I thought it had been longer since I last wrote here. I feel like I’ve sat down a hundred times and started to type. But I see it’s been less than a week. Funny.

I’ve been feeling very overwhelmed in my professional life lately. And rather underwhelmed in my personal life. I’ve been processing so much. I’ve had so much to say. But I come home at night and discover that I just can’t deal with it. That I’d rather just tune out for a while. Shoving my problems under the proverbial rug.

I had a little mini heart to heart with a good friend on Friday. We’d both had one of those weeks. She said some stuff that hit home. Nothing I hadn’t told myself already, but hearing it from someone else always feels different.

I’m not happy. I won’t go so far as to say that I am unhappy. But there are definitely things about my life that are not what I want them to be. But there are things that are simply beyond my control. And truthfully, even if they were in my control, I don’t entirely know what I would change.

PF and I have hit a rough patch. Or what feels like a rough patch to me. I’m so out of practice at relationships that I don’t quite know how to deal with it. I can’t remember the last time I had an issue with someone and truly worked through it. Clearly LH and I weren’t good at that. Aaron and I tended to scratch the surface a little and then just ignore things. Or, I would talk and he would ignore.

I feel helpless and I feel lost. I want to fix things but don’t know how. I don’t know which part is the part that needs fixing. I know that I love him. Academically I know that relationships take work and that life has its own system of cycles. I’m officially throwing my hands up on this one. Trusting and hoping like hell that things will sort themselves out.

But it has me feeling much more lost than I’d like to admit.

So.

The only thing I know to do is to take charge of what I can. To do the things that make me happy. Because at the end of the day I am the only one responsible for my happiness.

I miss singing. So I bit the bullet and sent an email that I was asked to send 10 months ago. Requesting an audition for a chorus conducted by a friend and colleague. It’s much smaller than the group I used to sing with and it’s composed primarily of current or former professional musicians and music educators. That’s much more my speed. So we’ll see how that goes.

I cleaned my apartment. Really cleaned. There was bleach involved. And I cleaned out my closet. I have a huge bag of stuff to take to Goodwill. I reorganized what was left. I couldn’t help but snicker a little as all of my black tie gowns and cocktail dresses wound up hanging next to all of my latex and other fetish wear.

I went online and signed up for a CSA (community supported agriculture) service. Yes PF, you may tease me and call me Californian. I’ll remind you that I’ve been shipping pecans from my hometown ever since leaving there. The CSA box is to serve two purposes. I’m trying to get serious about getting healthy again and part of that is introducing more produce. I could start hitting up the many farmer’s markets but I’m hoping having a box delivered to me will force me out of my culinary rut. And as a chef, I’m looking forward to the challenge of getting outside my box a little as well as increasing awareness of seasonal ingredients.

As for work, I’m just clicking along there. I’m past some big deadlines so I feel breathing room again. My new direct report is coming along exactly as I’d hoped. Better even. It occurred to me that there was the transitional period between my predecessor leaving and a replacement being hired that I did both jobs for 4 and a half months. Then I hired someone who never really caught on and I was still carrying some of that workload. Then her disciplinary action started. And now, finally, after 23 months of carrying all or part of that workload on top of my own, I’m finally seeing the light of having it all handed off to someone else. Which means doing only my own job. Now, my own job is still enough that it could be split into two full-time positions, but still. The load is finally finally lifting.

I could wax on about how life is what we make it and how many things in my life are really something to be proud of, but I’m not there. Not now. Not yet. Where I am is that I’m only one person. And there’s only so much I can do. So I’m going to do the things that make me happy and I’m going to do the best that I can and I’m going to focus on the things that make sense.

And the rest, will either work out or it won’t.

I feel like I’ve enrolled in relationship 101 without realizing it. Somehow between the failed marriage and the subsequent rebounds and all the sleeping around I’ve completely forgotten how to have a an actual relationship where you have ups and you have downs but you work through them. Together.

I’m trying. I’m really really trying. I just feel like a fuck up. I just hope PF doesn’t think that too.

Maybe this time, I’ll be lucky
Maybe this time, he’ll stay
Maybe this time
For the first time
Love won’t hurry away

He will hold me fast
I’ll be home at last
Not a loser anymore
Like the last time
And the time before

Everybody loves a winner
So nobody loved me;
‘Lady Peaceful,’ ‘Lady Happy,’
That’s what I long to be
All the odds are in my favor
Something’s bound to begin
It’s got to happen, happen sometime
Maybe this time I’ll win

When I lived in Germany, every so often that statement would hit me out of nowhere. I live in Germany.

I’d be coming out of the German theater that played movies in English and on a hill in the distance there would be a castle all lit up. I’d be out with friends and realize how accustomed I’d grown to the slower pace of dinner service in German restaurants. Or I’d be at my bank, carrying on a mundane conversation with Herr Schiller and realize that I was no longer translating in my head, I was just speaking.

But primarily it would strike me when I would drive between villages. From home to the base or to a friend’s house. Nothing spectacular, just an ordinary moment. I’d come around a curve in the road and something would just resonate somehow. Occasionally I’d have to stop for a flock of sheep to cross the road and I’d have time to ruminate.

I had one of those moments today. I was driving from work to the train station to catch a train into the city. I’d taken surface streets to avoid rush hour traffic. I’d taken a shortcut to avoid other people avoiding rush hour traffic. I was not in the best of neighborhoods.

I turned right and onto a main street and in the distance there was a line of four palm trees. Standing significantly taller than anything else on the horizon. The sun was at just the right angle to turn them into black shadows against an amber sky.

And it hit me. I live in California.

Not because I have family here. Not because I followed someone here. Because I got a job and picked up my life and I went. And I’ve built a life for myself that more or less makes me happy.

And even though I know that it’s real, for a moment it felt like I was watching myself in a movie. Because it just didn’t seem like my life. If I was able to get through all that stuff, and be that girl, the girl who could just pick up and move and start all over successfully, why is it that all of a sudden I’m second guessing everything I’m doing?

Who knows. The moment was gone by the end of the block.

“I am no good at love…

For I feel the misery of the end

In the moment that it begins

And the bitterness of the last good-bye

Is the bitterness that wins.”

Noel Coward

Sometimes I don’t want to process. Sometimes I just like to feel the sadness. I’ve grown comfortable with its weight.

When I sat down at my computer tonight, I thought it would be to write about my mother and my sometimes complicated relationship with her. Little tears have been working their way out all evening. Ever since our phone call. No real crying spells. Just the occasional wetness snaking its way down my cheek.

I thought I needed to come here and to process.

But I turned on iTunes and I came to this place and I simply stared at a white screen. I’d turned on a slow and smooth playlist, fitting for my mood. But as a song drifted by, and then two, and then three, I realized that what I needed was not to write. What I need was to just feel the sadness.

So I lit a candle. And I turned off all of the lights in my apartment. I switched to a slightly different playlist. And then I turned the volume up. Way up. And I just danced.

Dancing is something I love to do. I usually do it in a club. Quite often there is soothing herb. There is always alcohol. I’m usually in something cut low across my breasts and high across my thighs. Hair down so I can run my fingers through it. Artful smudges in black and gray shadow around my eyes.

I like going to a club and getting lost in the movement of bodies on a dance floor. I like that feeling of being connected but not. If I have a partner, great, but it’s OK if I don’t. I like to just close my eyes and let instinct takeover.

Tonight, without the chemicals and without the heavy eye shadow, I danced. For myself. I let the music play and I let my hips and my heart take over. I began to strip. Peeling off layer upon layer. Until I was naked in the candlelight. The tears came then. As I stood in my living room swaying to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by the Beatles.

It was the last song. I sank to my knees and was just still for a minute. Letting the tears dry themselves. And then I returned to my computer to write.

Roots have always been a sort of shifting thing for me. My southern roots are deep, it’s true. But when I was 8, I moved to the west coast. I became a successful transplant. And while it’s true that I lived in WA longer than I lived in OK, I spent so much time in OK on vacation and family related trips that my roots there remained strong.

Both states felt like home. Neither state felt like home.

And then I met LH. And when you marry the military it adds a whole other dimension to shifting roots. You’re told when to pick up your entire life and you’re told where to take it. And when you get there, you know on day one that your time in that place is already counting down. So you make friends and you do things, but it never really becomes home. Except it does a little.

Even when LH and I settled in TX and he separated from the Air Force, we knew our time there was limited. Our plan was to go to TX, finish his enlistment, finish school, take the world by storm. That didn’t exactly happen. Not all of it anyway.

The year after I left TX was the most rootless in my entire life. A few months in WA, a few in NY, a few more in WA, and then the move to CA. There were times when I felt homeless, even though I never was. There were times when I was acutely aware that my most major possession was my truck. That inside it’s cab was the only space I could call my own.

I’ve managed to build myself a quiet little life here. It’s a life I’m pretty fond of. But, I’ve been here for almost three years now. So I’m starting to feel that itch. The moving itch. And truth be told, there’s some pretty strong gravitational pull toward the middle of the country. To Texas. To Chicago. To New Orleans. Santa Fe.

Instead, I’ve done something to deepen my roots here. I joined a board of another performing arts organization. It’s not the sort of thing you do if you’re only planning on being around short term. I feel good about the decision. But at the same time, there’s that little part of me that’s aware of it’s larger implications.

There are plenty of reasons to stay here. More reasons to stay than to leave, really. But there’s just something about making an active, deliberate decision to commit to a place that sketches me out a little. Maybe because I view the world as being small and easy to move around in and I don’t want to lose that. Maybe because part of me worries about missing out on something that is happening somewhere else. Maybe because my fear of entrapment really is that big.

I don’t know. What I do know, is that from all appearances, it seems I’ll be staying here for a while.

When I was in late elementary school and junior high, I watched a ridiculous amount of TV. These were the in between years. When I was younger we were in Oklahoma and lived on a big patch of land in a small town. I was outside a lot. When I was older, I was at dance class or a voice lesson or a rehearsal or cheerleading practice. I had a life.

One of the shows I watched was Perfect Strangers. It’s hardly a memorable show, but there you go. I loved it. Balki and Larry and the happy dance. It made the adolescent version of me giggle.

Flash forward many years and I found myself in London’s West End watching a production of Stones in His Pockets. Stones in His Pockets is a fabulous two man show set in a little town in Ireland . We happened to be there during a week when the regular London cast was on a break so the cast who would be opening the show soon on Broadway could have a chance to really get the show on it’s legs.

I was in awe. It’s brilliantly written stuff, to be sure. But it also requires each actor to play many many roles. Both men were fantastic. One of them, was Bronson Pinchot. During the show I was completely able to forget that I was watching Balki.

After the show, LH wanted to get autographs. So we hung around. Across the street. Finally one of the actors (not Bronson) came out. He went to the take-away window we were standing next to, ordered some food, and then lit up a cigarette while he waited. We struck up a conversation.

The other memorable thing about this particular trip is that we were in London in Sept of 2001. As soon as we’d identified ourselves as Americans by our accents, it didn’t take long for a very animated conversation to ensue. He was from New York, so we talked about the bombing. We told him how we’d been in Pisa when it happened. He recommended that we take a trip to the Embassy to see the memorial (something we did the next day). Then we got on the subject of theater.

So we’re chatting away, having a completely sane, rational, intelligent conversation, when he sees Bronson exit the stage door. “Bronny,” he calls, waving him over. Bronson approaches us, we’re all introduced. And then tragedy struck.

Now, today, if you stick me in front of someone famous, it doesn’t really phase me much. Not unless you’re talking about super, super famous. Today, I know too many people, casually or otherwise, who make their living in entertainment. But back then, the only famous, or semi-famous, folks I knew were still in the “when” stage of I-knew-you-when.

It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Or listening to it. Before I could stop myself the words came tumbling out of my mouth. “I used to watch Perfect Strangers all the time when I was a kid. I loved that show. It is so cool to meet you.”

Yup. Not, you were fantastic in this show. You played such a wide range of characters. You’re going to be great on Broadway.

No. I let loose with unadulterated geekiness over Perfect Strangers.

I think LH’s jaw actually hit the ground. Needless to say conversation was pretty much over. We got our autograph though.