Punctuation Saves Lives

I remembered this image when I was searching for a title to start writing today’s post. I was going to call it:

Jesus Christ. What Happened?

and then I realized I could also call it:

Jesus Christ (what happened).

And then I giggled uncontrollably because I’m doing production on a show that has Jesus in it and it’s the reason I’ve been posting so sparsely and sporadically since December. I would like to say that everyone here at work in the theater turned around and asked me what I was laughing at but the truth is they’re all so used to me being on auto-giggle by now that no one paid any attention and even if they had, they wouldn’t laugh anyway.

We’re at that point.

One of my favorite places in New York is the Westerly Market. It’s a small natural foods grocery store that I love mostly because it has tasty snacks and my favorite chocolate. They have healthy things too, including a juice bar.

We had a strangely-timed lunch break today because we’re shooting B-roll (video to be used for publicity) so I went to Westerly and hit the juice bar. I got a shot of wheatgrass while I was waiting for my drink.

I dig wheatgrass. Sue me. And yes it does, in fact, taste like grass. I’m pretty sure when I was an infant I spent a significant portion of my crawling months eating grass. It’s just that good to me.

The drink I got today is called a Maca Firecracker. It’s coconut, cinnamon, agave, cayenne, and maca. It’s divine. Heavy on the cayenne, easy on the agave, as per my request.

It was perfect.

I paid at the juice bar ($12.50. No, I’m not making that up) and then grabbed my tasty snacks and went to the front counter to pay for them. You have to do that separately because making drinks that involve pressing wheatgrass and hacking open coconuts is quite time-consuming, and they can’t mess around with ringing up your tasty snacks back there at the juice bar.

At the front counter, I pay for my tasty snacks and then watch, like it’s in slow motion: My sleeve catching my Maca Firecracker and knocking it off the counter. The cup flipping upside down. Me screaming “nooooo!” in a very Wookieish voice. Half of my nectar of the gods rushing out of the broken lid.

Here’s the thing about a Maca Firecracker. When it’s spilled on the floor, it looks like vomit. I’ve never had so much personal space anywhere in New York City. I’m considering carrying around rubber vomit with me just to get everyone out of my hula hoop.

Oh, so back to the Jesus Christ (what happened) thing. I’m in production, blah blah blah. The hours are long, yadda yadda yadda. Also, there a lot of screens. It looks like this:

By the end of the first week of tech rehearsals I had the worst case of screen-related eye strain I’ve ever had (even worse than the case I got when I stayed up all night and wrote this post over the summer). When we finally reached the day off I had to lay around with my eyes shut. I didn’t even make it to yoga.

I had to read analogue books for a whole week (I read Sara Zarr’s How To Save A Life and Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman)’s Black Heels To Tractor Wheels)

Even now, ten days later, I can feel my retinas singeing. It’s still bad enough that I’m not even going to attempt to fix the alignment of these pictures.

Speaking of wheatgrass (and we were, earlier, I swear), there’s a guy I work with who is friends with a guy who started a wheatgrass company out of his apartment back in the day . The mice kept getting into and eating the wheatgrass. And the more they got into it, the harder they were to exterminate.

I feel like the wheatgrass people could make a motto out of that somehow.

I guess none of that really had anything to do with punctuation.

Resolution Revolution

So I made some New Year’s resolutions for 2011. I do that some years. Not every year, but some, with varying degrees of success.

This year I even learned something about it:

The key to being successful with resolutions lies in how you measure and define success.

I believe that wanting to improve is already an improvement- though not enough of an improvement.

Gretchen Rubin’s excellent book The Happiness Project is based on New Year’s resolutions. Umm . . . neurotic and obsessive New Year’s resolutions. I enjoyed the book even though her approach is totally not my style. Early on she says something about how there’s a difference between being depressed and just not being very happy. I read the rest of her book, but also, because of that, I got help. So I owe a little something to Gretchen Rubin.

I read her book at the end of 2009, and for 2010 I came up with six categories that I wanted to improve in. That’s it. No giant lists, no things to check off, just six parts of my life that I wanted to be better. When I got to the end of 2010, five of them were improved.

For the hell of it, in 2011 I did a longer list, in a few different styles. I’m not one who believes that lists must be done a specific way in order for them to work. In fact, I mostly rebel against lists of all types. But I did this list of resolutions for 2011.

Some I did affirmation style: I put out a blog post every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday.

Others were check-off items: Take a Zumba class. Sell something on eBay.

I reserved the right to get to them when I got to them. This is the first blog I’ve ever done, but I didn’t start it until February 22. I didn’t look at my list of resolutions after the first week of 2011 and lament that I would never be a blogger. I got to it when I could get to it.

I reserved the right to decide I didn’t really want to do them after all. I did two solid months of writing down the dictionary.com Word of the Day before I felt like I could let it go, because I found I just didn’t care that much.

I reserved the right to count any forward momentum a success. One of my resolutions was to finish The Norton Anthology of Literature By Women this year. It’s a book that I’ve been carting around with me since Christmas of 1995 but never opened, and it’s 2390 onion-skin thin pages in eight-point type. I figured out that if I read ten pages a day I would make it. That gave me plenty of room to blow it off- two days a week, in fact.

What happened, surprisingly, is that I was riveted. I couldn’t put the damn thing down (which is saying a lot, because it’s not easy to hold). I was inspired to read more by certain authors than just the excerpts included in the anthology. I downloaded and polished off Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, sat through two different film versions of Jane Eyre, and was still way the hell ahead.

Until July, at which point I got bogged down in Rebecca West. Her Indissoluble Matrimony, to be exact.

I don’t know why it took me so long to get though that piece. It probably merits more consideration. Perhaps I’ll put that on my list this year. Or not.

Anyway. I eventually plowed through Ms. West and kept on, but I never regained my momentum and now with about 48 hours left in 2011, I’m on page 1615. Seven hundred and seventy-five pages short of my goal.

I consider this a resounding success. That’s 1615 pages more than I would have read in this book this year had I not made the resolution. I refuse to beat myself up for falling short and have no plans to get all jacked up on quadruple espressos to stay up from now until next year to try to finish on time. Though I do intend to finish.

In the past when I’ve done lists of resolutions, I’ve gotten frustrated by what I perceive as lack of progress and just bagged the whole thing and stopped even trying. That old perfect-or-screw-it mentality.

I dunno. Something about getting older is helping me mellow a little bit there. Something about acting as a parent is making me more realistic and optimistic, and more able to recognize small successes (as well as the fact that the world does not revolve around me, and who gives a rat’s ass anyway if I have an extra cookie?).

One of my favorite ways to start on my New Year’s resolutions is to begin them in the old year. A goal for 2009 was to begin a regular meditation practice, so my friend Polly and I went to a Learn to Meditate class in the last week of 2008.

This year- just Wednesday, in fact- I’ve started tracking all my money on a ledger sheet. Pen and paper. I haven’t yet decided if the 2012 resolution will be some new agey affirmation like, “I track all my income and outflow on paper and it brings abundance to me,” or if it will be, simply, “Money.”

But I’ll figure it out. And whatever it ends up being, I’m already ahead.

Meanwhile, the only resolution I have for 2012 so far is this:

“Do, or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda

Enjoy the end of your 2011.

I’ve Never Read Gone With the Wind

On our drive home from work the other night, I was talking with CC about a book I’m reading, Cinders by Michelle Davidson Argyle (which is great).

Me: It starts in the Happily Ever After part of Cinderella, only it isn’t.

CC: Isn’t Cinderella?

Me: Isn’t happy. Anyway-

CC: What, like she turns into a man instead of a pumpkin?

Me: {sigh} That was the coach.

CC: She played softball?

Me: You’re not funny. Cinderella never turned into a pumpkin. The coach turned into a pumpkin.

CC: She played softball with pumpkins?

Me: Are you finished?

CC: {smirks in silence}

Me: Anyway there are these peasant uprisings and there’s this whole thing about how love is a choice, and a bunch of stuff happens. . .

CC: That’s pretty profound.

Me: How love is a choice?

He ignores my implications.

CC: No, “a bunch of stuff happens”.

Me: {sigh}

CC: You know what’s an excellent book? Gone With the Wind. You should really read that.

He reminds me, every time we talk about books, which is often, that I’ve never read Gone With The Wind. I’ve also never read Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, or War and Peace (or any Tolstoi to completion, for that matter) but he never mentions those.

Me: Yeah, yeah. Gone With the Wind. It’s on my list.

CC: You know her daughter dies.

Me: That’s sad. Wait, she was married?

CC: If you read the book, you’d know.

Me: It’s on my list, I swear.

CC: She’s married three times in the course of the book.

Me: Three times! I didn’t know you were allowed to get divorced even once back then. Did she marry the I-don’t-give-a-damn-guy?

CC: You know it won the Pulitzer prize.

Me: Wait is that where that, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies!” comes from, one of her marriages?

CC: No.

Me: I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies either.

CC: That line is regarding Melanie.

Me: Seems like after three times she’d know though.

CC: {sigh}

Me: Wait, who the hell is Melanie? I thought her name was Scarlett. As in Letter.

CC: You should read it. We have it downstairs.

Me: C’mon, that was funny. Scarlett. As in Letter. It’s like, literary, even.

CC: Did I mention it won the Pulitzer?

Me: Did she have to get married three times, if you know what I mean?

CC: If you just read the damn book, you’d know.

Me: That sounds like something the I-don’t-give-a-damn-guy would say.

CC: I can’t believe with all your women’s lit that you’re always going on about you’ve never read Gone With The Wind.

I’m plowing my way through the Norton Anthology of Literature By Women. I often make him listen to my thoughts on this, too, when we drive home.

Me: I didn’t know a woman wrote it!

CC: You didn’t know that Margaret Mitchell is a woman?

Me: Margaret Mitchell?

CC: Yeah, the most popular female author of the twentieth century until J.K. Rowling came along?

Me: I love J.K. Rowling. She’s like, magic.

CC: Don’t you have something to do now?

Me: No, we’re still driving home. You’re trapped with me.

CC: {mumbles something incoherent but I’m pretty sure I pick out the words “window” and “pavement”}

Me: Hey, I think I’ve heard of Margaret Mitchell. Didn’t she write Gone With The Wind?

CC: I am going to bang my head on something pointy now.

Me: I heard that was a good book. Have you ever read it?

Have you? What haven’t you read?