(no subject)

It's past 2am and I just got home from opera rehearsal.

If I were the sort of person to dedicate myself to any one thing, in a pure and simple way, it would be opera. At least it feels that way right now. I've just never had an experience like I did today, working hard on the stage doing some wiring stuff, listening to our musicians play (we have a harpsichord!) and our wonderful singers, half in costume and half in mundane clothes work with them. It was just so soothing, and right and I mean, come on -- opera -- they're all always about monsters, stalkers and/or dead girls. It's just so great. Also, the death scenes. Oh My God. Love love love.

I'm also up for a serious, full-time, well paid SM position. So we'll see what happens. Fingers crossed. Good thoughts always welcome.

And, picked up Sands of Ammon -- blew through 40 pages during down-time today. Am increasingly disturbed by it. As a young child, I had something of a crush on Alexander. As a late teen I made an immense nuisance of myself at my University by doing a controversial paper on him, that in retrospect was probably about antagonizing people as much as anything else. Right now, I'm having a very role model sort of thing going on. Interestingly, less for the ambition than for the odd combination of hedonism and asceticism in his life. It's a trait in mine I've not often found cause to recognize elsewhere.

Okay, the screen is waving about in front of my eyes, I'm going to get some rest.

lonely for the future

For those of you who do not live in NYC, I should note that most of us are renters, and unless one has a loft, one doesn't tend to do home improvement. If you own an apartment, you hire people, and if you rent an apartment, you don't do things to it (again, unless it's a loft). So hardware stores can be hard to find, and the home improvement aisle at KMart is always empty -- except of stage managers and perverts. It's a really funny thing.

I've got to go buy jazz shoes today. Or maybe character shoes -- doesn't really matter which, but it's terrible, because I have such a dance shoe thing. It's very hard not to want the dance sneaker, or to buy tango shoes when I don't really need them right this second and so forth and so forth.

Anyway, I'm behind schedule _and_ it's just occured to me that I'm in a _really_ weird mood. Not good, not bad, and certainly not giddy. I know the mood but not the word for it. And it's only ever of any use if I set fire to it. I'm going out tonight. Alone, most likely. Because sometimes I need to call to things in the dark.

I'm really nervous, by the way, about my headshots. I'm worried I look too pretty in them. I've always relied on having a face as if from another world, and I am not so much sure I know how to compete for this one.

I feel lonely today -- but it's not a relationship sort of lonliness, nor about how little time I've had to see my friends in the last month, although both those things certainly have their emotional weight.

About a week ago, Megan and I were sitting around talking about relationships -- actually she was perched on the windowsill smoking and I was in the kitchen cooking and gesticulating with a butter knife. And I said, "You know, I used to think, that I'd never have another very very close marriage-type relationship. You know, I did that for years, and it really hampered me. And I know what I want now, and it's not less committed, but it's certainly less scheduled and regimented. It's the funniest thing though, you know this whole collaboration thing I'm on about, this whole, two or three or whatever against the world thing? Somewhere in the last couple of days, it's stopped being one of the things I lie awake in the dark aching about. Because it's going to happen. When I'm 35, or 40. But I'm so sure of it all of a sudden. It's so real."

And I hadn't known I felt that until I said it. It was the strangest thing. I could, and I won't, make a list of ten things I want more than anything in the world. Things I clutch my hand to my breast over and would cry to tell you of my desire for. Some of them, I lie awake in bed thinking of all night, single senteces repeated over and over again into the dark. Others of them, exist in my mind as if they are already facts, spoken and written into a future I must merely catch up with. I have no doubt of them. I don't know how it is some things wind up in one category or another, or how they shift abruptly, as they sometimes do, but there it is. I am hungry, and impatient, and wish to have the world before me to move through simply as I was made to.

I know so many small things. Certain ways of smiling and nodding. Of moving my hands and wrists. Grace and ease as if the world was made for me to cut through it like water. And it is the simplest things, that make the waiting hard. The smile, the head twist, the way someone else puts on a coat, the thought of open spaces and drapes blowing into a home in New York's fragile Spring.

I've been lucky enough in my life, to spend large portions of it with those who pretend to such things well. But how we live is so much entirely about how we think we have the right to live. And in the end, they were not like that, and resented me no doubt in part because I was and I am.

I choose everything. And it really is that easy. And that monstrous. It's not simple, certainly.