Pursued by a Bear

A brain, a heart and some courage.

Lately, I've been quiet. 

I'm not the only one, I've noticed. Many of my bloggy friends have abandoned their regular writing schedules over the past month to just marinate and take things in. Ain't nuthin' wrong with that.

Yesterday was my birthday. When I got my first Happy Birthday message on Facebook, it felt great. Then I remembered how I failed at the chance to be lovely with people all year long and wish them a Happy Birthday. Uhg. In that moment yesterday, I decided to give everyone a gift back. I vowed to stop whatever I was doing when I received their message and I vowed to give them my whole attention.

And then I would respond with my whole self.

And I wouldn't edit it.

That last part is particularly hard for me. I'm keen on cultivating an image. I edit this blog all the time. I edit emails several times before I send them. I erase status updates and links if they are older than a few days from my Facebook wall, only to have friends repeatedly contact me with:

"I tried to find that post from a few days ago and now it's gone! BOO!"

Why do I do this? Am I afraid a new friend will stalk back a few pages on my Facebook wall and make snap judgements about me? I think about that sometimes.

Anyhow, about half of my Facebook friends reached out to me yesterday to say hello and wish me a Happy Birthday. If you ask me - that's good odds with the Facebook. I've collected quite an amazing circle of people. I don't know why I am so worried about being judged.

I replied to everyone with my full attention. I wanted to allow myself the freedom to say "I love you" and/or "You mean so much to me and this is why..."

So often, I'm so careful. I edit myself. I don't wish to be like that anymore. A birthday is a great time to "birth" a new habit. So, I am going to stop deleting stuff from my facebook page. I am going to stop making revisions once I post entries on my blog. I delete far too often in those two places in order to cover up "evidence" of myself. I don't think that's the direction I should be going. I need to work on being mindful enough the first time I write something that I don't feel the complusion to go back and tweak...and tweak..and tweak again.

(I won't give up my email habit quite yet, though. My job as a Managing Director of a theater company requires a cool head. Sending the 7th rendition of an email has saved my butt more than once!)

Brain. Heart. Courage.

 
 
(I posted this entry with only one proof-reading. See? I CAN DO THIS.)

 

 

#9 - Vietnamese Sandwich

So.

Lulu & Mooky's was #9. Lulu and Mooky's was a liquid nitrogen ice cream parlor that was the IN place 2 years ago. I had a hankering for ice cream last month and I happened to be on the Lower East Side, so I googled Lulu & Mooky's only to discover that they have loooooong since the writing of my list gone out of business.

Boo! I needed to replace #9 on my list.

I was keen on replacing with another food item. I remembered that Vietnamese sandwich places get good write ups frequently in TONY and I've never had a Vietnamese sandwich, so I added that to my list.

Last week, on my way to the Jitney, I stumbled across this place. The line was at least 40 people deep and stretched all the was down the block. They must make some pretty good food!

Hmmmmm.

I made a mental note and decided to grab a sandwich before work this week. Luckily, the pre-noon line looks like this:

And I got this:

That's a grilled peach sandwich with bacon, chives, jalepenos, chili mayo, pickled carrots, cilantro (er, sorry, Catherine - I know it offends thee) and cucumber. WHAT. Just...git in my bellah, wouldja? YUM.

I didn't learn until AFTER eating my sammy that Num Pang is actually a Cambodian sandwich shop. Oh. Would it be totally cringe-worthy if I shrugged and said,

"close enough"...?

I'm sure Vietnamese sandwiches are good, too.

(aaaand that's #9 on the list - DONE)

MYOB

Ah, unsolicited advice.

First of all, I know I have done it. We've all done it. Someone tells you a problem and you think, "Aha! I can fix this!" -- but how much do I loathe being on the receiving end of unsolicited advice? The people offering me advice - do they not recognize me as an intelligent person that has alreadly exhausted the obvious?

I had a person in my life a few years ago that capped off almost everything I said with,

"Well, you know what you should do..."

It drove me nuts. Fred turn it into a joke. He'd wait until I was in a perfect tizzy over something and then he'd get a shit-eating grin on his face and yell "YOUKNOWWHATYOUSHOULDDO"...then he'd duck and cover.

Nobody likes a busy body.

Last night I was on the subway with my friend Nat and we were creating an accountability plan for going to auditions. Just one a week. For practice. Mind you, we're both married women and working hard at our own theater company here in town. It's not likely, on one audition a week, that we'll book any of the gigs that we're planning on auditioning for. That's not the point. The point is that we recognize that our audition skills will get soft if we don't continue to work them. It would be beneficial to our confidence as artists to just get out and do one audition a week; to keep our song books and monologues fresh and the noises in our heads at bay.

So, we were sitting on the subway, chatting about our plans - like, not even griping about the state of auditions, which is easy to do - no, no, no: we were just talking about our plans to go to Equity Principal Auditions once a week and joking that it is a perfect plan because there's no way we're going to actually book anything from an EPA anyway.

(That's the truth.)

(But, God...? Feel free to prove me wrong. ANY TIME.)

Suddenly, an old lady sitting next to me blurts out,

"HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN IN NYC?"

...and in my head, I was like,

"Ex-cuse me?"

(...because her tone was suggesting that there is always a correlation between the amount of time you are in NYC and the amount of success you've encountered.)

...and then my next thought was,

"Honey, please. There's not enough time here to tell you about my life journey. So you just go back to the word find you were workin' on, Ms. Random-nosy-subway-rider."

But she was the pushy type; so I thought,

"Eh. I'm gonna mess with her."

So I gave her an innocent face and loudly declared,

"SIXTEEN YEARS."

I was hoping that would knock her off her course. I was dying to see what she would do with that information. Unfortunately, she wasn't even listening to me! She went ahead and launched right into her story about her (former) career and agent-this and agent-that and broadway and off-broadway and, you know, TV is really where it's at...

(Talking about herself is all she wanted to do. Okay.)

The funniest thing was that she had to get up while she was talking because her stop was coming up. She was flailing all over the place because she was more intent on talking at us than concentrating on her own balance. She rushed her speech at us as she was walking out the subway door and it was shutting on her.

Now - who does that? Who decides to hijack a subway conversation 2 minutes before their own stop?

I felt so psychically dumped on.

I suppose it's one thing to overhear a conversation and say, "Excuse me? Are you actresses?" and - you know - only choose to do that if you are going to be on the train long enough to have an even exchange with the people you just interupted.

But to just launch and leave? Really?!

There have been times when I have wanted to chat with someone on the subway, but I decided not to disturb them because I know I am disembarking soon and "the flow" would be off. In those situations, you just let it go. Am I right, fellow New Yorkers?

We watched her walk away as our train pulled out of the station.

Finally, after a pregnant pause, Nat was all,

"WHAT. JUST. HAPPENED."

Whew. We got Busy-Bodied!