lextopia

A few days ago I received a message about something very painful that happened in the past, something that I had done. The event was horrible and was my fault, but what had led up to it was just as horrible and hadn’t been my fault, but the message I got didn’t mention any of that. It just tore open the old wound for all to see.

I’ve been exhausted. Like, really, really, hit-the-wall kind of exhausted, and so when the note came I faltered a little bit because I didn’t have any resources, any strength, to bear up against it. Now, after a few days and some small successes, I’m feeling much better, much stronger, and the note doesn’t have the same impact. I can see it for what it is now: just a big mistake that will end up hurting the writer far more than it ever could me. That said, the note did change something profound in me. Something snapped and finally released, and as I finished reading I knew it was time to put some things away.

I’m apparently going on a long trip, but I think it’s one of mind and not of body. My meditation practice slipped in the last two weeks because we’ve been working just too damned hard. The President & First Family have been on-island and we’ve been all over them, filming, editing shows together quickly, and wringing ourselves out. Well, it’s done now. The “Obama Shows” have aired and the crazy summer season is drawing to a close–which is why I can write this from home at 9:30am on a Friday.

One of the things I have to put away are the cats. I spoke to the Animal Shelter here and will likely be dropping the cats off in another week and a half. This will be terribly difficult for me. I care for them very much and am not, as we know, at all good with letting go of things I love. But I don’t want to care for them any more. I just don’t want to. They’re hard in terms of upkeep, and remind me too much of a past I want to turn away from so I can finally move forward in a brand new direction. I’ve been in limbo for over two years. Two years. A lot of that was the economic crisis, but at least 50% was due to raw wounds that have been taking too long to heal.

In mid-Sept. I’ll finally “move” back home and have some serious time to work on the coal film. THAT’S where I live now: in my work. I’ll try to craft a happy life despite the hole in it where Mom used to be, but the main focus will be doing what I do: making stories that I hope will have some impact on even just a few people. And I’ll travel. I’ll go to all the places Mom always talked about but was too afraid to visit. I’ll stay longer than one does for “vacation,” and I’ll get to know new cultures.  I’ll read and I’ll write, and make sure–as much as I can–that my friends are healthy and know that I love them.

We’re all in limbo, in transition. Chogyam Trungpa, the late Buddhist teacher used to talk a lot about negative/uncomfortable emotions being preferable to straight-up happiness because there’s so much energy in them. He said it’s better to walk right into the center of ill feelings and just hang out quietly because what you’ll learn will blow your mind.

Bon voyage, everyone.

"Untitled" by ImaginationRoom (http://imaginationroom.posterous.com/)

I don’t know where to start. This morning I’m feeling a lot of fear mixed with stress mixed with the intellectual knowledge of peace and relaxation. This job is just too much, I think. There is literally NO BREAK. I have one or two weekend days each week and they don’t even help me to catch up on sleep anymore. Tina was right, I need to train someone to share the load. I thought I had been doing that. Looking back now at May, June and the first part of July, I can’t understand at all how Hannah survived overseeing the show as well as ads creation. Insanity.

I spoke last night with a woman who is back from the brink. She has Lyme disease and mercury poisoning, but because she has a lot of money, she is alive. I’m afraid to watch the documentary about Lyme that she financed. I’m afraid for my friend Su, who has Lyme, and afraid for myself that I may not have the courage to help her the way she needs to be helped. At the moment I am stressed out enough just watching over my own life. The mortgage. Always the mortgage. But for me that struggle is worth it because I am surviving and my house is my life-raft.

Could I do this job again next summer? I might not physically or psychologically be able to handle it. If Courtney stays then I could train her in May and June and then, hopefully, something will have turned for me so that I can leave as Hannah left this past July. I just can’t imagine doing this all again. Not without someone like me to share the full load.

I saw “Eat.Pray.Love” last night–the Hollywood representation of one of my favorite books. The movie, frankly, sucked. I’d needed it to not. I’ve needed some kind of heart vacation for a while. Not romantic, something to help me feel at peace. I stayed in the movie while others left, not because I had hope, but because the images, at least, were something I’ll be able to hold on to later. And, hell, Julia Roberts is pretty, so…

There’s no one way to tell a story, but if you’re going to try, you have to settle on a direction. The director of Eat.Pray.Love, I think, shot a 6-hour film. Pity we didn’t see that version. Another film, “The Kids Are Alright,” reinvigorated my love of movies and visual story, and showed a decent, hard-working, loving family. Two lesbian parents and their teenage kids. I thought ti was wonderful. A friend thought it was insulting to lesbians worldwide because of something that happens in the story. Her anger and staunch position nearly destroyed the tender story for me. I got sad listening to her just not letting it go. There isn’t just one way to tell a story, and so you shouldn’t get mad at one interpretation.

I’m exhausted. This post is one, fucking stream-of-semiconsciousness, isn’t it? Sorry about that. I’ll try again tomorrow. If anyone sees a thruline here, please comment so I’ll know what the hell I’m talking about.

Cheers.

“Love of beauty is Taste. Creation of beauty is Art.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m stealing the use of this quote from a beautiful blog I found courtesy of someone on Twitter.

This morning I slept late. Really late for me. 9:30am. I’d gotten up at the customary 5:30, but was having trouble opening  my eyes. As I padded to the bathroom in the gray light I felt the walls so I wouldn’t fall down the stairs. I felt heavy. Really, really heavy and knew I was going to go back to sleep. I was so happy at the prospect because that hasn’t happened in well over two years.

When I crashed, I crashed hard. Heavily. It was the grounded, in the ground, rooted sleep of a changed woman. Evolutionary change always happens for me while I’m doing something else, and so I don’t ever realize what’s happened until later. The sound of the TV was what finally got me up, my eyes to reluctantly open. My show was on and there were people in my house watching it. I went downstairs to join them.

Each week Dad & Sarah have generously sat and watched the show and graciously given feedback afterward. In the last couple of weeks, though, they haven’t given any feedback, and the reason is because the show is good. As I sat beside everyone today, watching them watch, I could hear them listening and it was awesome. And when a specific, funny moment happened, everyone chuckled, unaware that they were sitting with the producer. For them, they were just watching an engaging show.

It was a good start to what has been a deep day. I didn’t do any soul searching, rather, I did a lot of soul listening. I meditated for over an hour with the intention of finally letting the Universe flood into my mind. Well, she did, and with her came answers. A letting go, a courage to be quiet, and a bunch of ideas for how to finish the coal film. From there the day was like those days I used to have before I got into relationships: present, comfortable, mine. I looked hard at my tendency toward self-criticism and knew there was a lot more work to do there.

I took a short walk into the open field on our property and turned to look at our house from a different perspective. While sitting in the hammock, a place I frequent every weekend, I was struck by an urgency to see things differently. I thought that if I shook up my visual comfort, more changes would follow. They did.

I looked up at the trees, the scrub oak that I love so much, that surround our house. And I realized that God, Mom, all life, and all the answers were in the trees because they were beautiful. I realized for the first time in decades that Beauty is the portal to happiness and understanding, but you’ve got to have the balls to try to make beautiful things.

My silly little lifestyle show is beautiful, and all I need to do now is to stay out of it’s way. If it gets bored and needs something new to liven it up, I’ll develop a new segment. The show and I are one and each know what’s best for the other. Similarly, I will honor the coal film, and my own life and capacity for love. I will get out of my own way. Via Beauty.

Tonight I went to the gallery opening of a famous island painter, Allen Whiting. His work doesn’t jump out at you, but if you spend a little time seeing where he’s going with his choices, it certainly grows on you. Revealed. The intention is revealed. In other cases you can see the intention immediately.

Such was the case with the above painting, “April-Tisbury Great Pond-Chilmark, MA,” which I bought in postcard form for a friend. The moment I saw the postcard I knew it was for her. “The intrepid fisherman in waders in the early morning, out alone in his little skiff, too young to be so in love with a practice that takes him away from people.” But there’s a love in the image too. Pure love, that’s simple and universal. Everyone will look at this painting and feel the same thing.

Things are opening up. My mind, specifically. Letting go is more a lesson learned and less a teaching, and I am, for what it’s worth, the better for it. But I still wonder about love. In all the meditation I’ve done, classes taken, and books read there is no mention of how we are to maintain an attitude of impermanence while accepting love into our lives. One teacher said: “Oh, it makes love bigger and better!” But I don’t see how. “As soon as you love,” the teachings seem to go, “you have to remind yourself that everything is impermanent.” They lost me at “Hello.” How can you love and maintain an attitude of… alright, you know the rest. But you get where I’m coming from right?

I’m thinking about these things because I realized that I’m still in love and that I won’t be able to have another relationship until these feelings fade. But they’re pretty strong feelings, so my hope for success is… kinda low. So I turn to the teachings which say, in essence “Live with it. Sucka.” Okay, no, the teachings don’t add the “Sucka” part, but that’s what it feels like sometimes. The good news is that I’ve finally moved out of Bitter. I am now firmly ensconced in “Oh well,” which I usually follow with a shrug. I am Learning To Let Go, and, frankly, it sucks. Truly, though, I won’t know if it’s good that I’ve learned to let go until I have a new, real relationship, and as we know that won’t be for some time… blah, blah, blah… You get the idea.

And so I spend a lot of time alone. I sit and look all around at this gorgeous island’s landscapes, I read, I edit, and I watch a little TV now and again. I no longer eat dessert, run probably more than I should, sleep without a comforter, allow the cats to drink out of my water glass, and avoid–as much as possible–looking at pictures of myself from the back.

In short, things are changing–evolving before my eyes–and although I’m happy that I’ve finally found some of the grace to just observe it, the price sucks.

Love, I get so lost sometimes.
Days, hours, and this emptiness fills my heart.
I want to run away, drive off in my car.
But whichever way I move I connect to the place you are.

Spoke with an old friend last night over Skype. She’s in LA. We don’t chat or see each other enough, so these occasional communications are vital and soothing. We both feel that there’s something fucked up going on in the world, in the air. Everyone around us seems depressed or in some difficult transition. To me, it feels like we’re all evolving. The astrologers say so. They talk about some cosmic shift in the planets affecting everyone and forcing change. Well, I’m kinda done with change myself. I’d like my fucking status quo back, thankyouverymuch. I had a home, a love, a job, a life. Hell, I had a dog and two cats! I still have the two cats, but I miss walking the damned dog, even, though, back then in The Life, I resented it at times…

When is this “weather” going to break? What have we done? You can’t move about your normal life anymore in the U.S. and not think about how the oil spill is going to affect you. Recently I filmed a bunch of fish markets. Most of them get their fish from fishermen who fish the Atlantic. That means that soon those fishermen are going to be running into oil. I looked at one man, one fish market owner, and thought about how long his family has been doing this–selling fish. His livelihood and those of his children and grandchildren could be disastrously affected. They must have all of their investments in fish.

In mid-April, before I came down to the Vineyard to do this job, my sleep pattern changed. I now get up at 5:30am whether I want to or not. I fall asleep roughly between 9 and 9:30, and by 6:30 I’m back from my daily run and having coffee. Nothing precipitated this change except for massive doses of anxiety and stress. I was TERRIFIED to make the move. Terrified I’d be giving up my house, terrified I’d lose everything, terrified I wouldn’t remember how to work in an office with other people. All those fears are mostly gone now, but I still wake up at 5:30. Also, I’m sad. Just sad, sad, sad. I realize I’ve been sad since the last year in CA, when things got just awful between Molly and me. And now, today, I miss her like an organ that was ripped out of me. The difference between then and now is that I can feel that place in me healing–scabbing over. There’ll still be a scar forever, but, like all scars, I’ll learn to live with it. I’m learning to live with it. It sucks out loud, but I’m learning to live with it. One of my solutions seems to be dreaming of her every night. Solution? Torture? Who fucking knows…

I’ve never been not happy for this long, and I hope it’s all just a phase, just a “transition,” as the astrologers say. I don’t know how much more of this shit I can take, or how much any of us can take.

Whenever I feel afraid–and for me fear is always about the lack of control over my responsibilities, like not having a job so I can pay my bills–I gather my “totems” (usually books) and place them all around me, like a child playing with blocks on the floor. I set my mind to “accomplishing.” “Today I’ll read from each of these books and by the end of the day or middle of the day I’ll know what to do.” At least there’s a chance I might feel better…

In the last several months I have applied to hundreds of jobs and gotten responses from less than ten. My resume, if you haven’t seen it, is fairly extraordinary. I’ve done some amazing things and worked at a lot of impressive places and done well there, so it’s shocking to me that I have been passed over so many times. It is certainly wearing me down. Maybe that’s why I’ve thrown myself headlong into this film about coal–to keep my mind and body occupied so I won’t dissolve into despair. Truly, despair isn’t very “me,” but this economic crisis time is strange and powerful enough that I wouldn’t be shocked about a lot of shocking things happening all around me.

Last night I finished Isabel Allende’s beautiful, funny memoir “The Sum of Days.” Its a reflection of the lives of her family members in the thirteen or so years since her daughter, Paula, died. Isabel is looking at her “tribe” and trying to make sense of her own life and choices in the face of everything that happens within the group. Not surprisingly the book is gorgeously written and very candid. I like books like that most of all. I don’t see a need for hiding, especially the raw and ugly stuff. My greatest emotional liberations have come when I admitted I did something and then apologized for it.

Today is rainy and so I can’t work out in the newly cleared garden. Nik was here over the weekend and helped me rake. By being gentle, she first motivated me to not be afraid of starting the garden project. She sees, even this early in our relationship, how much starting something new sometimes scares me. My mind works in an odd way with new projects–I have no trouble starting, I just sometimes have trouble feeling it’s okay to start. I worry that if I’m starting this new thing it means I’m taking time away from finishing something else, but, truly, I’ve never had a problem getting things done. When I was little Mom said that Michael would never start his projects and I would never finish mine. She was talking about homework, but it’s a good analogy. My first therapist–the great Joan in NYC–thought for a while that I might be ADD, but I shrugged that notion off. I’m not ADD, I’m just organized.

Anyway, so I had a block about starting the garden project that I think was fear of being alone. I think I shy away from some tasks or projects because I’m afraid of doing them all alone, when that’s usually how things end up anyway. I always do my projects alone.I don’t want to all the time, but that’s what happens. People aren’t as motivated or passionate as I about getting something done and done well, so I end up working alone. TV I can handle in this way, more domestic-like projects I guess are tougher. This is something I’m trying very hard to work on in meditation: to be okay with the journey being largely or occasionally solitary. The motivating, mind-opening phrase is “the path is the goal.” Isn’t that marvelous?

Right out of college, after only one year, I gave up on acting as a career because I saw quickly that I wouldn’t be able to make a living from it, and that I’d have to do A LOT of bad work and work with bad people until I finally found something fun. But then that fun would only last three months at best. The thought that I’d have to look for work every three months was enough to make me understand that there was much more to life than that kind of suffering.  So I moved to television… A much more satisfactory metier…

My meditation practice, and Isabel’s way of writing, focuses on staying right where you are and looking at THAT, just that and nothing else. Don’t let your mind wander. Isabel has this wonderful paragraph toward the end of the book where she describes the abusive inner monologue that greets her every morning: “Don’t eat the bread, do you think the weight will fall off by itself? You’ve been writing for over twenty years and still you haven’t learned anything…” etc. I don’t do that to myself, I’m much kinder about my accomplishments, but I do tend to think of my world too small. I forget where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’ll be going soon and allow myself, instead, to get caught up with “what if?” Dreaming. Dreaming when we’re asleep is fine, but “What if” doesn’t exist and has no value when we’re awake. Only “this is” has value, only the knowledge of love has value, and so today I will try to stay in the present, learn something, and reflect on all the love in my life. That’s enough for one day.

Since I bought my house there have been items and places on the property and on me that smell like skunk. It’s a semi-permanent thing. “Semi” because once I finally block up the accesses to the crawlspace under the barn where the little buggers live, the smell will fade over time (to be replaced by other more pleasant ones, I hope). But for the time being some piece of me or my life will smell like skunk.

Dr. of Animal Science and professor at Colorado State University and autistic, Temple Grandin said “Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.” This is the simplest I’ve ever heard The Golden Rule described. It’s not enough, apparently, to let people know that they have to be kind, you have to paint them a picture. Dr. Grandin’s phrase is as clear a picture as there is. Just watch any National Geographic special about animals in the wild and you’ll get the idea…

Nature is on my mind today as it has been almost every day since my unemployment-forced convalescence began. It’s because when I wake up I can see it and hear it all around through the many windows in my house, and because the business of nature has permeated my smell. Smell is identity. It can pinpoint time and place, and sometimes emotion. Sometimes a scent on me will be the inspiration for me to change my attitude. If I’m dirty I shower, sure, but that’s not it. Sometimes I’m perfectly clean and shower anyway because I need that fresh, organic shampoo smell to clear my mind.

I’ve been wound-up pretty tight lately because of the unemployment. It seems that no matter how many resumes I send out there is no work for me. It used to be that I could figure out what I was doing wrong, what I was saying in a cover letter that I shouldn’t say, or what I should remove from my resume to make myself seem a little less experienced (read: “expensive”). It is just fact that I’ve been doing what I do as long as I’ve been doing it, but that’s not what employers in this economy want to hear. They want to hear that you’re “inexperienced” (read: “cheap”), but have been working at this thing long enough to… you know… know everything.When I first got into filmmaking you had to have experience as a producer. Then you had to have experience as a videographer. Then you needed to know how to edit, which made you a Preditor (Producer/Editor). Then you needed to know how to create basic graphics. These days, if you can’t do all of these things as well as know a fairly large amount of motion graphics, you’re considered unhirable.

When I was at AOL I was hired as a video producer/editor. When the economy started to tank, my budget was slashed. No more video. So with the help of my immediate boss, I learned to blog and kept my job for another year. When the economy sank even more our uber boss put up another set of hoops. I jumped through them all. Whatever was required I learned not only how to do it, but do it well. I worked my fuckin’ ass off and got good at a lot of things. When I lost my job I took the time to made two documentary films and today, still unemployed, I am hard at work on the third. I work my fuckin’ ass off.

If our societal systems can’t figure out how to use people like me in the day-to-day improving of the world, then i think it’s time to reboot or rebuild the systems. We’re doing something very wrong if people with such skills can be tossed aside. Truly, I’m no different than anyone who can do something well, or anyone at all, really, because I believe that everyone is good at something. If nothing else, everyone is passionate about something and that’s a start to being good at it.

Temple Grandin saw that cattle were unhappy in the rectangular pens they were being held in, so she designed pens that catered to what made them feel good. If there was another Noah-like flood, the day the water recedes and people are allowed back on land they’ll ask each other what they can do so society can be rebuilt. You’re a carpenter? Okay, you go over here. You’re a priest? Great, go over there. You can make a mean chicken catchitori? Perfect, please design us a kitchen. You’re a documentary filmmaker? Thank goodness, we’ll need someone to look around at what we’re doing and write it all down so we remember.

I have value, and so do you.

By now most of you know that when my mother died something in me died too. The reason I started this blog in 2006, one year after she died, was to try and make sense of the empty feeling I’d been left with, and, possibly, to rebuild. Well, as you’ve all seen, the rebuilding hasn’t gone so well. I made a lot of bad choices, a lot of passionate choices, and a lot of good choices. Sometimes I was lucky, sometimes I bit the dirt, hard. But at no time did the sum of all my choices put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The hole in me, that chunk that got carved out and was burned with her, is still missing. If it is to be replenished at all, it can only happen with a long, slow simmer of combined true love: mine for myself, mine for someone else, and someone else’s for me. This is what I’ve observed in watching couples these last years. Healthy, happy union is possible, and helps us weather so many things. That doesn’t mean I’m going to run off looking for someone to make me feel better about losing Mom, no. It’s just part of the process.

I got a message last night about that hole and something in my mind finally broke free. It brings with it the despair inevitable for someone who has been hiding the truth from herself: I will never talk to Mom again. I will never see her again. I will never find someone or something to take her place and fill the hole in me that’s been festering for so long. The message shocked me into a new perspective. Literally. It was like getting corrective lenses after years of blurry vision. I can read street signs now–think of it like that. There’s no more hiding emotionally. I know what my truths are and have no choice but to move forward with them as my guide instead of the fantasies I’ve been waving around hoping reality would be just a bit softer than this.

If anyone has any ideas how about how a person deals with going from talking with their mother/best friend 4-5 times a week her whole life to suddenly not doing that, I’m game to hear it. My friend Christiane from college, who lost her mother before we met, and with whom I recently reconnected on Facebook, said of the grief of losing one’s mother: “Hold on tight.” When author Isabel Allende lost her only daughter to porphyria at age 26, she wrote a best-selling novel, “Paula,” but was still so distraught after thirteen years that she was worried she didn’t have any more books in her. She called her editor, a woman who always seemed to have the right answers to her creative conundrums. “Send me a two or three-hundred page letter,” the editor said, “and I’ll take care of the rest.” The result was the book I’m reading now, “The Sum of Our Days,” a letter to Isabel’s deceased daughter, Paula.

It seems that since Mom died the only stories that have resonated with me are ones about the deaths of loved ones: The Year of Magical Thinking, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, If I Am Living Or Dead, The Sum of Our Days.

The last happiest time I remember in my life was while I was working at Oxygen. Before the attacks of September 11th my days were damned-near perfect. I was completely fulfilled at my job and had good prospects for a loving, healthy relationship. Last night, during my walk, I realized that since then my life has been a patchwork of unemployment, confusion, terror, anger, longing, frustration, disgust, disappointment, and sadness.

The attacks in NYC caused Oxygen to close their broadcast center for ten days. Those mere ten days of lost ad revenue were a body-slam to the network’s financials and so it wasn’t long afterward that we started hearing about layoffs. My show’s came in March of 2002. Working at Oxygen had been the best experience of my life and it was suddenly over because of something none of us could control. Sadly, with the job went my brand new relationship, and my incredible life in NYC… That was the first time I felt something had been “untimely ripped” out of me, but still… I didn’t get the message. Before I moved out to LA, I caught Molly emotionally toying with her ex-boyfriend. She hadn’t told him about us and he was trying to get back together with her. He’d hurt her so she said she’d wanted to play with him. She liked to flirt. A lot. When I discovered that the “toying” was a little too close for my comfort I confronted her and she stopped it, but still… I didn’t get the message. She was a child and I needed to steer clear. The problem in making sense of my relationship with Molly, though, is that working in LA for four years was the kick-in-the-ass my career and my career-mind needed. As soon as I was out there I knew I’d chosen the right profession. Production is my fuckin’ element. To borrow a phrase from my old Oxygen boss, Laurie, “I can make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”

So where does all this leave me? Well, it feels like I’m to be remaking myself again. But this time it’ll be the stripped-down version. No arm-waving, just me. One careful step at a time. Mind the gap.

Since Mom died holidays have been odd, tough to define. Mostly they’ve felt not mine, like I was carpetbagging. As a result the last–what is it five? four?–years of holidays have gone by without much memory. The best so far, I think, was Sarah’s tree last year. She was soooooo happy and thrilled about her “pesky tree” that she made the holiday feel like an actual holiday. These days, though, with Mom’s stuff dispersed between Michael, Dad and me, it’s hard to settle in to anything. To find a “home.” Cut to my breakup with Molly and you have One Confused Alexia.

Until two nights ago…

Two nights ago I slept in my bed for the first time in ten days. Granted, New Year’s was… amazing… but one’s bed is still one’s bed. No matter how much I’d like to make my bed comfy and cozy and “like home” for my new squeeze, it’ll never be as cozy and relaxing as her own. It’s the same with me. Waking up on the TempurPedic with the sun streaming in from all four directions provides a comfort and relaxation I can’t do justice here.

So, as a result of sleeping in my own bed again after such a long time I feel surprisingly “at home.” This is a first for a while, folks, and I’m eager to see if the feeling grows. A LOT of structure will come once I have a regular job again, but in the meantime I’m making the most of the time I have by finally doing the things I’ve wanted to do for a while: clean up the workroom; consolidate all the  media that’s scattered over a few drives; finish some small projects; hang pictures of my family all over the walls of my house; learn After Effects and Logic; fall in love again; and let go of the demons of the past for once and for all. In short, I aim to get off my ass and make 2010 one of the best year’s of my life.

Years ago, while in college, a chick I had a crush on said to me “You decide to be in love, it doesn’t happen like a thunderbolt.” While I disagree about the thunderbolt I also agree about the decision part. What I think she meant was that too often we shy away from accepting how feel about someone, giving in to our worries that they might not like us as much as we like them. But where does that get us? Nowhere and stuck, that’s where. I’ve never been that guy and wasn’t expecting I’d ever be, so imagine my surprise when I woke up in California in the middle of a five year relationship in which I was. Well, that’s working on being done now cuz I’m DECIDING that it’s been long enough. I’m going to think of this phase like sitting shiva. I’m going to let my emotions settle in to 2010 and then I’m going to kick’em out the door. Yes, I still have a bunch of Molly’s stuff and she still has a bunch of mine, but FUCKIT. It’s just stuff. What I need today is LOVE, pure and simple. The love of family, the love of friends, and the love of a new love. Easy? Not easy? Who cares as long as it gets done.

Happy New Year, y’all. Time for everyone’s dreams to come true.

I’m so tired of being unemployed. I keep trying to take it lightly and think of the future when, from the comfort of my job, I can look back to this time and say with grace: “Wow, that was fuckin’ hard.” It’s amazing to me that I was able to edit one film and conduct serious interviews for another during this time. Maybe that speaks to the resilience taught me by my parents, but I don’t know. I just constantly feel like crying about it all won’t do any good, and so I keep working at the films… It’s still odd, though, that during the scariest financial time of my life I am a first-time homeowner, and a filmmaker who keeps getting great ideas thrown at her. Odd & wonderful & curious & terrifying.

“By the way, I’m going to wake you up in the middle of the night because I won’t think you’re real.”

My needs are emerging. It’s been difficult seeing everything I was missing in my day-to-day life with Molly. The neglect, the coldness. She was such a sweetheart, but how did I live so long without touch? She wouldn’t touch me in public. She would barely even stand next to me. She frequently didn’t introduce me, and when she did it was as her “friend.” It makes me sick to my stomach. How did I stand for that??? Anyway, looking back on it all now makes the emotions I buried then come out. It’s sooooooo painful. It’s like I’m reliving it, and for what? Hopefully to feel these things for the last time and finally get the whole hellish experience out of my soul.

And then, in the midst of all of this, comes this new person. All bright and shiny and sooooo loving. We can’t keep our hands off each other and that touch, for me, is food. It is the nourishment I lacked and longed for four years. Her touch makes me aware of how love-anemic I’ve been. Sometimes when she touches me my heart breaks a little and I’m afraid of how she’ll feel about my reaction. Will it be too much? Am I just not letting go? Am I dwelling? Or is this the past in it’s death throes?

These holidays have been very hard. Harder than others since Mom died. I didn’t feel “in my place.” I need to find it–my place. I’m looking…