Bodies: Bizzarre and Baffling in Quail Bell Magazine

This piece of mine on bodies was originally published by Quail Bell Magazine on July 29th, 2014. They publish a mystical range of fiction and reality, check them out! I'm so excited to be a part of the Quail Bell Magazine community, and wanted to re-share the essay below. Enjoy!

Vishnu's Dream Machine

By Jeanne Joe Perrone
QuailBellMagazine.com

I hereby solemnly swear this is not another essay about body image and self-esteem. It’s more of an existential crisis and I definitely talk about death. Lately, my eyes somewhat glaze over when I see memes about “real” bodies, Photoshop, and beauty. Not because it’s not a thing, so much, as I think it just misses my real question about bodies, which is: What the *#!@ is this whole body thing all about, anyway? What is going on with bodies? Why do I have one? What is it? Whaaat?

My self-portrait created during rehearsals for The Body Stories.

Am I seriously the only adult that thinks it’s bizarre that we have bodies? I know babies know what I am talking about. Watching them constantly re-discovering things like fingers and faces is hilarious. Babies clearly don’t expect to encounter them, bodies: still getting used to them. Bodies baffle babies, and me along with them. 

Somewhere after that stage of life, though, people seem to stop questioning the body thing. Well, I haven’t stopped.

Kids for example definitely seem more accepting of bodies than babies. Sure, everybody poops, they say, I have a book about it. What’s the big deal? That’s just the way it works. And I am the weirdo grown-up left alone going, yeah, but whaaat? How weird is that, that everybody poops? Everybody?! Everybody POOPS! That’s so weird! We ALL do the SAME poop thing together, ONE BIG HUMAN POOP FAMILY!

It’s bizarre to me that human beings, for all our questions and art forms and inventions and winter Olympics and religions and dreams, boil down to creatures of bodies. As a friend recently put it, we just eat, poop, copulate, and die. For some (I’m looking at you, religion and popular culture and longing), this is a problem. The body thing isn’t enough the way it is, or it’s simply bad. Bodies become the obstacle between us and purity/eternity/beauty/glory/whatever-we-think-is-better, an obstacle between us and the way we think it ought to be. And yet we have to have a body because, well, we just do.

So our relationship with our body becomes complicated. We have to fix it. Discipline it. Starve its appetites, sometimes, or fence them in safely. But, dear god, we must control and dominate it lest it dominate us.

My question has always been: Aren’t our bodies…us? Isn’t our relationship with our bodies, fundamentally, a relationship with our very selves? And if yes, then why do I separate myself from my body, even in my own internal language about it? I mean I have to have a body to even have language, right? A brain to think, a tongue to say, fingers to type the question: Am I my body?

It’s very meta.

A dear friend, the amazing Larissa Dzegar, and I co-created a show together in New York City a few years back exploring questions about bodies. We called simply it "The Body Stories" because we’re creative like that. We asked a small group of performers to create 5-10 minute vignettes dramatizing their relationship with their bodies.

It was a pretty open-ended, fascinating process because I was really curious to see where other brains would take that general phrase “relationship with your body.” Of course, because the two guys and the one person not in their 20s in the cast ended up dropping out because of schedule conflicts, many of the pieces were about things you’d generally expect young women to focus on: insecurity about beauty, complex relationships with food and weight, desire to be desired.

I’d like to do the show again someday with a more diverse mix of ages, races and genders, but we still made some astounding discoveries as a group—the main one, for me, being that everybody struggles to accept their body, its limits, and its goodness. A good tagline for our show might have been “Bodies: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” We’re stuck with what we’ve got, and our bodies play a fundamental role in our identities. Maybe not the most groundbreaking theatrical discovery, but it felt like a major accomplishment and affirmation to have this conversation with other artists and audience members and hear my own questions echoed back to me from other people.

Here I am, though, a couple years later, still asking the same questions. Because there might not be any answers.

It’s still bizarre to me that we all know the only way we exist on this planet is ONLY in a body, and yet we seem to be so bad at dealing with this fact all the way up from self-image through healthcare. I mean if you don’t have a body, you can’t be here. Bodies are like the white tie to get in planet earth’s members-only lounge. There’s probably a sign in earth’s driveway that says “No body? No service.” And we only get ONE body (as far as we can prove).

To me, I move to the mystical to try to understand the body thing. I can’t help myself; I was raised in a pretty conservative branch of Christianity, and much as I sometimes fight it that upbringing has permanently affected the way I think about most things—bodies and their hobbies in particular: reproduction, death, food, waste, pleasure, pain, disease, unfairness of size and health and strength and politics. We are our bodies, they exist for a while, then die: that is all we can know for certain. And yet I am constantly pushing past the known and asking myself, what does this all mean, this body thing? What is it? Why is it? How do we all handle it, share it, and yet live completely and only within the walls of our own cellular structure? What is my body?

Growing up, this was my main take-away about bodies from church: they’ll sin and suffer and die, but don’t panic, there’s a way to save yourself from your body of death. Through faith, you can have God’s spirit LITERALLY live inside you and your body becomes God’s temple. And when this body dies, we get a new one. A perfect one. God loves bodies! New permanent bodies for everyone*! (*Everybody who's Christian.)

Woah.

Obviously this is a religious opinion, but let’s just think about that concept for a second, the body as God’s temple thing, because it still blows my mind with its simple beauty. It’s something like the mirror image of Hinduism where our world and bodies all exist only in Vishnu’s dream in his sleeping head, and therefore we are one with God because we exist in his mind—except that in the Christianity I grew up with our bodies are real and the dream of God’s presence is inside them. God is inside our bodies, or vice versa.

In any religion, belief in spirituality lifts our bodies from the physical to the holy, giving our experience on earth a multi-dementional, sci-fi feel with a very, very happy ending: union with God and a new kind of life after this body’s death. If our bodies could literally be God’s temple or God’s dream, every action and aspect of our physical life takes on the nature of devotion and worship. Even pooping is more special. And our earthly bodies become a sort of cocoon from which we will emerge after death even more beautiful and metaphysical than ever.

I gravitate toward this. It’s a beautiful, seductive idea, just as hell and damnation and cycles of suffering are ugly, scary, off-putting ideas. The main thing is, though, faith is faith and there’s no way to really know what are bodies are: spiritual vessels, or just material? They’re a mystery wrapped as a totally obvious, banal reality. Kids seem to get it. I don’t.

Recently, on a date, two of us stretched our bodies out on a blanket in Central Park under a shady tree and put one earbud each in one of our ears and listened together to a podcast about Alan Turing. (People, THIS is how to woo.) Turing was the genius British mathematician who basically cracked the Nazi code and accelerated the Allied Victory at the end of WWII. After an adventurous and brilliant career as a war hero, Turing was later arrested for homosexuality and chemically castrated by the very British Government he had served.

Turing, it turns out, was raised conservatively Christian much like I was. After watching his boyhood love die of consumption, Turing sought his lost love in prayers and clouds but never found him again. Turing eventually concluded this was because the boy was just gone, and that the Christian idea that humans are more than bodies and that we somehow exist after our bodies die was just a lot of rubbish. As an adult he had a sort of reverse conversion and became an atheist, a materialist, a man of science who decided that the material world and our physical bodies are what they are, and that is absolutely all there is to it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Turing believed that our bodies were the machines of our existence, and that we are essentially conscious machines. Someday he believed humans could build machines that would achieve consciousness, as our equals. The idea rather comforted and set him free, and he went about using his impressive brain/body machine to create machines and codes that changed the world. Then he got arrested for giving his body the love lifestyle it craved, as homosexuality was still illegal in England. Once his own body was turned against him through forced injections of estrogen, Turing grew so depressed and unrecognizable to himself that he chose to end his own life. He bit into a cyanide-laced apple, just like Snow White in his favorite Disney cartoon. (Oddly, it made me feel better to know I am not the only one who has epiphanies about self, bodies, life and death while watching Disney cartoons – but more on that later.)

Is that what our body is, a machine? Turing’s concept of life as a straightforward material equation also attracts and comforts me. To have the experience of inhabiting the sophisticated, complex machine of a human body can be very exciting when it’s working well, and very scary when it’s not.

I’ll never be able to fully burst out of the cocoon of spiritualizing the human body the way that Turing did (I am a bit of a superstitious caterpillar), no matter that I’ve long since resigned my position as president of the Abstinence Club in High School (yes, that’s a real thing that I did) and now live the life of a sinful artist in New York City (sorry not sorry).

Don’t worry, though, spiritualizing the body isn’t all masturbation crosses and chemical castration; one of my favorite Christian saints, St. Francis of Assissi, had a very grounded and humorous view of the body and all the banalities and glories that go along with it. He famously referred to his body as “Brother Ass.” (By the way, children, St. Francis of Assissi, along with every spiritual leader that has ever existed including Jesus and Buddha and Joseph Smith, also pooped. I am quite sure of this.)

I wanted to escape my own “sister ass” for the longest time, but for no reason as profound or tragic as Turing’s government-ordered body hijacking. My body identity crisis was rather clichéd, I suppose: puberty and standard-issue Christian sexual repression. I felt like my body was in my way, holding me down, and pissing off God.

As if being 12 isn’t hard enough.

Disney’s Mulan came out when I was in junior high going through puberty. I don’t know if you remember Mulan or not but I had a sort of epiphany because of it. There’s that one song Mulan sings when she’s frustrated with the limitations of having a female body in her society. She looks at her reflection in a pool and sings, “When will my reflection show who I am inside?”

Well, I used to sing this to myself in the mirror, crying, because I felt like my body was something that I wasn’t, preventing me from being who I truly was. And I did this a lot. Yup...afraid so. I hated that when people saw me, they saw me as my body and not as my brain or soul. I wished I could just be a brain or soul and skip the body part because wouldn’t that be nice. Maybe then I could teleport, mind-read, and not have to wear a bra. I could be like the blue fuzzy light-ball Martian’s in Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man.” Pleeeease? Why not?!

I doubt I’m the only one who ever thought about that: I bet we all want to escape our bodies sometimes, whether for cosmetic or political or health reasons. But one particular day, when my preteen self was singing that particular Disney song to her naked reflection in the bathroom mirror, I suddenly realized that escaping my body would mean death.

Death is the only way out of this body.

Duh! That was the moment I really realized that my body will someday die, the light clicked on, and I faced my own mortality for the first conscious time. That moment changed my life and my relationship with my body. Not to say I instantly and forever looked on my body as only good, but I’ve certainly appreciated and enjoyed it more ever since. I now know my body is only mine temporarily, like a gift that will one day break.

And so when I wrote my own 5-10 minute vignette in "The Body Stories," I did an interpretive dance about puberty (like you do) and ventured peace between my body and my religious traditions and my current questions by writing it a love letter. I apologized for hating it and being mean to it. I told it I loved the way it felt, how much I enjoyed its ability to move and touch and taste and eat and have sex and sleep. And I concluded my love letter like this:

Dear Body, someday you will die, and I will miss you. When you leave me what will I be? Will I be at all? I am afraid to contemplate the absence of you, Body. It is another world, another side, a darkness that I can’t shine light through from here. Someday we will be separated, Body, and the part of me that wanted to escape you will escape. And maybe then I will know whether that part was you all along or someone else, me, or you alone, or us, or another. Until then, we are together. We are one person, you and I, Body, til death do us part. I am married to you in a union stronger than I will ever have with another, a stronger union than anyone can understand, until we are perhaps one. I am you, Body, and I will always wonder if you are also me. You will always be a wonder to me, never answered, only felt.

Loco De Mayo

Or,

Steps of How Not to Sleep on (Potentially) Your Only Night Off in May

• End the evening venting about professional and romantic feelings with your witty German actress buddy, because THAT will be uplifting for BOTH of you. It ALWAYS is. (Sorry Toni. You're great. I brought us down. My bad.)
• It's now 8:30pm, sooo....go home. It's time.
• Converse with roommates. Be momentarily uplifted because they rock. 
• Realize the Mindy Project rocks. You watch and laugh together with your roommate LIKE A FAMILY OR SOMETHING until the show seems all too painfully familiar and you need distraction from the pain. 
• Wait. You just said you're in pain from watching a sitcom? What's wrong with you. Goodness gracious.
• Existential crisis.
• You need distraction. You are thinking too deeply into things, so you should waste time on Facebook. 
• Waste time on Facebook.
• Be disgusted with yourself for wasting time on Facebook and decide to do something productive.
• Be productive. In your brain right now, 'being productive' somehow means sending a thinly disguised needy email to your boss asking for positive feedback without overtly asking for positive feedback but really actually just asking for positive feedback. Because, let's face it, you are feeling needy.
• Admit you're feeling needy. Try to channel your thoughts in more positive directions. End up thinking about all the lines you have yet to memorize and all the dayjob stuff you have yet to finish.
• Briefly think about studying your lines, decide not to.
• Reprimand yourself. 
• That self-reprimand was harsh. Feel needy again.
• Existential crisis 2.
• Call your mother because you are feeling needy. She answers the phone by saying she just sat down and is taking her first bite of pizza. 
• Feel guilty. Say goodnight. 
• Feel needy. Feel guilty for feeling needy.
• Roll your eyes at yourself.
• Repeat.
• Start to really wish you were eating pizza with your mother and get all nostalgic, then suddenly get really, really hungry. 
• Once the hunger beats the nostalgia, remember that you had a cookie for dinner instead of dinner. Feel both proud of/disheartened by your choices and decide that although you deserve to eat again if you want, you have already brushed your teeth and having to do it again sounds too hard.
• The time is now 11:00pm, somehow. Try to account for the last 2.5 hours. Fail.
• Take a sleeping pill.
• Turn out the lights.
• Check your email on your phone in case your boss wrote something nice. Aw, he did! Feel less needy.
• Now you can't stop thinking about pizza. Try to channel your thoughts in a more positive direction.
• Existential crisis 2.1: over-analyze everything in your life. Decide that if you are thinking so much, it means you must care, and being able to care is good, right? So, that's good. Maybe you're okay, since you care. But then, caring about something doesn't necessarily mean it's important, does it? Maybe you're caring too much about things that don't matter? So, that's bad. Also, why are you thinking about this now? Is it urgent? No. Can you fix anything? No.
• Self-reprimand 2: WHY AREN'T YOU OFF-BOOK FOR STUFF YET!?
• Ask yourself: what pizza places are open right now?
• Try to sleep.
• Try to stop thinking about pizza.
• Pizza.
• Pizza on a bagel.
• The leaning tower of pizza.
• Pizza pizza.
• Oh my god.
• Try to distract yourself from pizza, because it's now 11:30pm and there is no cheap pizza available, probably. Do anything/everything to forget the crushing desire for pizza. 
• Examine your freezer. There's no pizza. 
• Eat some cheese with nothing.
• Identify the solitary late-night scarfing of cheese with nothing as an allegory for your life. Realize that thought makes no sense.
• Roll your eyes at yourself. Again.
• Go to bed. Again.
• Think about pizza. Again.
• Remember that it's Cinco de Mayo. Think about Mexican food. 
• Remember that you forgot to brush your teeth again.
• Give up. On everything, maybe. Or maybe just on your immediate desires. Just give up.
• Feel suddenly better. Have you moved past wanting? Wow, is this non-attachment?
• Achieve enlightenment.
• Fall asleep. Dream of pizza.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Oh hey there, blog. How are you. I know it's been a long time since I've paid any attention to you. I could say I had forgotten you were there, but that is a lie. I knew you were there all along, full of blank draft pages and unborn witticisms blinking back at me from the eternal, empty white screen. Blog, I know you were there, just waiting to link me with brave Readers, to help us share a moment in time. The thing is, I just didn't know what to say.

If we were lovers, dear blog, then I was definitely the neglectful, estranged, frustrated jerk who just up and disappeared one day without a word or warning, leaving you in the lurch and maybe wondering why. Yes, I've done that before - not to other blogs I mean, but to people. Several times, in fact. Whether or not they wondered, I don't know. But you could safely say that by now, at this point in my character, it's becoming a pattern.

I should say I am sorry I disappear but the fact is I am not sorry.

Sometimes it just takes me a long time to be honest with myself about what I want. But once I know, I know. The jerk part is that once I am honest with myself about what I want, I am selfish about it. Once I see clearly, I use the clarity to make a decision and rarely bother to explain that to others.  It's not that I don't care. It's that I have stuff to go do.

It turns out, I really needed a breather from you, blog, and from other things too. In November my streak of artistically satisfying plays ended and I had a sort of a personal heartbreak. A sort of disappearance of a hope, you might say. I say sort of because it was a long time coming and a long time on repeat, and nothing actually happened other than that I woke up one morning fully aware and OK with the fact that I didn't approve of my own nonsense anymore, that the thing I was hoping for had never actually been on the table, that it was time to vaporize and re-materialize somewhere else, hitch my wagon to another star. My Dad calls it a Moment of Truth, or the Five Minute Rule: it only takes five minutes to be honest, really actually honest with yourself. Not that it isn't a little scary and hard sometimes. But in November, I managed to do it.

November was when my brain switched gears.

I panicked a little. I skipped out for a bit on certain things, hoarding my new found clarity. I stopped submitting for auditions. I stopped blogging, basically. I cut down on sleeping. I started dating pretty much everybody in New York City. (Just kidding. Only a handful. I am not actually cut out to be a man-eater.) And, on a deeper note, I had yet another Acting Crisis that lasted all day every day for a few months there: why am I doing this? Am I even doing this? What do I want to do with this? What have I done with this, and what do I want to do next? And, most importantly, WHAT IS THIS THAT I AM DOING?

In graduate school when I had another whirlwind episode, prompted by another heartbreak, my roommate Treasure said that in the days where I would disappear (and I would sort of disappear, coming home to our apartment only every four or five days to change clothes), she pictured me riding around the city on the backs of fire trucks, howling at the moon.

Close enough.

This time, though, my howl reached heaven and my life actually changed. Through a super cool and bright actress I know, I got an actual writing job. I prayed for it. My mom prayed for it with me. We prayed together as I pressed the send button with my emailed application. And twenty minutes after I emailed in my writing sample, I was hired. I jumped up and down, I bounced off walls, I danced and hopped and squealed for several weeks like a cliche from a 90s high school movie. It was an actual turning point, a bolt from the blue, a gift from God.

I may have never mentioned this to you, blog, but I had a very specific dream when I was a little girl. My kindergarten teacher asked everyone what they wanted to be when they grew up, and I said, "My own boss." I wanted to write and act. Those were the only two jobs I ever wanted. I wanted to have lovers from every country in the world and eventually children from every country in the world. I think my logic was, why just pick one? It is hilarious and amazing and somewhat disturbing to suddenly step back from my life right now and realize that I am actually doing it. (No babies yet, though, please.)

I am actually doing it.

Sure, there are points I'd like to hit in my acting career that I feel very far away from. I'd like to get great representation, star in feature films, win an Oscar. Sure. There are points in my personal life and finances that are not the best they could be. If I live long enough I'd like to someday get married and have kids (this is very hard for me to admit) and maybe - maybe - even open a savings account. But you know what? I am actually doing the things that I dreamed of doing when I was 6. If I don't thank God every day, shame on me.

This week, I got to go visit my 81-year-old Dad in Texas. Our time together is always too short and we try to cram a year's worth of presence and intimacy into a few days, so it's always super intense. We go and sit in Carl's Jr. because he likes it and we drink decaf coffee and talk for hours. I told him how amazed and excited I am about the writing job, about my weird new attitude about acting that I haven't quite placed or defined, about how strong and lucky and perhaps almost empty I feel, in a way that seems good. Maybe open is a better word than empty. Maybe full is a better word than empty. Maybe empty and full are the same.

And my Dad looked at me and said what might be the most important thing that anyone has ever said to me: "When I go, I get to go knowing that I've left the world a better place because you are in it. Because of who you are, not just what you're doing, but because you are a point of light in the world."

So, blog, I just had to write again and say all that, to try to explain how the last months have given me moments and choices and gifts that changed me, and what was significant about them. Not everyone gets to hear words like that from their Dad. I really, truly wish they did. We need to know what we mean to people, what our lives can be. I am sharing this not because I want to rub it in peoples' faces or anything, but because I want people to know that you CAN say words like that, and that when you do, it makes someone's life. We have that power with each other. I want to share that you can disappear in a positive way, to transform and resurrect. That resurrection is real.

It turns out, life is pretty simple. I may never win an Oscar or really "make it" as an actor in terms of shiny money things, but I've made it. I may never be a New York Times bestselling author, but I have had my writing published and read by strangers who paid my rent for me. I may never actually have kids from all the countries in the world because that would be 196 children and that is just a totally stupid idea in retrospect. I may always be a little bit of a jerk sometimes, when I am hurt, because I am a human being and no matter how hard I try to do the right thing I will sometimes fail. Yet I see that I can try to do the right thing - I have that option to choose - and that is the important bit.

As far as I am concerned, my Dad just gave me the Lifetime Achievement Award. Even if I never accomplish anything else, I'm good.

Feeling All the Feelings

The Cherry Orchard at Horace Mann Theater

Oh boy, it's been a fall, y'all. Last time I remember knowing what day it was, it was definitely August 21st. Or 22nd? A Tuesday?

I am always thankful for the busy. Sure, I cry into my whiskey in the shower out of sheer exhaustion sometimes. I definitely drink whiskey in the shower, yes. I know because there's probably still a cup in there. And as the weeks go by and I sleep less and forget to eat, I end up having to wear children's shirts at work because I forgot my uniform, and I start making questionable decisions about who to bark back at on the subway...sure...but all in all, busy and sleep deprived are the bread and butter of any working actor. We like it when we can't feel our faces because we rehearsed until midnight and had to get up at 6 for our dayjob. We like it when we have to cram for an audition after our brunch shift and before tech. We'll be the first ones to tell you that, and simultaneously complain.

The Weirdest Tree I've ever climbed.

But really, I can't complain. I don't know if you remember this one day in August, but I do. I was such a mess that I had to blog about it, but the friendly fellow I auditioned for sans shoes or make-up made the surprising decision to go ahead and cast me in TWO of his plays anyway. So, I've been doing that. I got to work with wonderful, talented, insane people on The Weird Tree, a devised and very physical play based on an Eastern European fairy tale, as well as a notably non-traditional rendition of The Cherry Orchard. See the balloons? The snow drifts? It was pretty magical. And, while all that was happening, I also shot two short films and went to Los Angeles for a week. Because reasons.

It always happens at once, and you have to just go ahead and feel all the feelings and get it done.

Varya doesn't care anymore.

At the beginning of the year, my former roommate and I declared that 2013 would be the Year of Awesomeness. We had said 2012 was the Year of Men, so, 2013 definitely had to be something else. Various 20-something problems aside, I think our prophecy has come rather close to the truth. It was the first year I got very specific and clear with myself about what I wanted. I wrote a list of professional goals, all of which are neatly checked off even though it's only November. It's kind of amazing, actually, and humbling in the sense that many of the goals came about through channels other than my own pursuit. Some of my goals came and found me. After they roughed me up a little bit, we got along great.

Perhaps it was simply a matter of confessing that I wanted them, that I was willing to risk failure for the sake of saying their names out loud. LA, for example. I have been thinking of scouting out the town every since finishing acting school, but it was always a little scary to find the money or the time. So, finally, with a little help from my friends, I just went and did it. I forced myself to make some uncomfortable but right choices personally. I asked for what I needed, and mostly got it. But I had to ask. I had to own it. And now I grow less afraid with each whirlwind.  There will be valleys and peaks, and I now know better how to navigate myself in them. It's not so much navigating the changing landscape of my career, I am finding, but how to craft and navigate myself. 

You have to ask for what you want, Lopahkin!

And I can't skip any steps. It's all connected. I have tried so many times in the past to skip steps. I've so wanted to fast forward to the money days, the married days, the champagne in a slipper days. But you just can't. First you have to grow. You have to go through the whole process, from excitement to disappointment to joy to brutal teeth-gritting to drudgery to joy. The ending never comes first.

I am always in such a hurry to get to what I consider to be the good stuff. But how the heck do I know what the good stuff is? When I look back over the last few years, I realize that my perspective at the time was a little muddled, and I can only assume my perspective now is equally muddled. Only later can I really see how the decisions, work, and time were building up toward something new. Now we see through a glass darkly...And I really do think it will all come together when it most needs to, in the way that is best. Cheesy, but yeah. I am actually having this moment of realizing that something very cliche is true. Not in a tie-dye and crystal kind of way, but in a frustrating, painstaking, reality way. Blah blah blah.

So, with all of my latest projects winding down, I am feeling all the feelings. Pride, elation, thankfulness, and the inevitable post-show-slump. And I am not avoiding any of it, because I want to feel all the feelings. Preferably through a buffer of whiskey. Then, and only then, can I press onward and forward.

I got to wear my glasses onstage! It's the little things.

September When It Comes

And then, ten years later, you become an overnight success.

Your life can change in an instant.

This is something I often joke about with many friends and colleagues and family members - the myth of the lightning strike that turns you from a nobody to a contender.

Not to say there's no such thing as the bolt from the blue that flips your career. That absolutely happens, perhaps in showbiz more often than any other industry - but rarely does it come out of nowhere and strike a random target.

You work really hard preparing yourself, building your skills, simmering your passion, navigating a dynamic and deadly landscape of extremes, braving conditions that would discourage most egos and navigating tough choices. You do all of this every day, so that you're ready when it happens. You constantly fight to improve your changes, position and posture yourself to be the best possible conductor for the power jolts.

 You want to be hit. You will yourself to be hit. You pray. You submit. You study. You interview. You toil and earn and fight and create and never stop so you'll be ready when the universe aligns.

The secret of successful people is that the universe aligns not just once, not twice, but many times. And this alignment is partially in our control, and partially not.

It seems like I spend a lot of time not necessarily having the stereotypical "big breaks," but rather experiencing nearly constant small breaks. They add up. Down the road, if you stick with something long enough and maintain laser focus on your vision, all those small breaks put together will be the "big break." It's just that no one other than myself will know just how many tiny little breaks, threats of rain, thunder, and electrical storms preceded the lightning strike.

There's a calm before every storm, but the storm always comes. Like a hurricane, my acting career seems to be arced in a tempestuous parabola. It's a cycle of work, preparation, searching, work, preparation, searching, work...Calm, storm, eye...jobless, working, regrouping...

September was a month of little lightning strikes for me. After a few fallow months, I booked an amazingly creative original play and two film jobs all at once. Both film roles were in projects I didn't audition for, and were opportunities supplied by artists I've met over the years and stayed in touch with. And one of those films, to my surprise and delight, brought me my first Taft-Hartley and, once all the filing is complete, my SAG/AFTRA-eligibility.

We spend a lot of time as actors waiting for our big breaks. We sometimes forget to mark and celebrate the small ones. Becoming SAG/AFTRA-eligible was one of my goals for the year, and I was behind schedule in my plans to achieve it by producing my own new media project. Then, BANG, the universe brought me a role through a fellow Actors Studio Drama School alum, who reached out to me. And this school chum, a bolt from the blue, has changed the course of my year. What a gift! Lightning struck and a seemingly small break, one short film role, brought me a big milestone. Thanks, Chelese Belmont, for furnishing such a significant moment in my life (and producing an amazingly fun shoot, can't wait to see the finished film!).

What I am trying to say, dear reader, is that we must always be ready for September when it comes, whether it is a burst of work or an opportunity to use down time in a constructive way. When the small breaks begin that domino effect, you don't want to be caught napping. I want to be standing up, saying yes, and full of decisive action.

We are always building toward something.

Garden

my mom's sunflowers

 I am in northern California. My mom is recovering from a surgery, and we are using that as an excuse to essentially be on vacation together in her home, doing very little, sitting in the sun, escaping from reality for a while and creating an alternate universe of our own.

My mom is an awesome, lovely, sweet woman who is currently reading a book called, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking." She is not quiet at home. I am a cranky New Yorker readjusting to clean air and kindness, reading a book by Goethe called "The Italian Journey," and find myself saying very little in this holiday world. My step-dad is jolly and hard of hearing, occasionally popping in to shout jokes at us before disappearing to read a book called, "Chasing the Wild Pendulum: a History of Consciousness." It's been in the 90s all week and there are about 30 hummingbirds fighting over 3 feeders hanging from nearby cedars and bays. And that I think sums us up admirably.

mom's butterfly

We've realized through talking this week that I've been in New York City longer than I've lived anywhere else, and I'm not sure what to feel about this accomplishment. My mom's current house was my pre-teen and teen haven, but I've slept in New York City longer than I dreamed in the corner room with the writing desk. My step-Dad has been driving my old Mazda protege longer than I ever did, and now it smells distinctly of dog and cigar. It's not my car at all any more, even though the Japanese prayer my brother brought back for me is still hanging from the rear-view mirror.

There's been a slight paradigm shift under my feet as I've sunbathed in the rocking chair, a gentle ah-ha, settling-in feeling; the comfort of being around family, looking out the window at a tree-covered mountain, having nothing on today's schedule. Obviously one can't be on vacation all the time, but I dare to hope that this feeling of support and peace can be cultivated everywhere I go. And I think I will go other places. Having hit a record in NYC, I feel a release to dream new dreams and learn new things. That city doesn't have to be my comfort zone, because that place is here in my mom's garden.

her other butterfly

She waters it every day, even if she needs a cane. She let me help her with it a couple of times, but frankly she doesn't like being helped. We talk about the amount of time and water it takes to keep her plants alive, and I confess that I would feel rather oppressed if I knew I had to come home to an hour-long watering chore every day. It's a big commitment, cultivation. Mom agrees that I lack the natural knack, but she insists that standing still with a hose in your hand is a kind of a meditation, a cycle of nourishing at a pace I have grown incapable of keeping. She feeds her plants and they feed her, there's a symbiotic understanding between them more subtle than shade or scent. Slowing down is tricky for me, but it really is all I want right now. So I take up the hose.

The squashes and the sunflowers are hard for me, nothing but leaves, but once I make it to the tomatoes and the hot sweet smell of them hits me, my imagination chimes in. The tomato plants transport me to Marlon Brando's death scene in the Godfather, where he's chasing his grandson, and the memory of sharing the film with my Dad. Their earthy, bright smell takes me back to another garden mom kept in another county, another life when I was half my size and surrounded by all the people I loved in the world (it was a smaller world then). The tomatoes we pick for our salad are small and still hot, and taste like the Amalfi coast in Italy, where my mom daringly took me to celebrate graduating from High School.

might just stay here...

I still don't think I am ready to knuckle down and devote myself to a garden as vast and lush as my mom's, but that is only because I haven't built up the patience or the land yet. I understand now how she can devote herself to it, how it gives itself back to her, how it becomes it's own world of memories and thoughts as well as living forms. There's a small succulent plant on my windowsill in Harlem that my roomie is keeping alive for me at this very moment. I explained to her that if I can keep this plant a live for a year, maybe then I can trust myself with pets, children. She pointed out that recovering addicts have the same process, which I think is hilarious. I am not a recovering addict, just a bit of a workaholic space cadet. Why is it so hard to keep other things alive? That succulent of mine may have company soon, because I really want to take my mom's garden with me when I go back. I want to spend time and energy in the garden, to tend and garner results. I want to slow down. I want to live at the pace of plants.

happiness

Well...at least, sometimes...

Poems

Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing poems. It didn't seem to serve any purpose anymore. There was no time and, frankly, no interest. My step dad wasn't around to read my poetry after a few shots of tequila and tell me I was a genius, which left only myself and one very nice professor from undergrad to glance over them once in a while. Gone were my jobless teenage summers, sprawling sun decks, and endless thoughts. After grad school, I hit a plateau where I didn't want to think anymore, didn't want to string words together on paper in journals or submit to publications or care. If poem could be a verb, I didn't want to poem. Poetize? Poemify? Yeah. Not gonna.

There was this one time like 8 years ago that I struck up a conversation with a lady on a bench in central park. She was wearing a long hippy dress, hadn't brushed her hair, and had a journal with a big moon on it on her lap. She was sitting there to write poems about her dreams, never to share with anyone. She told me it was for her own eyes only. She must have been in her forties, frizzy and alone, and something about it struck me as too much. I mean, good for her, but it suddenly hit me that this was a possible future me and I very urgently I realized I didn't want to be wearing hemp and writing in a moon diary when I was forty just the same as when I was fourteen. And I didn't want to be the girl giving everyone poems for Christmas and birthdays anymore. I thought, "How embarrassing is that at 19? Gross!" (I was gross. I was young. I'm less gross now. At least I think so. At least, I don't think poems are a gross present anymore. I think it's awesome.)

My dreams and poems used to mean a lot to me, but after a few years in New York City I just didn't want to care. I didn't want to be a poet with feelings sitting alone on a bench with a journal - it was very occupying being an actor with feelings, thank you very much. Very occupying being an actor with feelings doing things and trying to do more things and not being allowed to do certain things I wanted to do like get famous and reserve a table at schmancy expensive clubs in TriBeCa and jet off to Cannes. Writing things sounded just impossible. Or ridiculous. Between eight weekly shifts at a restaurant, rehearsals, auditions, and the mounting August crankiness, I lost my poetry. I just lost it.

But just this week, I think I found it again, and I think I know why.

See, I was the only child at home after my brother moved out, and with our 12 year age gap, it was more like I was an only child. And like most only children, my imagination was my constant companion - my BFF. There was a lot of wearing funny hats and sitting in trees talking to myself and my invisible unicorn friend Bow, and I wrote a lot. Don't get me wrong I totally had friends - non-invisible ones - but I was always equally happy to sit down all day with a word processor. Literally, all day. Once I clocked 12 hours. And my imagination was prolific - there were bushels of short stories, books of poems, two unfinished novels and even one finished (not my best, I think, but a good start). Alone time was always my friend, and honestly, I wrote for myself.

The thing with story telling is that it can't exist in a vacuum. Something I am really digging about my acting classes at The Barrow Group is the way that they remind us, over and over in various ways, that we're actually not there to have a personal experience. We're there to tell a story. And we're not telling it to ourselves, we're telling it to our audience. I mean, duh, right? But somehow I super need the reminder. Actually, I never really thought about an audience while writing...which means I kind of missed the point.

I don't really write for myself anymore because I don't want to just sit with myself. Part of the reason I stopped writing poetry was because it felt a bit...self-involved. TOTALLY unlike blogging right??? Sheesh.

Well, anyway, I just needed to stop the poems for a bit. I didn't have the spare energy for sitting with myself because I had blocked that off and was so busy with other people, but now the thought of writing again is exciting to me because of other people. I want to write for them, tell them stories, give them poems. I want people to read my stuff. And I am really happy, actually, that I had some time away to think about the difference between living privately in my imagination and sharing parts of it with others. Communicating. After all, what use is a light if you hide it under a bushel?

"Ang Lee and the Uncertainty of Success"

I don't often use my blog to refer to other articles, but this one was so poignant, timely, and needful to my heart today that I thought I would share it here as well. Thanks to my friend and colleague, actress Chelese Belmont, for sharing this on facebook and giving me some much needed comfort and sense of community from the true-life story of a great artist!

"Much is made of genius and talent, but the foundation of any life where you get to realize your ambitions is simply being able to out-last everyone through the tough, crappy times — whether through sheer determination, a strong support network, or simply a lack of options."

Read the full article "Ang Lee and the Uncertainty of Success" here from jeffjlin.com

Note To Self

I am having one of those weeks where I am tired and busy and beginning to succumb to those kinds of thoughts whose spidery tendrils whisper and grab at you from within most dark and twisty of nebulas, Desperation. Fellow actors, I know that you know the galaxy I mean. It is a tiny vortex, always accessible through a sigh, where sight is distorted and deep draughts of the drink Compromise are cooked up by a broken bartender.

Dali's Rabbit Hole from Alice in Wonderland

We none of us like to admit that we frequent the place (it is rather the unfashionable end of the universe). Going there is a nasty habit we pretend not to have, a source of shame, and we try to hide our furtive trips to its shadowy doorstep. But we go there, hypnotized, pathologically comparing ourselves to each other and beating ourselves up for things we didn't do instead of acknowledging the hard work we've done and the successes we've accomplished.

And what's nuts is that we're usually convinced it's the only way - a required pit stop on our trip through life's lessons, an unavoidable toll bridge from point A to point B. As if we can't just steer our starship around it. As if Desperation is everywhere no matter what, like dark matter or god particles or whatever the heck the universe is actually made of. We float into this gross galaxy each time we worry about jobs, auditions, appearance, or the future, and do not remember to breathe deep and take care.

Tonight, thanks to a mentor who has saved my life multiple times (my Dad), I had a bit of a reality-check and intervention within my own mind. I woke myself up on the threshold of that smokey hole and shook off it's weak gravitational pull. I thought I'd share some of the basic things I was reminded of tonight that lifted my gaze from the netherworld of doubt and worry. A simple note to self reminded me that making choices should always be guided by the simple truths that any 6-year-old worth their salt knows implicitly.

Here's what I came up with:

• Money is never a good reason to do anything you are uncomfortable with.
• Be legitimate. Be professional. Be your best, bravest, and brightest.
• Avoid slippery slopes.
• Don't break your mother's heart.
• Stay lovely. Practice loveliness. Look for it everywhere!
• Enjoy life and be thankful for it.
• Treat others as you wish to be treated. No exceptions.
• If something isn't right, it isn't right, and it isn't right. Do the right thing. 

 As my Daddy jolted me by saying, "If God wouldn't do it, don't do it." A tall order to be sure, but a good thing to aim for. I plan on using this simple note to self to help me avoid falling down the rabbit hole next time.

Fellow voyagers, there is no reason why we should let the dark side of the force overwhelm us. It doesn't have to be complicated. Why waste away in a black hole when you can just...not go there?

2013: Year of Awesomeness!

Hi friends! I am stealing today's image from a buddy's facebook feed, as a refreshingly cheesy reminder about positivity, hope, and forward motion. (Who doesn't love cheese?!?!)

Don't give up! My roommate and I have declared that 2013 will be the Year of Awesomeness, and so far, January is laying some great groundwork. I'm happily working my acting muscles at The Barrow Group's fabulous Scene Study 1, meeting cool new acting peeps, attending workshops and EPAs, and working on producing two awesome original projects. AND I got a promotion at my dayjob! Don't you love the days where you can see some of the fruit of your hard work?

Want to join in making 2013 awesome? What are some awesome things you want to make happen this year? Our energy, intention, and perseverance can make it happen!

Equilibria

ME! On set of Equilibria by Harley Brown's Cafe

This month I've been privileged and blessed to work with Harley Brown's Cafe on the new film Equilibria in which I play Marcus. Yes. MARCUS. As in, a male character name. As in, I had a beard and wig and a sock in my trousers most of the shoot. Am I transgender? An otherworldly deux ex machina? Triple agent? Who is the man behind the mask and who is pulling the strings - the mafia, the FBI, the church? You'll have to see the film to find out!

Director Norman Siopis, DP Shaun Jones and AD/renaissance woman Sara Gunderson

And let me tell you what, it's going to be a freaking beautiful movie. This cast/crew was a motley assortment of the most creative, loving, warm and fun people I have ever come across. Check out a sneak peak of the rich, gritty look of the film in these photos courtesy of Harley Brown's. It was one of the best weeks of my life - shooting a film all day every day with amazing people, accomplishing one of my life-long acting goals. Portraying a cross-dressed character has been a DREAM of mine since the first time I saw Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as a wee ten year old, and now I can say that I have done it. Check! So much to be thankful for! I am blown away.

FREEZING on set with director Norman Siopis, during his Hitchcock cameo

In the film my character Marcus is a force to be reckoned with, and there is a powerful theme of balance running through the story. Balance is something I have yet to master in real life. This Thanksgiving, I have a long weekend off from work - marking the first time I have a day off other than Superstorm Sandy since August. This week I am thankful of Equilibria's reminder of balance - of how important it is to find freedom in work, to prioritize artistic endeavors along with survival, to rest and eat and sleep as well as pound the pavement. Balance must be restored.

The universe has a way of self-correcting.

On set of Equilibria. The handsome gent with the beard is ME!!

In a season where I am extremely thankful for a moment's pause and reflection after working on a beautiful project with beautiful people,  I am also thankful for the world of entertainment and art that motivates me to keep pressing forward. I am thankful for the people I've been honored to work with along the way, and the new ones I have met this year. I am thankful for the jobs that allow me to stay in New York, and thankful for the reminder that these jobs are supporting a larger purpose. I am thankful to have a specific vision for the future, a clear desire and star to hitch my wagon to. I am thankful for the busyness before the pitch-perfect calm of balance. I am thankful for paying my dues and the perspective it's helping me to develop, even when I want to complain and stamp my feet like a tired toddler. I am thankful for the silly, tired mistakes I make that give me insight and help me learn my own limitations. I am thankful to know once and for all how important it is to find my equilibrium as an artist and a person, and I look forward to seeking that balance in every aspect of my life moving forward.

I love these people. Thanks Equilibria family!!

And you know what? I am looking forward to seeking balance, and to the balancing act itself. Because it is a blessing to be able to juggle along the tightrope. It's a blessing to be alive.

Like and Love

"If the need to act is so strong it wakes you in the middle of the night, then stay with it."  - Frank Langella

There are things in life that we like. I mean, really really like.

These might be the things that we crave for comfort on a tough day, or hope to get for Christmas. Nectarines, tea, a new dress, a smartphone.

What lights you up?

These things we like might even be people that warm us or cheer us up or speed up our workday. The guy with a joke about everything, the friend who listens to our ideas. We really, really like them. We want them to sit near our cubicle and come to our happy hour. We want to hear what they think. Their presence is like a refreshing bath or breeze.

The things we really really like might even be activities - hiking, reading, writing, swimming. Things that revitalize us and strengthen our health.

Then there are those things that we love.

The distance between the things we love and the things we like is subtle and sometimes confusing, but it is a sudden and shockingly deep precipice nevertheless. One day we might wake up and realize that the thing we thought we only liked we actually love, or vice versa. And then it might turn into one of those sprinting-to-the-airport, buying-the-cheapest-ticket-to-anywhere-just-so-you-can-bolt-through-security-and-race-into-the-gate-and-declare-your-undying-love-over-the-speaker-system-and-embarrass-the-crap-out-of-everyone-but-end-up-passionately-making-out-and-not-caring-anymore movie situations. That crossroads moment when everything is silent around you but the cry of your heart. The "once you know you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start right now" kind of deal. (God I love When Harry Met Sally.)

But until that day, how the heck do you know?

Sometimes I can't tell the difference between the lands of like and love. I squint and scrutinize but blur the line, spill something on my map, and lose track of where the boundaries are. Like is like love, I say to myself. Like is love in a way, I say to myself.

I think myself in circles, spending a lot of silly time trying to understand my feelings about things, and develop feelings for my feelings, and try to feel my way back to knowing whether or not my feelings are feelings of like or feelings of love - or feelings in a different category entirely unrelated to like or love.

Feelings, WTF!

Or whether my feelings are really a factor at all?

The thing about love is you can't think yourself into it, out of it, or around it.

It is, or it isn't. Right?

The thing about love is that it's mysterious and nonsensical. It can appear and disappear sometimes, and sometimes it can be a permanent weight in a small corner of your heart. Sometimes it can easily be mistaken for something else, or not acknowledged at all. It can be the huge writing in the sky that helps us make a choice, or it can be the choice we don't want to make.

King Kong's feelings are clear.

Love makes us alive. Right until it we fall off the Empire State Building.

The reason I know that I love acting - not like it, but love it - is because I just KNOW. No thinking necessary.

Sometimes I toy with the idea of talking myself into liking acting and loving something else more, because loving acting is complicated. I sometimes want to love something that's easier to love. Something that's nicer to me.

But that's just ridiculous. Not to mention impossible. The heart wants what it wants. And what else would I do with my life for goodness' sake, make model planes? Grow a pea garden? Not there's anything wrong with those things. They're just wrong for me.

Tina knows EXACTLY what love has to do, has to do with it.

I remember my making-out-passionately at the crossroads moment with acting, when I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with it and I wanted the rest of my life to start RIGHT NOW. It was when I got the phone call that I was accepted into the Actors Studio Drama School, and felt for the first time that a life as a professional actor was ACTUALLY within my reach. I screamed so loud, and jumped around like such a crazy, I am sure I embarrassed everyone on the block. Or at least my brother. And it was amazing.

Today, Gentle Readers, I trust that you can also know what you love. And that you can have it.

You'll just...know...

Life and Happy Thoughts

I don't know about you guys, but the beginning of August has been a bit rough and tumble for me emotionally, and it's not just the heat-and-humidity-induced smell of the city that's getting to me. Two amazing men in my professional life passed away this month, one of them much too young in the prime of his life. Both spent their time inspiring other people and tirelessly throwing themselves into their passion for this industry. 

Life is funny. Day to day I'm auditioning through the longest dry spell I've had so far in New York, simultaneously struggling to keep some perspective on why I'm still duking it out AND YET knowing with absolute certainty that there is nothing I want more than to act. I'm an actor, dammit. You don't really decide to be one. You just kinda are.

And so, August, I will begin my blogs in you with life filled happy thoughts. Because life is a gift. It can disappear startlingly fast. It can revive and rout the enemy with miraculous chance. It switches on a dime. And you know what? Life is great. Therefore, August, I will revel and rejoice in life. I will fill my brain with good thoughts from great people. Here are some I have commandeered:

"Life is too short to not have fun." - my Dad

"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity." - Gilda Radner

"After each experience, you grow up, you get enriched with something, and you don't know how you're going to be in six months, you don't know what you're going to want, what you're going to need." - Audrey Tatou

"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before." - Mae West

 

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The world owes you nothing. It was here first." - Mark Twain 

Get Serious

OK self. Let's have a chat.

What are you doing here? Are you hanging out and surviving, or are you living out a dream? Are you just another post-prosperity young American drifting through economic hardship, or are you gaining ground and advancing on our goal of acting in feature length films, TV, and Shakespeare? Are you letting life just happen to you, or are you going to be bright and brave and beautiful and grab the bull by the horns? Are you going to blow the smoke away and DO what you're here to DO?

Why do you live here again?

Let's be real: if you're just going to work a smattering of jobs in an attempt to pay your bills and not put your entire energy every day into your acting goals, you might as well not be in New York City. If I'm just living my life, I might as well live somewhere easier and prettier and wilder, with expanses of sky and water and space. Like Tahoe, Montana, Sicily, or Galway. Remember why you didn't go that route? Remember why you're here? There was a reason. A good one.

There's a good reason you don't live here. Yet.

You are an actor.

Remember the advice given to you by an older, more experienced actor: the beginning is slow, the beginning is hard, the beginning kind of sucks. You watch friends marry and buy houses and earn livable wages. You watch the comforts and pleasure of life that you've postponed going on and thriving in their merry dance around you, and you get jealous. You want things you don't have. You feel you've maybe made a bad trade, that maybe you should take a month off the acting stuff and try to save up for a motorcycle. If you're not careful, you get bitter. You covet. Your focus swings off track and you get bogged down in pursuing contrary purposes.

But there's an easy way to avoid this. Remember the wiser actor's advice: get to the middle. Don't wallow in the beginning. Push through. Push to the middle of your career, the part where you're a well oiled machine and a passionate doer of deeds, where you audition your face off and know who you are and know what you want. 

The middle, where you keep in focus at all times that you ARE doing what you came here to do, that you ARE an actor, that you ARE closing in on parts that are right for you. The middle, where you're making that true. The middle, where your married friends with houses are stuck with mortgages and car payments and office jobs and you are not. The middle, where you are free to go to do an amazing, epic, romantic, steamy film in Brazil with Joseph Gordon Levitt if you want. Heck you could even tell him what a crush you have on him over craft services one day. Just be like, "Hey Joe, it's me the other Joe - what's up? What? What's that you say? You like chewing on matches too? Ok, let's make babies. Or not. You know, we could just hang out and work on a film together and make brilliant acting choices too...if you want...either way..."

"Hey JGL. Looking forward to our movie."

This is the middle, where you will live the rest of your life.

Get serious, self. This isn't a brief experiment. You want this life. You want this topsy turvy acting career. In fact, there is little else you want at present. You are shaping your reality - so don't forget to be intentional. You are the man behind the curtain, so to speak. If your hand sags, the whole puppet stops. Get going. Don't stop. Never quit.

Remember who you are.

Remember why you're here.

Mufasa says: "Remember who you are!!!

One Thing A Day: Rest

They say you should do one thing a day for your career. Some days, I do as many as 10 things. Some days, I am uber productive, focused, relentless, passionate, and cut-throat. I submit resumes, shoot emails, make phone calls, have meetings. Some days, though, I feel like I don't manage to do even one thing. I'm trying to learn how to make every day count.

Today I am pushing through my reflexive guilt and doing something very important for my career, something I hardly ever do, something that Americans generally probably suck at...

REST.

My one thing today is to rest. To take an actual weekend day. To sleep in. To watch a movie. To wear mismatching house clothes and not brush my hair. To have a skype date or talk on the phone with my mom. To hang out somewhere with friends maybe. Or, maybe, not do any of those things. Maybe do nothing. To rest for me means to reclaim space in my mind, declutter my soul, and touch the things that make me myself, dust them off, and let them shine again.

As a New Yorker and an extremely ambitious gal, it's hard for me to justify staying at home all day. The pace of the city and the drive of my heart's desires usually thump and pulse and propel me down my stairs and onto the streets. As much as I love sitting on my couch watching "Waiting for Superman," I feel like I'm missing things when I make myself rest. However, I think it's really important that I learn how to do this now in my 20s, before my film bookings and family things have me flying all over the world or whatever. Perhaps this rest is less for my career and more for my personal pleasure, but you know? I think those two things should intertwine. Resting not only makes me healthy, it makes me strong. It will allow me to hit the ground running.

I'm making rest part of my career strategy.

Making Things

Fiji fixes everything, right?

This week on my rollercoaster ride life as an actor, I've felt like I haven't made it. I've felt frustrated, tired, and discouraged more than once, and somewhere around Thursday night it seemed to me that I hadn't made much progress at all ever. I felt like I hadn't made good use of my year in New York so far. I felt like I hadn't made enough money, enough movies, enough of enough-ness to be enough. There was only one thing to do: move to Fiji and support myself by selling my hand-made shell necklaces.

By Sunday morning, Fiji seemed less lustrous as a feasible solution. Isn't there some saying about when the going gets tough, the tough get...you know...

I may have felt like the going had gotten past me without toughening me up or getting me going. I may have felt like "the tough" probably refers to somebody else, somebody who has made enough things or has simply made "it", clearly unlike my own state of un-made-ness. But, whatever my feelings might feel, the truth is I HAVE been making things: making space, making peace, making time, making art. I make kids learn everything from grammar to soccer in my day jobs. I make gourmet meals for myself and friends at home. I make sides come to life in auditions, and worlds appear out of monologues. I make theater productions from scratch sometimes, and sometimes I make my small contribution to larger, ancienter stories. I make tapes and lists and cards and mailings and contacts and friends. I make choices and merry and connections and magic. I make motion. I make stillness.

Once again this week, I am reminded that the voices in my head and my own swirling emotions aren't always the best way for me to look at my life and my work. Sometimes, it's not helpful to let myself feel my way through slow times or low thoughts. I have to remember objective reality and calm down, breathe, and go on making things. And as long as I'm making things, I have to remember that it is enough. And so am I. It's helpful to notice that what I can make, and what I have yet to make, are on course to intersect beautifully.

So I'd like to share with you something I've made - along with many other talented makers. It reminds me of what I've done, what I'm doing, and what I'm going to do. Go on making things, gentle reader! In our making things, we make the world.