11.11.2005
Suppose I accidentally got my shit together.
Would I get a medal? Or a pat on the back and a little feather?
You'll have to fill in the rest because I can't remember it and that's what Google is for and by making you do it my site is therefore interactive. Yeah, that's it.
So apparently I have people who check this blog a lot. And to them, all I can say is BWAH HA HA HA
Ahem, rather: I'm terribly sorry for disappointing you so.
What's my excuse? What's ever my excuse? That I was busy? So are breeding Brooklyn moms and they find time to write witty, poignant salvos on the modern condition. That I was traveling? That was true, but only for about two weeks out of the last four months.
No, the excuse is something else entirely. It's not a new phenomenon, but one that I've never quite copped to publicly before. We'll get to that at the end of the all-purpose catch-up list of the goings-on in La Vie en Dublin. Since last we blogged...
1. Mr. Man and I had an excellent visit to New York City where we met up with a glossy posse of fabulous sassy women with big hair and money to burn (aka my mom, aunt, cousin, mom's best friend and her daughter, one of my oldest friends). We were fed steak dinners and barbecue and taken to Broadway shows. And life was good.
Other highlights of the New York visit were seeing Avenue Q again; going to jazz at a new club overlooking Central Park whose name I dare not write for its corporateness; loading up on new running toys to make the marathon training more pleasant; long runs through Central Park; visiting with Mr. Man's family; meeting the original Yitzhak; general huggy love-ins with old friends; and, of course, Sunday brunch at 7A.
Lowlights include the sad location in which we visited Mr. Man's parents the first time, but that's another story.
I departed New York on a Sunday evening and arrived Monday morning and went straight into rehearsals that same morning for...
2. The Fringe. The epic, exhausting Fringe. Doing two shows for the Fringe and preparing for my play workshop and training for the marathon sounded like a good idea once upon a time...nah, I can't even buy my own bullshit on that one. I knew it'd be a tough time, but, not-so-secretly, I love being that busy. Or, to be more specific, I love being employed and doing work I'm into and being active. (I could not be less of any of these things at the moment, but that comes later.) Play the first: Woyzeck, one of the Rough Magic Seeds II shows, which got some mixed reviews but a stellar 5-star one from the Irish Times, and was nominated for the Spirit of the Fringe Award. Play the second: what else but La Hedwig, which received 5 stars from Irish Theatre Magazine online and won the Best Spiegeltent Show award! Technically, I think the award is called the "Most Entertaining Spiegeltent Show" but, whatever, they called us up onstage, I gave a breathless thank-you speech and we boogied on into the night and got some money for it.
I got one day's rest before getting up at the crack o' dawn to get my director from the airport and begin...
3. The workshop for my play, which in the past month I've come to call "What Not To Write." It was like a playwriting Trinny and Susannah came and removed the three really nice outfits I had and then took the rest out back and obliterated them with a flamethrower. As I don't know how to write a play, the first draft with which we were working resembled a teenage girl's journal vomiting. The workshop experience itself, while tremedously humbling, often to the point of despair, was actually really great and was absolutely necessary for me to move forward.
Two days after the end of this adventure I embarked on the most serious run of my...
4. Marathon training. The most serious run of which I speak was 22 miles. It was basically torturous. I'd taken about 11 days between my last long run (18.5 miles, which I did during the run of Woyzeck and was fine) and I only got through the last eight miles by telling myself that this was the hardest part of the whole training; that it all got easier after this; and that the marathon itself would be totally easy. In fact, one online running buddy of mine said it would be "the icing on the cake."
To paraphrase the brilliant and sparkling Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, this is the shot of the cook in The Hunt for Red October.
To continue my stolen-from-Ted Casablancas-segue theme, in between my last few long runs and all-around race prep (which included eating WHATEVER THE HELL I WANTED TO which was GREAT!) I started spending my days chained to the computer because I was...
5. Making money online. If you listen to Air America Radio, as I obsessively do as I'm puttering around the shoebox masquerading as a livable space for two rambunctious children-at-heart, you'll have heard the mysterious ads about working from home and "buying and selling" online and never having to work in an office again. Mr. Man and I like to insert "FOR PORN!" (a la Trekkie Monster) after every ambiguous proclamation of whatever mystery goods you are signing up to sell (FOR PORN!). My particular shady online dealings involve making money with online gambling. It's going pretty well, though not as well as it should be because the feckers have figured out who I am and are sort of banning me from their sister casinos. This limits my options; thus I have had to begin...
6. Paying the damn bills with temp work. For a while I did this with extra work, but it's too sporadic and mind-numbing, and, frankly, demoralizing for this particular NYU-trained actor: for this I took out enough loans to keep me in debt until I'm 37? Temping, while not as overtly spirit-crushing, is quietly gnawing at my soul. However, keeping my spirits buoyant, to a point, are my memories of...
5. The marathon! The marathon! It was SO MUCH FUN. And deserves a proper writeup with photos which I cannot provide here but am aiming to finish up later today.
6. And now, two weeks after that, here I am.
My mystery reason for being so under the radar lately is a simple one, but one that I have not been able to be fully honest about, particularly to myself.
Basically...I'm depressed. I'm chronically low-grade bummed out. I'm not exactly sure why, though I can point to certain things in my life here in Dublin that really aren't helping, and it doesn't feel like the crushing, medication-needing depression I've gone through before. But I feel myself shying away from the outside world, even my friends, and this is a slippery slope, one I've slid down time and time again and had to climb back up through pure contrary behavior. When one is depressed, what one interprets as one's "instincts" are not necessarily acting in one's best interests. Don't want to go meet your friends? Tough. That's the depression talking. Go wash your hair.
I have days where it is the height of accomplishment to get dressed and go to the grocery store, and the fact that this is such a mundane part of life for so many people but something about which it requires the better part of a morning for me to even organize my thoughts continues the downward spiral. I'm not writing, and what's worse is that I don't really care that I'm not writing. I don't understand where the days are going, and I find the way my life is structured right now to be untenable.
I know it doesn't help that I've spent my young life thus far dreaming of huge, magical things and great work to be done and that these days when none of my thoughts will stay still long enough for me to align them in order of importance are directly undermining what I want to do with my life. Even the act of basic life maintenance is rubbing me the wrong way: I resent my temp job because I feel like it's getting in the way of my acting stuff here, except there really isn't anything going on right now for it to get in the way of, and I should really be grateful for things that make me shower and put on cute clothes and be active in the world but yet, I am feeling distinctly ungrateful.
I've been laying low about this also because I know it is a desperately unhip thing to be depressed but, let's face it. I am not a hip person. I am not even consciously unhip. I'm just sort of...here. Depression might be interesting when spun ironically, but I don't even have the mental energy to be ironic. As the wonderful Buddhist nun Pema Chodron says, "Your neurosis is your wisdom" which I interpret as meaning that all you can do is be honest about who you are and what you do. And while I cringe at the thought of this becoming a chronicle about depression, at this point I'd jump for joy at it becoming something about something.
If you want fabulous tales of Dublin, I suggest you go here and here. ¶ 2:07 PM
You'll have to fill in the rest because I can't remember it and that's what Google is for and by making you do it my site is therefore interactive. Yeah, that's it.
So apparently I have people who check this blog a lot. And to them, all I can say is BWAH HA HA HA
Ahem, rather: I'm terribly sorry for disappointing you so.
What's my excuse? What's ever my excuse? That I was busy? So are breeding Brooklyn moms and they find time to write witty, poignant salvos on the modern condition. That I was traveling? That was true, but only for about two weeks out of the last four months.
No, the excuse is something else entirely. It's not a new phenomenon, but one that I've never quite copped to publicly before. We'll get to that at the end of the all-purpose catch-up list of the goings-on in La Vie en Dublin. Since last we blogged...
1. Mr. Man and I had an excellent visit to New York City where we met up with a glossy posse of fabulous sassy women with big hair and money to burn (aka my mom, aunt, cousin, mom's best friend and her daughter, one of my oldest friends). We were fed steak dinners and barbecue and taken to Broadway shows. And life was good.
Other highlights of the New York visit were seeing Avenue Q again; going to jazz at a new club overlooking Central Park whose name I dare not write for its corporateness; loading up on new running toys to make the marathon training more pleasant; long runs through Central Park; visiting with Mr. Man's family; meeting the original Yitzhak; general huggy love-ins with old friends; and, of course, Sunday brunch at 7A.
Lowlights include the sad location in which we visited Mr. Man's parents the first time, but that's another story.
I departed New York on a Sunday evening and arrived Monday morning and went straight into rehearsals that same morning for...
2. The Fringe. The epic, exhausting Fringe. Doing two shows for the Fringe and preparing for my play workshop and training for the marathon sounded like a good idea once upon a time...nah, I can't even buy my own bullshit on that one. I knew it'd be a tough time, but, not-so-secretly, I love being that busy. Or, to be more specific, I love being employed and doing work I'm into and being active. (I could not be less of any of these things at the moment, but that comes later.) Play the first: Woyzeck, one of the Rough Magic Seeds II shows, which got some mixed reviews but a stellar 5-star one from the Irish Times, and was nominated for the Spirit of the Fringe Award. Play the second: what else but La Hedwig, which received 5 stars from Irish Theatre Magazine online and won the Best Spiegeltent Show award! Technically, I think the award is called the "Most Entertaining Spiegeltent Show" but, whatever, they called us up onstage, I gave a breathless thank-you speech and we boogied on into the night and got some money for it.
I got one day's rest before getting up at the crack o' dawn to get my director from the airport and begin...
3. The workshop for my play, which in the past month I've come to call "What Not To Write." It was like a playwriting Trinny and Susannah came and removed the three really nice outfits I had and then took the rest out back and obliterated them with a flamethrower. As I don't know how to write a play, the first draft with which we were working resembled a teenage girl's journal vomiting. The workshop experience itself, while tremedously humbling, often to the point of despair, was actually really great and was absolutely necessary for me to move forward.
Two days after the end of this adventure I embarked on the most serious run of my...
4. Marathon training. The most serious run of which I speak was 22 miles. It was basically torturous. I'd taken about 11 days between my last long run (18.5 miles, which I did during the run of Woyzeck and was fine) and I only got through the last eight miles by telling myself that this was the hardest part of the whole training; that it all got easier after this; and that the marathon itself would be totally easy. In fact, one online running buddy of mine said it would be "the icing on the cake."
To paraphrase the brilliant and sparkling Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, this is the shot of the cook in The Hunt for Red October.
To continue my stolen-from-Ted Casablancas-segue theme, in between my last few long runs and all-around race prep (which included eating WHATEVER THE HELL I WANTED TO which was GREAT!) I started spending my days chained to the computer because I was...
5. Making money online. If you listen to Air America Radio, as I obsessively do as I'm puttering around the shoebox masquerading as a livable space for two rambunctious children-at-heart, you'll have heard the mysterious ads about working from home and "buying and selling" online and never having to work in an office again. Mr. Man and I like to insert "FOR PORN!" (a la Trekkie Monster) after every ambiguous proclamation of whatever mystery goods you are signing up to sell (FOR PORN!). My particular shady online dealings involve making money with online gambling. It's going pretty well, though not as well as it should be because the feckers have figured out who I am and are sort of banning me from their sister casinos. This limits my options; thus I have had to begin...
6. Paying the damn bills with temp work. For a while I did this with extra work, but it's too sporadic and mind-numbing, and, frankly, demoralizing for this particular NYU-trained actor: for this I took out enough loans to keep me in debt until I'm 37? Temping, while not as overtly spirit-crushing, is quietly gnawing at my soul. However, keeping my spirits buoyant, to a point, are my memories of...
5. The marathon! The marathon! It was SO MUCH FUN. And deserves a proper writeup with photos which I cannot provide here but am aiming to finish up later today.
6. And now, two weeks after that, here I am.
My mystery reason for being so under the radar lately is a simple one, but one that I have not been able to be fully honest about, particularly to myself.
Basically...I'm depressed. I'm chronically low-grade bummed out. I'm not exactly sure why, though I can point to certain things in my life here in Dublin that really aren't helping, and it doesn't feel like the crushing, medication-needing depression I've gone through before. But I feel myself shying away from the outside world, even my friends, and this is a slippery slope, one I've slid down time and time again and had to climb back up through pure contrary behavior. When one is depressed, what one interprets as one's "instincts" are not necessarily acting in one's best interests. Don't want to go meet your friends? Tough. That's the depression talking. Go wash your hair.
I have days where it is the height of accomplishment to get dressed and go to the grocery store, and the fact that this is such a mundane part of life for so many people but something about which it requires the better part of a morning for me to even organize my thoughts continues the downward spiral. I'm not writing, and what's worse is that I don't really care that I'm not writing. I don't understand where the days are going, and I find the way my life is structured right now to be untenable.
I know it doesn't help that I've spent my young life thus far dreaming of huge, magical things and great work to be done and that these days when none of my thoughts will stay still long enough for me to align them in order of importance are directly undermining what I want to do with my life. Even the act of basic life maintenance is rubbing me the wrong way: I resent my temp job because I feel like it's getting in the way of my acting stuff here, except there really isn't anything going on right now for it to get in the way of, and I should really be grateful for things that make me shower and put on cute clothes and be active in the world but yet, I am feeling distinctly ungrateful.
I've been laying low about this also because I know it is a desperately unhip thing to be depressed but, let's face it. I am not a hip person. I am not even consciously unhip. I'm just sort of...here. Depression might be interesting when spun ironically, but I don't even have the mental energy to be ironic. As the wonderful Buddhist nun Pema Chodron says, "Your neurosis is your wisdom" which I interpret as meaning that all you can do is be honest about who you are and what you do. And while I cringe at the thought of this becoming a chronicle about depression, at this point I'd jump for joy at it becoming something about something.
If you want fabulous tales of Dublin, I suggest you go here and here. ¶ 2:07 PM
