Force be with me

I'm babysitting nowadays, and let me tell you honestly-- there is no perspective-giving life event like child watching. I'm all about development, both in life (general) and specifically in childhood.

Now, on a couple of unfortunate occasions, I've had to force this 20 month old baby/kid I'm watching to do a couple of not-at-all-unfortunate tasks-- like eat, take a bath, stand STILL for two seconds. Simple. Tasks that even if they felt boring or like a waste of time, any normal adult told to do them would be like "Sure. Ok. Whatever." But for an almost two year old, it's like THE FUCKING LAST THING THEY WANT TO DO.

So I have to force her. And hopefully if I do it gently enough, it's a positive learning experience (although it doesn't seem like one when the result nine times out of ten is screaming, kicking or tears all over the goddamn place).

That being the analogy I want to set up-- I don't feel like writing at all right now. I am classically blocked, completely uninterested in writing at the moment. I want to eat and run around the house and watch television. I have to pick myself up and force myself to write something.

But I don't WANNA WRITE!

You know you have to turn in a scene to class tomorrow.

DON'T WAAAANNAAAA.

You haven't written all week. It couldn't hurt to just try writing a little bit now.

NO!

Come on.

NO!

Just write a little bit. You'll forget you didn't want to in the first place if you just do a little bit.

NO! WRITING! NO!

Okay, I'm just gonna pick you up and we're gonna go write for a little bit whether you want to or not.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOHHHOSAAAAAOSHFAOISJLEKSFOOOO (just screaming, now, no words)

Shhhh, it's okay. Calm down, shhh now.

(Quit halt to screaming/sobbing)... no writing?

No, you're going to write.

(Beat. Screaming like lemon on a wound. The neighbors are gonna call the cops on you.)

Prom and Conversations I'll be a part of someday but not today

Okay... optimism is a fickle bitch and can't decide whether it's in abundance or a rarity. In my life, at least. So tonight, I write with an ambiguous "things are... things" kind of mentality. Not good. Not bad. Just things.

My friends Matt and Frank are throwing a birthday party prom for their 26th birthdays this Saturday. I'm all ABOUT this, as high school prom was a complete debacle in the majority of my remembrances, and a do-over is definitely in order. Plus, I'm not planning too far in advance. The planning is all-too-often where prom goes horribly awry-- expectations almost always blow the entire event out of proportion.

And another way this prom is already better than the first one-- I have a real date! I asked him over G-Chat and it's no big deal, but still, he's a real live guy-date*.

*Not that going to high school prom with Emily Roberson wasn't a slice of delightful. She was just a she.

In secondary news, today at work I was a part of a discussion that placed me in terrain so clearly out of my league. To explain-- a group of playwrights got together for bourbon and discussion. I happened to be working, sat down and joined in.

I spoke maybe three times over the course of two hours.

They talked about politics and playwrighting and theater and America and ALL THIS SHIT I'm CONSTANTLY thinking about. The difference being-- oh, I don't know, their legitimate status as playwrights? Their intimate knowledge of the topics we were discussing? The big, deliberately chosen words they used to express pertinent, edgy ideas? One of those.

So while I was overwhelmed and felt totally under-qualified to so much as express my opinion, it was huge just to be in the room. It was like hearing all my college professors get together over booze and shoot the shit. I'd be SO interested and listen with unwavering attention-- but I'd be scared out of my fucking mind.

Attrition! Attrition! .... Attrition!

Sing the title to "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof and it's way funnier.

I've been blog-absent for years now, it seems. I only honestly admit this because I just spent the past hour or so reading old entries and getting lost in the alleyways of memory lane. ("I was still friends with people from high school in my junior year of college! And I wish I still was! Oh my god how detached I feel now by comparison!")

There's this idea that got introduced in my playwriting class that seems a little daunting. It's what makes "All My Sons" a fucking virtuousic dramatic work-- indicative of what theater should be able and IS able to do. It's the concept that dramatic actions build upon every dramatic action that's come before it-- the attrition of emotion/information is cumulative, and pressure builds until the drama has stuffed itself into too small a space and something has to explode in a cathartic release (CLIMAX!).

That being said, I have a bit of a problem with attrition in my own life. I think it comes with my ability to completely forget the past and live completely in the future. (This is a recent development... ironically.)

I love progress. And I love thinking that the version of myself that I am at the moment is more advanced and evolved than previous versions of myself. But reading old entries makes me realize that old me wasn't the senseless, underdeveloped me that I always pretend she was. Granted, reading old entries is a bit like hearing a stranger talk (and what a clever, attractive stranger she was). But I wasn't completely retarded, and certainly not so less sophisticated than I am now. Less well-read, perhaps. But not unintelligent and not completely incomprehensible.

Speaking about completely incomprehensible behavior, I had a point about "attrition" that may have been thrown to the wolves of a slightly inebriated mind. Blame it on people at work deciding that Thursday night is the best possible night to throw a Bourbon party.

Oh man I wish I had written this:

This is from another guy's blog (arguably, a better guy's blog, but give me time). Here he is, in all his glory.

And here's what he wrote to make me fall in love with him:

Dumb Things Stupid People Say About… (#1)
September 23rd, 2008

Vegetarianism

If you were a Martian visiting the planet Earth, you could easily be forgiven for believing that vegetarians were a bloodthirsty, militant sect, positively armed to the teeth and prepared to make war against the helpless and peaceful denizens of civilisation. Judging purely by what the other ninety four percent of the population has to say about us that is.

Yes, yes, I can already hear the words coming out of your mouth:

“Oh no! He is one of those militant vegetarians about to jump on his soapbox!”

Well yes and no. I’ve never considered myself a “militant” veggie, in fact, I’ve always found the term somewhat mystifying, never having encountered one. Most of the vegetarians I know are reluctant to speak about their dietary choice, unless talking to another veggie, or pressed into conversation about it by an omnivore.

But I am about to jump up on my soapbox. Sorry folks, but this has been building for some time. It’s strange, but vegetarianism has been the only thing I have ever experienced any form of prejudice over, yet I’ve never tried to “convert” a non-vegetarian, and tend always to shy away from debate on the subject. Despite the fact that I would eat most omnivores alive in such a debate, and despite the fact that virtually every omnivore I have ever known has at least once tried to convince me of the merits of their diet, and furnished me with unrequested justifications for their murder of other species.

I get treated like a nuisance and a chore at meals and trips out, have been verbally abused by staff at restaurants, and am expected to endure any number of jokes at my expense with good humour. If any vegetarian should dare to answer back to the standard barrage of bigotry, they are instantly labelled a wild militant proselytising veggie.

I need to get this off my chest, so here it comes. My normally unspoken response to the stupidest things I hear said about my diet.

The Myth of the Militant Veggie

Every omnivore will talk about these people as though they cannot even get out the door without having to fight one off. Odd, since we don’t even constitute a tenth of the population in most western nations. They will roll their eyes and tut about how much they loathe them.

Here is some news for you:

There. Is. No. Such. Thing. The so-called extremist veggies, are usually just people you have cornered at a meal table. Every time my diet has been discovered by an omnivore, I have been expected to defend it, as though the very fact of my existence is a challenge. Every such discussion will mean having to endure the standard of effluent mush from self-appointed diet and ethics experts explaining their half-baked theories of why my diet is wrong. Most people that get pigeonholed as militant veggies are simply people that are sick of this shit. We just want to eat our meals, so please don’t take offence when you decide to pounce on us, and we reply in a manner that is less than obsequious.

What annoys me most, is that the smug critics of “militant veggies” are usually equally militant about their own moral qualms, it’s just that they aren’t forced to defend them every lunchtime.

Imagine if every time you tried to sleep with someone over 18, someone barged in and said “Oh my god, you don’t believe in fucking twelve year olds? Why?” And proceeded to explain why you should (twelve is the legal age of consent in more than one country you know…) and you might understand why some veggies start to feel a bit touchy on the subject of their diet.

So someone is a tad sensitive about having to defend their ethical stance against murder every meal time?

Well gee-fucking-willikers! What a surprise.


"Humans Are Designed to Eat Meat…"

Don’t you love it when people use superstitious anthropocentric teleological brain-farts in place of logical discourse?

Right.

Humans are not designed to do anything, you fucking imbecile. Keep your absurd religious beliefs to yourself, and then maybe I’ll keep my diet to myself. Humans evolved, from monkeys. Early human diets probably got their protein from small insects, not great lumps of cow flesh. Yes, human evolutionary history certainly includes the eating of meat, it also includes rape, living in trees and throwing shit at one another. This does not present us with a teleological imperative to eat meat, it is not a justification, it is simply a fact about the past. Trace our ancestry back far enough and you’ll find fish, should modern humans breathe underwater? The only “fact” about our diet in this regard is that we require protein and certain vitamins, all of which are attainable through a vegetarian diet without supplements. Meat is one way of getting those things, but it is not the only way.


"You’re as bad as us! Cos you kill plants and plants might be able to feel pain!!!"

This argument does genuinely does make me reconsider my stance on vegetarianism. Because I think “anyone stupid enough to try and field that as a rational argument, clearly needs to be removed from the human gene-pool for our good and theirs” and fuck it, if we’re killing them anyway, we may as well eat them for tidiness sake.

Now, I appreciate that you were probably never told this in primary school. This was because most primary school educators assumed it was self evident, that not even a lobotomy victim would fail to grasp the startling fact… Plants do not have brains. They do not experience life the same way that we do. Yes, there may well be some plant equivalent to displeasure, but to claim that their experience is analogous to ours, or even comprehensible to us, requires a special degree of mental ineptitude. Oh yes, you can invoke rhetoric and intellectual dishonesty, and point out that I don’t know what it is like to be a plant, and they might well feel pain and unhappiness at being eaten, but this argument could quite easily be applied to anything. It has the same degree of intellectual substance as claiming that eating shrimp may well upset Jehova.

Yes, Plants may well feel pain, and the invisible pink unicorn may well punish us for eating corn flakes. The simple fact is, we cannot possibly know, so as a statement it is entirely without meaning or content. However, we do know what physical pain is like, we do know what fear of death is like, we can clearly see that animals experience physical and emotional distress just like ours when confronted with pain and death.

We also know that an omnivorous diet is not a nutritional necessity, but simply a meaningless lifestyle choice.

Oh I know the “plants feel pain” defence was your favourite, I know, I know, it was a beautiful theory ruined by an ugly truth. Get over it. It wasn’t a valid argument when you spewed it up, it isn’t one now, and it won’t ever be. The only thing it provides evidence for is the possibility that you aren’t a thinking intelligent creature.


"Well you aren’t saving any animal lives by not eating meat…"

Well, aside from being an outright lie (the meat industry is a good 6-7% smaller than it would be if we ate meat, simple logic, give it a try sometime) this statement is based on an extremely shaky ethical assumption.

The point isn’t that we are saving all the cows, the point is that we aren’t killing them. Would you apply the same logic to abortions or the holocaust? No? Of course not, because it’s fucking ridiculous.

If a woman is going to be raped anyway, would you join in?


"Vegetarianism is a luxury, what if you were starving to death and had nothing but a cow/sheep/duck/kitten/etc?"

If there was a famine, and people were starving to death, why the fuck would they waste the bulk of their edible resources raising an animal, that will provide them with barely a quarter of the same amount of food in return?

When you produce meat, you are throwing away food because meat is a secondary food source. The idea that hard times would force people to adopt meat-eating diets is patently absurd. Why don’t you take a trip to the third world, and ask them how many times a week they have steak?

Meat is a luxury product, ecologically unsound and wildly inefficient to produce. If you were starving in a desert, you wouldn’t eat a cow, you would tuck into your grain like everyone else, imbecile. Sorry to break the illusion for you.

And if for some reason I were forced to kill an animal to survive, well what of it? It’s a completely different ethical situation to our current one. We don’t have to kill animals to survive. We have a choice. And one of those choices leaves you less prone to cancer, is better for the enviroment, less expensive, causes less heart disease…


"But we stun the animals, so they feel no pain…"

And I drugged your sister with Rohypnol, so she won’t even remember…


"But it isn’t wrong to kill weaker beings for food…"

Good, I’ll eat you.


"But…but… but"

Shut up already. I’m done (exhales). So next time you’re at a meal, and about to abuse the veggie with the usual line-up of flaccid inanities, please, just think back over this, see if it has already been covered. You might just spare yourself an encounter with a militant veggie.

Our diet is better than yours, morally, ecologically, medically and economically. But if you don’t bother us, we might just keep it to ourselves.

A surprising revelation: I like yoga

I'd be the first to admit that I always hated yoga. In high school, I thought it was pretentious. In college, I thought I wasn't built for it. And now, here I am, about to profess my love for something I used to genuinely think was ridiculous. (Oh Ignorance, you sly bastard. I keep forgetting I still have so much of you!) YOGA, you guys. My hippie-ness steadily increases the further I get into my twenties-- and I LOVE it.

But yes-- Yoga at 10am every Friday is starting look like my new personal version of church at 10am every Sunday. As far as habits go, this seems like a pretty sensible one to make.

The woman I'd most aptly describe as my new spiritual guide is named Vanessa. And she is a total genius.

I've always shied away from yoga because I'm inflexible, and most classes I've taken in the past have been populated by super-stretchy aspiring actresses and equally-stretchy German dudes, so I've gotten pretty intimidated and I don't generally enjoy myself. The class I started taking last week, though, added a very important ingredient to the regimen of simply too-hard-for-Carly poses: Spiritual Enlightenment. And not just like "close your eyes and focus your energy"-type spiritual enlightenment. Actual life wisdom in the form of yoga-inspired insight.

There's a ritual structure to these classes that appeals to me the way I'm sure church appeals to most people. Vanessa begins the class with a sermon of sorts-- anecdotal thoughts from her own life, followed by what she sees as the universally shared weekly energy state of, literally, humanity (even as physiologically obvious as: "it's getting colder, our lungs (which we all have) become slightly more dried out and brittle, I'll focus today on warmness and certain types of breathing). And it's never anything so hokey that I'm pulled out of the legitimacy of the practice-- which is AMAZING.

Today's sermon was an oddly-serendipitous analogy: Getting your computer fixed. Vanessa had recently taken her computer to the Apple store (like OH HEY I had to this weekend). They told her something in her computer was "corrupted," which meant her hard drive needed to be completely wiped clean (like OH HEY mine had to be). Our bodies and our souls oftentimes corrupted-- maladaptive schemas, incorrect posture, bad diet, hurtful belief systems-- some that we may not even know about. And when our body-computer stops working or isn't working as efficiently as it can, it's not as easy as it is with a computer to wipe the slate clean. But in the practice of meditation and realignment and all this great yoga-bullshit I'm starting to love, we gradually come closer to a clean slate.

And it's the effort that we put into the practice that makes the rewards all the more special. When you drop off your computer, come back a couple days later, and it's suddenly fixed, you lose that crucial, behavior-rewarding feeling of achievement. And it's a blessing in disguise that bodily and spiritual realignment is the pain-in-the-ass, sometimes-too-hard commitment that it actually is.

Another reason yoga class kicks ass: she talks about "honoring" your body in the most conversational way. And it's true. If you are stubborn to a pose (in the same way that you could be stubborn to a person's wishes) you are not honoring your body (or that person). It's really cool to make this realization when you have your heel in your face.

We were asked to envision ourselves taking items off a table throughout the course of the 1 1/2-hour class. By the end of the session, our table was to be cleared and totally au naturale. I came upon an interesting conundrum that I think actually gives interesting insight into my character: my table couldn't decide what it looked like. It alternated between a plain, unvarnished, rectangular blonde oak table-- very simple, very structurally solid-- and a varnished, maple, round table with artfully crafted legs-- very crafty and beautiful.

I'm still not that flexible, but it's nice to be humbled once a week. To be grounded into my own body and to feel like I'm chipping away at the over-calcification that plagues my hip-sockets. I feel like I don't always honor my body... so it's refreshing to get a taste of what it feels like to do so.

The ongoing battle against shit that gets me down

Well, if my lack of writing lately hasn't been testament enough to the fact, September gave me little to complain about. A quick summary includes my getting hired at the best internship ever, seeing a bunch of shows, reaffirming and pretty much cementing my desire to be a playwright, and a serene, happy feeling that followed me everywhere I went. Sometimes my brain clicks on, and my thoughts come quickly and the world is rose-colored.

And, to balance out, sometimes my brain clicks off and I feel like a big, big retard and the world is shit.

I'm pretty sure I just began the slow descent into the latter.

I felt pretty depressive all day-- lethargic, pessimistic and oh yes SO HUNGRY. For some reason, when I get depressed, all I physically desire is ice cream and a nap. And I had planned on going to the gym today...

But even when things aren't going that bad at all, when I've got a case of the downer, I still manage to perceive good things as
shit-tinted. Like, for example, tonight I saw a free 80's rock musical. At the outset, I expected it to be fun but bad (like "The Holiday" or a whole bunch of other movies my mom really likes). And surprisingly, as the night went on, I realized "Oh wow... this is bad... but not -that- bad." It was a juke-box musical, but the book wasn't entirely moronic. Some jokes were so over-the-top that I had to commend the show's commitment to it's own ridiculousness. And ultimately, I was having a really fun time watching it. At one point during the first act, I was unable to keep from singing along (it was the "Waaanteeed" in between "I'm wanted" and "Dead or Alive," just to clarify).

Only something managed to tarnish even my ridiculous fun. I realized at intermission that my boss from when I worked at The Public was sitting behind me.

Which was fine. I'm civil and try to be genuinely friendly, even though the internship ended pretty badly. I joked about the ridiculousness of the musical (my friend literally admitted that she was having more fun than she did at "The Seagull") and I was successfully behaving cordially, until I realized that she was gathering her things to leave at intermission.

Now, I mean, please. It was the first preview, the audience was seeing the show for free, and even I (who despise juke-box musicals SOhohoHO much) have to admit that it wasn't the actual worst thing I'd ever seen.*

*"Strippers and Gentlemen" takes that prize. Edinburgh 2008. I left half-way through and I've never regretted it.

But honestly, I'd be lying if I said I got over my indignation for her pretention anytime soon. It bugged me all throughout the second act-- which, by the way, was even MORE FUN. In fact, it wasn't until just recently (while writing this) that I found a positive spin on what was essentially a non-important event anyway. The positive spin being this:

Thank goodness that I'm not so stuck-up that I can't enjoy myself when things are far less than earth-shatteringly important. Obviously I really enjoy good, legit art as well, but I consider myself lucky to enjoy an especially wide spectrum of entertainment. My tastes aren't always so discerning that I can't see the specific kind of value in well-executed buffoonery. (An example of well- versus poorly-executed buffoonery being the difference between "Tropic Thunder" and oh, say "Epic Movie" or any of those painfully unfunny spoof-movies). As long as a retardedly fun show doesn't expect to be received as anything more than retardedly fun (and succeeds in being retardedly fun)-- I'm on board.

That being said, people who saw "The Trailer Park Musical" at Edinburgh will understand when I say this-- Bad musicals can be fun.

And this one was WAY more fun than "The Trailer Park Musical," just saying.

The Living Age

The Living Age: "We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life it would be like hearing the gross grow and the squirrel's heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence As it is the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity Vol i p 351"