project that you've done in the past, many times), B) sit and think over the proposal (assuming he bothers to open his email and read it) for a few weeks, C) hold a full-department meeting to discuss this proposal, a meeting that ends with him deciding unilaterally that the issue requires more thought on his part, D) finally make a decision and then send emails to everybody in the world who might be affected by your project -- and neglect to copy you, E) complain bitterly when the work doesn't get done and there are negative consequences, and finally F) blame you entirely for everything falling apart. And then we start all over again.

Hakuna matata -- it's the circle of life . . .

But as I mentioned earlier, this doesn't apply in any way to *my* boss. No no no no no.

Here's something else that doesn't apply to him, cough cough: it's absolutely amazing to me how it just so happened that as soon as he got hired, 5 out of 7 department members suddenly got stupider. He hired a new position, so now 3 out of 8 of us are intelligent, innovative, responsible employees, while the rest of us are, well -- older, fatter, older, not younger, not prettier, older, and, well, older, and therefore stupid and not to be trusted with any kind of actual work. And gods forbid we take it upon ourselves to actually think ahead and try to determine the result of an action before we take the action -- how dare we be that defiant of his authority!

Gee, I'm glad my boss isn't like that.

I'm also glad he doesn't: obsess over triviality, ignore massive problems, neglect to support his own department when representing us and our interests to outsiders, or treat any of us disrespectfully.

I'm so damn lucky!

I could go on and on (and on) and probably will later, but I'm late for another fabulous meeting! Gosh I love meetings, I could go to them all day! Oh, wait, it just feels like they last all day, what with a boss (nothing like mine) droning on about his personal concerns instead of work for the better part of each hour. Lectures are fun, right? Especially when they're about the difficulties of buying a new microwave, or about how things were done at his *last* place of employment, or about how he'd like to get a cat but really feels like it's just too much responsibility right now (or ever), or --

Gotta go. Quick.