Now Playing -
the six o'clock news.
Now Eating -
nothing, because I'm not home to cook it yet.
Now Feeling -
fragile.
Now Tweeting
- Melanie
One way to avoid having to remove paint from under your fingernail...snap it off on the car door! No, no, it didn't hurt. Just pissed me off, because I was at one of those "Hey, my nails are all one length and they look nice!" stages.
Good lord. I just wasted a paragraph on breaking a nail.
So the "paint beneath the nails" came about yesterday while I was painting a small table. Used milk paint, and as I was mixing it, the smell hit me. And it was a smell I remembered from my childhood. Summer camp. And I can even remember which summer camp...Red Robin. There was this old house on "campus" where we would go when it rained, and the chalky smell of the paint brought back to me the musty smell of the house.
Strange how just a scent can make you feel that way. Or a dream...ever have a dream about the past and wake up with a feeling you cannot shake? I have very few distinct memories from my childhood. Not sure why, considering I'm not that far removed from it, but I just don't. But I can remember exactly how my grandparents' apartment in Brooklyn smelled. The texture of their carpeting. The Lifebuoy soap and Chiclets my grandfather kept in a kitchen cupboard. The tulips in my front yard. The very 60s linoleum in my bedroom. Yes, I had linoleum in my bedroom. The Persistence of Memory, I guess.
Wow. The Boss was just browsing around on the Ellis Island site. He showed me the listings for his mother and grandmother and then we found...my grandmother. On the S.S. Amerika, 1909. She's the second line down, right below her mother, my great-grandmother. Marjem, known to our family as Molly. I'm named after her. She was thirty-five when she came here, my age now. My grandmother was nine. Amazing.
I've been feeling like so much emotional wreckage lately. Weepy over the oddest things. Not maudlin weepy per se, just overly sentimental. I suppose I'd rather feel too much than not at all, so there could be worse things.
I'm just...discontented. A friend made the mistake of asking me some months ago whether I missed performing full-time. Not a deliberate mistake on his part - how was he to know that this was the one question I hadn't dared myself to think about these past few months?
And the answer is, I do. I do miss it. I dread getting out of bed in the morning, and procrastinate no end before I finally get my ass into the shower and, eventually, out of the house. Eventually. Hah. On average, I'm a half-hour late every day. Good thing I'm able to "flex" my hours and stay late to make up for it.
I miss it. There I said it, it's out. And maybe it's some sort of arrested development thing, wanting to �play theatre� all my life and not get a �real� job, but theatre is what feels real to me. It�s the place where I am the most comfortable. It�s where I feel alive. But we have bills to pay, and doctors to visit, and a future to think of. As I say in Belle of Amherst, �How to grow up? I don�t know.� I wish there were a way to negotiate the two.
So here we are, my husband and I...one who wishes she could perform all the time and "never do a lick of work again," as they say in Kiss Me, Kate, and one who wishes he'd win the lottery so he'd never have to perform again. What a pair, eh?
I think we�ll have some talking to do this vacation. Not �We need to talk� talking�just about things that fall by the wayside in our daily life. We spend so much time going over the minutiae of our days that the important stuff remains unsaid. And it shouldn�t. But sometimes, after the average exhausting day, it�s more exhausting to contemplate discussing the things that matter most. Is it too much to want to sit on a boulder in Maine and talk to my husband about our life, our marriage, what he thinks of me, what I think of him, where we�re going in this life together?
I hope not.
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a very fine cat indeed - Friday, Jan. 17, 2014
happy new year! - Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013
this is where i am - Saturday, Jun. 30, 2012
this is how it is - Friday, Feb. 24, 2012
a very late last year's wrap-up - Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012
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