Monday, January 31, 2005
clouds and sun
Dear friends:
Please don't worry too much about me.
My mother used to say that I was "oversensitive." I never understood that. To me it was like saying, "my, how you're overtall," or, "I've noticed your hair is overbrown." I couldn't help it, so what good was announcing it going to do? She said it in the context of many failed auditions in my acting days, when I would show up to a big room filled with commercial-cute kids with stage parents hounding them on, and they would yell in sunny voices: "Dannon Yogurt is grapealicious!" (I am actually not making up that line, fuck the copyright), and flutter their little blond eyelashes, and I would just sit there and ask them what the hell a slate was.
I never got to be one of those little blue-eyed commercial brats, but when I look back on it I wonder why the hell I wanted to. I was destined for the more mature roles they would never have allowed a 10-year-old to touch. And by the time I was old enough, I felt too inexperienced to go further. Even my headshots from when I was 14 were done to make me look about 5 years younger than I was, which didn't help things.
But at ten or eleven years old, how could I not be hurt by all these kids who seemed so superior, so ridiculously talented in the arcane art of being cute? And what perverse power decided that now, at age 21, I should suddenly be cute, when at the age it would have actually helped me I was just a funny-looking, gangly kid with messy hair and bad teeth?
This recent bout of "oversensitivity" or whatever you call it, stems from a number of things which in the unforgiving daylight of a Monday morning I can now see with a bit more clarity.
I feel terribly responsible for Kun having gone to speak to the cheerleading coaches for me (even though she offered, and I never asked her to) and for it having been a tremendous disappointment for all concerned. She feels bad for having been so rejected by them, when I suppose she was hoping there would be an atmosphere of more open discussion and negotiation. I feel bad because the Boy got dragged into it and now they want to speak to him about it, probably because he's their best player and they assume that not letting his girlfriend on the team would breed bitterness on his part. The thing is, he doesn't care, which is just dandy for him and the team and all concerned, except of course, me. I feel like the odd one out, again. I just feel massively unimportant in the scheme of things.
I went to go see an All-Star team that Tiny and some others from my school belong to last night. They're heading to a competition in Las Vegas, and while their routine is not perfect, it is spectacular. They're unbelievably skilled athletes, capable of pulling off totally insane things, but I couldn't help but feel like their level will always be unattainable to me, so long as I am barred from university-affiliated teams and am restricted to open stunting nights where people may or may not show up to an absolute maximum of two nights a week. Every other sport in the world one can pay to learn. Name a sport, any sport. Even wild cards like fencing, extreme skateboarding, women's boxing, obscure martial arts, even fucking lawn bowling, you can PAY someone to teach you. Not so here. With this sport you need a team, and to get on a team you need a modicum of skill, and preferably a student card.
I have picked a sport no one seems to care much about, and I suppose they have their reasons. Stereotypes run deep, and no one thinks of cheerleaders as athletes who build muscle, train hard, compete, and incur serious injuries as a result of years and years of soaring through the air and pounding their (often very little) bodies into the ground on the way back down.
This is why I loathe those idiotic inspirational posters that say things like "never give up," and "hard work yields rewards," and "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again." Sometimes months of hard work and negotiation yields only more hard work and negotiation with few measurable results.
So that is the source of some of my frustration.
The other thing is that I don't want to come down really hard on the Boy because I know he tries his best to give me what he can and he's always been careful not to make false promises or create false hopes. I just sometimes feel superfluous in his life, while he is a vital force in mine. The other problem is that hopes and promises feel good for a reason, and while I don't want them dashed and broken, it's hard to not be allowed to have them at all. What I wanted last year more than anything in the world was to feel secure, to know that there were people who wouldn't be prone to leaving for no good reason. I need to know that I am not expendable, that there is more reason to stick around than my being nifty or cute or a novelty item. I was hoping to know someone wanted me no matter what. And right now I'm just not so sure.
My biggest problem is simply that I seek affection from sources that seek to deny it from me, and I resist affection from those who are happy to give it abundantly. Either I crave constant struggle or I am simply punishing myself.
None of this sorts itself out in a few hours, days, weeks, or any short-term period, and I don't expect it to. I did hope that this would be a relatively fun and easy part of my life, before I had to shoulder major responsibilities, but I guess that's just not going to happen.
I have never really had the good fortune to be carefree, either. Even when I was a kid I thought big thoughts, including the idea that I was all alone in a world that I had created, and that if I closed my eyes it would all cease to exist. Ten years later I discovered that they call this solipsism, the theory that the self is the only reality that can be known and verified. What a terrifying thought that was for a little kid. But there is no escaping it, either then nor now.
I am real, this I know for certain. I am as real as it gets. The rest is perhaps not ether, but I haven't yet figured out how to embrace it instead of always trying to escape.
Dag, I am looking forward to you coming, more than ever. Don't worry about that.
Rick, I hope you won't sign off on everyone, myself included, in an effort to sort yourself out. I know that isolationism is not the best road to travel (you are a liberal, after all), but I have no desire to make you do something you don't want to do.
Cait, thanks for the email. Thai food on the 12th sounds grand. How long will you be in town?
The sun is out for the first time in a week. The rainy city is awake, and miraculously, since 8:30 in the morning, so am I.
-N
