Say yes to beautiful without paying the price

I gave notice here at the office on Tuesday! Bold? Fierce? Foolish? Who knows. My job is consuming my art, my posture. I figure I ought ot be able to find something closer to my field, or at least my background. And I want to stop receptionizing before that becomes my background. Fierce!

So now is the last, lousy month of working at a job that my bosses know I'm leaving. I feel bad, because it's a good job with nice people. Maybe this is a tiny bit like the way people feel when they break up with someone but haven't moved out yet. Or maybe I'm just a big baby.

In any case, I'm looking forward to a short stint of relative poverty and freedom. There are things, after all, which can't be bought! Like the chance to practice and to try something new.

Brains? No thanks, I'm watching my cholesterol....

Another clunker of French cinema. Last night it was They Came Back (Les Revenants), a pensive zombie movie with no radioactivity or brain munching. The dead simply wandered back into town wearing pastel sportswear. (There was no explanation of how or why they got out of their graves and into Sear's.) They were in perfect health and they strolled around town all day and convened at night to chant directions ("left three blocks, next to the laundromat..."). Then they started planting car bombs for no apparent reason, so the living gassed them with a neurotoxin and they vanished like vapor. Great premise! Great emotional nuance. But car bombs? Lame ploy to move the plot and get rid of the zombies. I give it one meh.

Here I sit with call numbers tantalizingly arranged on post-its before me and about 20 minutes before I can go to the library. Lord. I've been sitting here playing Bejeweled for so long, I fear that if the phone does ring, I will have forgotten how to speak. My grandmother always said: Only boring people get bored. Probably true.

So I saw this movie last week called Pauline at the Beach (Pauline a la Plage), which appeared to satisfy the 4 Criteria of Em-proofery:

1. A beach
2. in France
3. populated by some kids
4. who are learning about this thing called "la vie"

To my dismay, the beach was pretty drab, the frenchiness came mostly in the form of casual breast exposure, and the movie was a bunch of silly conversations about love between three adults who had not a spark of chemistry (...correction. The two guys could have made it work, but it wasn't that kind of story.) Anyway, we looked it up on the interweb, and found rave reviews. As a person who tends to enjoy things that others say are lame, I'm confused.

Well, the big show, it came and went. I was satisfied. It was crushed up against two other early music events, which I guess caused the audience to be smaller than I'd hoped, but it was an honorable crowd. Now I'm grimly facing the grind once more. The past couple of days have been spent exploring the windier corners surrounding Seattle. Desperate to find a forest or beach, we instead encountered impenetrable pockets of greenery by the side of the road, and a flearidden spit with a No Trespassing sign. The city itself offers many a floral wonder, but seems far away from any true wilderness. Oh the steel and glass! Oh the screaming gulls and beaky tourists. Yesterday I had a look at the chocolate chapel, and was disappointed to find it nestled cutely.....right next to a busy highway. So much for that idea. Mom and I bought some sea foam from the sweet-faced Issaquah teens and left the chalet behind. Metro-natural, my eye!

In 1.25 hours, I will be free for 6 days! It's like spring break! I am all up ons. This happened because John said I would be crazy not to take a couple of days off leading up to the big show on Sunday. Yeah, pretty much. After all, I didn't go through years of training to sit at a desk. Maybe that's why I'm not very good at it... wait, no, that's because I'm a human being

In other news, I am very excited about said concert. I've been berating myself for a number of things these days, not the least of which item is that my program isn't all that vocally challenging. I mean, a few of the notes are fast and a couple of them are high, but it's mostly sweet, intimate, crooney stuff. I'm pretty sure I started out with a lot more vocal heft, but somehow a lot of that got whittled away in favor of more simple fare, which makes me actually laugh or cry, and not just that awful Ha ha! I got the joke! kind of laugh that happens in concerts when something was supposed to be funny. So that's my show. Comin' at you in a ripped up bedsheet.

Each one of our cells has a nucleus, which contains all of our genetic information (except gametes, of course). According to epigenetics, each cell is informed by the choices of all of our ancestors. So many weirdos, making bad choices and good. My philandering uncle Wick. My teenaged grandmother, hiding in a tree with a book to evade housework. My dairy farming great grandfather who brought home raw milk at lunchtime to my thirsty father. I think my poor little cells are loaded up with these people who could not agree. I think they form me like a Frankenstein monster of conflicting influences. My grandmother, mother and self want/ed to be performing artists, but we also want/ed to hide. I wonder what their grandparents wanted. My father want/ed to be a writer and photographer, but he also wanted to hide. What is wrong with us? I know we all have a sort of deathly fear of exposure, because of the chaos that results naturally when something is handed over to public scrutiny. No more control or ownership of one's creation. For my part, I want to hang onto things too tightly (lately, especially), because I feel afraid that others will cast scorn upon things that I value in myself and in the world. The artist has only her soul to offer, in a sense, and I'm afraid of someone thumbing his nose at mine. It's too easy.

So John and I found this really funny flyer in a parking lot for a grill artist, and it features a picture of a lovely young woman with all this very permanent-looking stuff upon and between her teeth. Cultural relativity be damned. There is something morbid about embedding stuff in your teeth. To me, this is an acknowledgement of looming death. You only get one set of adult teeth, with a precious layer of enamel and vulnerable tooth pulp beneath. Why would you intentionally damage them? Does that not admit the reality of your own temporality? I guess that's what makes edginess cool. There is definitely beauty in fearlessness and in the willingness to commit to something to the end, even if it's something stupid.

I'm tired of temporality. I'm tired of being so aware of the ebb and flow, the basic instability of life as I watch the temps come and go. Yes, there is hopefulness and freshness, but there's also just a lot of shifting ground. I guess I should find ways of making myself more comfortable with the constant change of life, but lately it just feels like I'm in a big hourglass.

I had an interesting realization a couple of days ago: I am not all that interested in making money. Don't get me wrong; I love it when I get paid to sing, but it usually involves doing something tedious or debasing myself just a little bit as an artist. The thing about getting paid is that it means that someone else is calling the shots. It means you're doing something that someone else chose and could not do alone. There's nothing wrong with it, but the motivation is not coming from one's own heart. The music is a means to an end, usually. It's a commodity. There's more to it than that, of course, but I guess I always assumed somehow that all of my studies and practice was intended to lead me to paying gigs, but I've discovered that this is not the case. The appeal of getting paid speaks primarily to my ego, and not at all to my heart. Anyway, I think that most people would throw down a lot of dough in order to feel the satisfaction I feel when I'm making the kind of music I want to make.

Speaking of hearts, did you know that our heart cells do not regenerate and die? We have the same cells in our hearts (and brains) from childhood until death.