Getting to a point where you run out of money and reach your emotional limits is one needs a vacation from themselves.
What ever happened to things that mattered, dreaming through the tall buildings and doing anything because it was living (that sounded very Rent).
Tomorrow I will take a break from life and be adventurous.
A long eight years ago, and a few months after I turned sixteen, President George Bush, had just won Bush v Gore, the Supreme Court decision that put him in office, the second presidency won without a popular vote consistency. He was sworn into office, and the world changed. But I didn’t…I was only sixteen, the biggest thing I cared about, that cold January day, was that dreamy guitar player who hung out in the music wing, writing my senior thesis, and why the hell the inauguration was cutting into “Passions.”
Nine months later, I was a Freshman in college and 9/11 happened. And it sucked, but here we are eight years and a few anthrax scares later, still being reminded of it even in the election ahead of us. Sadness begets sympathy begets people’s votes, and thus the existence of a world of fear. My world is different, I do not live in fear of anything and I’m not afraid of terrorists, I‘m afraid a rat is going to get into my apartment when I‘m not looking; I live in a world of political indifference, a place where National Public Radio and the Daily Show dominates my political input and leaves me with having nothing to say to and/or about the President that hasn’t been said before.
Eight years ago, George Walker really didn’t make an impression on me and he doesn’t today. He’s a bad president, he makes up words, he likes Baseball, he freshens his mouth with two packs of Altoids a day, and he’s a cowboy starting endless wars…what’s new? He’s been President my entire adult life, and he‘s consistently failed to surprise me because he made me politically apathetic. I live in a world filled with ADD riddled news shows and Vh1 specials. How can one pay attention nor care about such things when Flava of Love reruns are on?
Once upon a time, before Bush, there was this really awesome guy named Bill Clinton, a man so exciting he got impeached for getting a blow job and lying about it. Remember when that was a big deal? Clinton as an edgy, bad boy with sex appeal and cigars to show for it. The last time I felt this remotely excited for a Presidential candidate after Clinton, was Howard Dean. A man with such attractive maverick appeal, he allowed people to get excited about politics again after three shrouded years of mourning, but then“yee haw”ed his way out of voter’s hearts.
That’s why this Election is important. On the streets of New York, people scream from the street corners about Obama and this idea of hope, while on the-home front my sister mutters something about the Republicans and Fox News. I wanted another Clinton, but because she didn‘t win, I have to settle for Obama. (I’m lying, seeing his bare chest on the cover of People, made my year). We need a young guy to spice things up and I want to be excited about someone again. Just look at President Sarkozy, who knew French politics would be such the rage?
Unlike presidential candidates and winners of years past, Barack Obama is thawing away my political boredom with his cute little ideas about universal healthcare (something a poor early twenties writer could appreciate) and his sexy proposal for international diplomacy rather engaging in some war based on the dependency of oil. Then again…”Yes we can” does not mean “Yes we will.” Living in fear is the only way one can conveniently remain in this war on terror, it takes a change to not repeat the mistakes of our ever repeating history. Maybe we can change; maybe it will be different. At the end of all this, I’d like to see Obama become President, but if that doesn’t happen, I’ve always got a reliable t.v. to guide me.
So, you get to this point in your life when you’re feeling highly unmotivated, highly sad, wanting to want to write and after many attempts to put your life and feelings in other people’s hands, you become content with that. Getting advice, feeling a bit out of control of your own life and it’s moments when people brush you off, that you remember…I don’t need anybody.
Running down the four flights of stairs, rounding the barrister that I remembered, I got myself here in the first place, me and only me. I never did need anybody. When did this sense of complacency overcome me? When did I feel like I had to have people look at my cover letter to send for an internship? I moved to New York all by my lonesome self when people are so afraid of stepping a toe outside their little comfort zone. But I pressed on. Maybe this is what is stopping me.
Last night, I just wanted to leave the city and go home, where I had friends and a little community, and then I realized, that I’d be back where I started regretting that I had made it so far and gave up when I hadn’t even reached my potential. I don’t know where this sudden feeling of giving a shit what people thought of me, came in because I’ve never lived my life like that.
It’s time to take back my life. It’s time to get back on track of all the things I should be doing instead of feeling sorry for myself. It’s that fire and the belly that motivates me, I just needed someone to light it back up. And I thank her for that.
It’s this paralyzing feeling that I get every once in awhile. It’s this overwhelming feeling of unmotivation and extreme sadness; sometimes I think it’s the end, like this is the moment when I’ve finally gone crazy. A lot irrational thoughts race across my head….why would I continue being a writer when all I do is get rejected? And I can’t get out of that. I absolutely can’t remember good things because it’s impossible at this very moment.
I was going to go to the beach today and then this feeling come over me, I guess it stemmed from the panic attack I subsided on Saturday. It’s still not resolved, I haven’t flipped out. That usually makes me feel better while wiping all my energy levels to zero. It’s a system restore of all the stress I put upon myself and deal with. Sometimes I don’t think I should live in the city, the city of dreams, the city of clausterphobia, the city of nightmares for someone who has anxiety issues. I always felt like living here allowed me to confront those issues all the time, but now I see it just irritates my friends. I haven’t changed from that small city girl complaining that she wanted to live here.
I’m writing this pilot about a lot of things but mainly my life. A few things it’s about…people and groups, finding yourself, bars, friendship, heartbreak, making it and of course, it’s about New York. New York is a city made of dreams that you’re always fighting to make it in the end. Everyone here is a dreamer, not necessarily creatively but they dream for their family or for an amazing job. When people talk of the American Dream, they aren’t really speaking of a white picket fence, they are talking about their own little dream that they imagine for themselves. As I’ve said earlier, I’ve imagined that dream into a reality but at what cost? My sanity and days filled up with watching tv and dreaming about boys I’ll never meet, and pilots I’ll never write and my parents telling me I should go back to college to study sociology.
I hate this. I’ll force myself to the beach even if it hurts to do it…Till another day.
The long run of non-posting was due to the overwhelming nature of the last few weeks. First, I went on a road trip to West Virginia to survey the poor conditions there. While on the trip, Sarah would email me and phone me about perspective apartments and she found one while I was on the road.
When I got back, I went straight back to work and had to start packing for the new apartment. On my weekend, I helped Lindsey pack up her studio and move it into her apartment, it was then we found out Rififi was closing for good. I had to say goodbye to it and steal a chair, and go straight back to work until I had to move on Monday.
The apartment wasn’t ready, so we didn’t start moving until four in the afternoon, and didn’t finish moving out our one bedroom fifth floor elevator accessible apartment, to our three bedroom fourth floor walk up. Days later, I’m still unpacking things but I seem to making a lot more progress than Sarah.
When you finally, get your own room after a year and a half of living in the same room as someone, it’s freeing. I’m a lot more relaxed than I used to be, I can create my own individuality within these four walls and I see myself weirdness coming out the way it did when I lived back in Rochester. You know you start becoming a weirdo when you’re desperately looking for the spoon you took from somewhere deep in the boxes of your life. And when you find it, begin celebrating.
I need to go to Target to get more things for the apartment but I leave tomorrow for Rochester for another five day vacation. My mattress comes today. House warming party is next week and we don’t even have the place ready for that. I can’t wait till this all over so I can begin writing and doing my work again. At least I’m not having terrible dreams anymore.
I’m reading this book about southern Appalachia to research my upcoming trip to West Virginia with Lindsey, and I was wondering, why don’t people write newspapers the way they did back in the 1800’s full of fervor and passion. Writers and publishers would be renown in political communities for their efforts of social change that eventually led to the boom of muckracking.
With that said, it’s sad how within that type of writing, people would venture into Southern Appalachia and write about the communities as being “low” and “common,” romanticising the very notion of these cute people and their little towns. How they laughed about it, as Susan Orlean did in “Adaptation” to her literati peers about John Laroche. That region was cut off by the geography and while they were as modern as any other city, it suggests that they are “hicks” and “backwood” people when really they are maintaining a sense of community physically cut off from the big cities. In a way, I think that physical isolation is romantic.
One time, at my lowest, years ago, I wanted to move to Sisters, Oregon, set up a shack with a garden and some farm animals just to be away from people. (Recently, I read that Todd Haynes, director of “I’m Not There,” had done the same after his lover/partner of twenty years died of AIDS). I found that the isolation might be nice to be away from people. Living here, I’m never away from people, I’m never alone, not even in my aloneness can I be truly alone because the city stays on you with it’s dust, loudness and crazy.
Kendra talked about wanting to leave the city. She’s not fulfilling her aspirations the way she wants to, but I think anyone within their first year feels that because it takes forever to get your feet wet, to find the people that you’re supposed to grow with and become a community with. I came her to become apart of a community and I failed at that because those people and I were on a different page. I’m a writer and wanted to be a Journalist and to extent, through my love of writing and that community, I did. But things aren’t always the way you plan.
You find something that interests you, it grows to an obsession and you yearn for that love until it is a full on aspiration. Connection and community has always been my interest and after months of pondering, I want on a gut feeling to cover the WGA strike back in November, and it wasn’t my writing that got noticed…it was my photography. (My parents now think I’m a semi-successful photographer in New York City.) But one thing led to another, and now I’m working on a piece about the Penthouse Recordings (monthly shows held in Times Square) that is also about community within the New York music scene, and I’m travelling to West Virginia to cover, what was that, community isolated geographically by the rest of the Eastern states.
In a way, I feel like I exhibit that same passion and fervor as those writers and their newspapers, over a hundred years ago, trying to unearth the truthes of those who cannot speak for themselves or want a voice to be heard. It’s an uneasy feeling sometimes being a translator of others. (That’s so unhumble of me, these are just frank feelings though). But like that gut feeling I had a little under a year ago about the WGA strike, I feel like this is a good thing and what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s the first time in awhile, that I feel like I’m happy.
PS: I’m going to be turning 24 in West Virginia, my horoscope said I had until the 22nd to do what I need to do. I think it’s a sign because that’s my birthday.
For about a year, I’ve been stuck on someone desperately trying to get over them because I knew in the bottom of my soul, I knew they weren’t right for me. It’s easy to decide, that “I am going to get over this person” but it’s hard to actually do.
The moment I decided this, his doppleganger started working at my store and occasions after that I would bump into him when I specifically wanted to avoid him. The rejection hurt too much, my heart broke and I wasn’t even in love, but I did want him, he was everything I thought I wanted, and sometimes still want.
On one not so great night in November when my day couldn’t get worse, I was waiting for a friend to see that Bob Dylan biopic; so was he…with his girlfriend. Determined to not let my feelings deter me from seeing this film that I had wanted to see (Cate Blanchett *swoon*), I bought my ticket and watched the film from the back. When one song came on, I hit rock bottom and months after the fact I couldn’t listen to the song instantly remembering the pain associated with it.
Kendra has tried to convince me to write about this for This American Life, in my cute and witty way where I make myself a character and allow people to laugh with me instead of dreadfully feel every painful feeling. For a week, I’d been mulling over it, thinking how I could do it, but everytime I thought about it, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
However, I think I’m on the road to getting to this point as I take baby steps to confront every painful detail and I started with the song. Listen with me because maybe this is the first step for a lot of great things including getting over this person who doesn’t deserve me.
“Heat” 6.8.08
It’s that type of heat that soaks your clothes the minute you step out of your building. The one that you could swim in on your way to the train station.
When you’re waiting at the Dyckman street stop of the 1, it’s so hot, that the click clack of the train pulling by sounds like that of a rollercoaster at an amusement park.
You’d think that that small burst of rain, earlier, makes it better when it only makes it worse. You crave the breeze that will rush pass you as the train whizzes by.
I was born in this weather, I should enjoy it but all I want to do is escape to the beach instead of being trapped on this island of concrete.
“Storm” 6.10.08
I used to watch the thunderstorms roll in, when I was a kid, back home where it rained constantly. Bolts bursting through the sky.
My Grand Aunt once told me that between a bolt and a thunder cracking was how far away it was. That’s how you knew the storm was nearing above you.
As I sit in the dark of my small Inwood apartment, I see bolts flying across the sky over the buildings and above the park.
The rain taps gently on the air conditioner in front of me, and I can see the lit up sky through my rain stained windows.
The building usually busting with sound is quiet as God’s rains take the heat away.
The only time it’s quiet here is when the bolts pass through the sky and the storm rages on outside.
Inside it’s quiet and peaceful.
So, it happened. I sent my piece about a week ago. It was called “A Girl and Her Sled;” I read it on the Rejection Show (oddly enough) and yesterday I got the note from the desk of the reader at This American Life. Rejection. I don’t know why I’m supposed to be surprised. I even wailed a little bit. “Noooo! Why!!!!” But after a few minutes of that, I’m surprisingly okay, I’m totally fine. And if I’m totally fine with this, can I be totally fine with other emotional attachments and their subsequent rejections?
You see, Ira Glass is still on those ads on the trains and when I submitted to the show, his stern look of encouragement turned into pride. “Good job, Kaetlin,” he would say to me quietly from behind his stack of papers. And I would smile at through his black rimmed glasses and say, “Thank you, Ira.” (I sound like a stalker). But now with this rejection, I feel like he’s just being smarmy. “You think you could get on my show, Kaetlin, think again…ahahahahahahah,” he now says. And it just sucks. Yeah, I get it, my material is what your show is looking for at this time.
But isn’t that just life, people not looking for what you have at the time. I constantly put that on guys. No, I’m not looking for you Mr. Wall Street Business Man or Mr. Nervous Guy-Reading-Dubliners-by-James Joyce (ew). I’m not looking for the person who’s supposed to be Mr. Right but always a Mr. Wrong, someone who’s completely out of my league and vice versa. It’s a ploy really. And as much as I want to give those guys the chance, it’s just never going to happen because I’m just not looking for that right now, and I don’t know why.
That’s the problem, why couldn’t Ira want me, and why can’t I want those who would be right for me? That’s the question I need to answer to figure out this problem. And it isn’t so much about the rejections bestowed upon me as they are the rejections I somehow bestow upon others. It’s me. It always been me and my shyness, awkwardness, bastardness, etc, etc. How to change that is the real challenge because it’s not easy to change for things that will eventually make you more happy at the end of it.
I’m rambling. I should stop because my cat is on her way to killing a huge ass cockroach that made his way into my apartment. Have a good night.
I think of all the people and things that changed my life and the film, Amelie, was one of them. Released in 2001 from France, the story tells of an eccentric young woman and her dealings with loneliness and eventual changing of the world around her. At 17, I knew this is who I wanted to be. The feeling of freedom, living alone, cracking a crème brule with a spoon, falling in love with a man who I met a photo booth in the Metro, that’s what I wanted.
My roommate Becca tells me that if you actualize what you want, you can get it. Sure, when she initially says it, it sounds like a cracked out idea, but thinking back on the last ten years of my life, I’m living the life I imagined. At 14, I gave up the aspiration of wanting to be a singer, knowing that was not my world with the cattiness, the pettiness and the unnecessary cutthroat competition that lie within. At 14, I set out to be a writer, much to my parents dismay. At that point, I always knew I was going to be a writer, but I never knew the details of my own story.
I spent years writing drab short stories (mostly involving me falling in love with JTT), winning awards in Journalism class for the school newspaper and writing half written screenplays (screenwriting is my overall passion). At 16, I graduated high school, and a month after that, at 17, I moved to Arizona and pursued a Journalism degree that I ended up never finishing but instead electing to take film and writing classes. It was in my second semester, while attending Arizona State, I saw Amelie, and my world stopped. I was living in a plastic world of party people (a complete culture shock to my North East Coast upbringing of sweaters and pants fashion. A year later, at 18 going on 19, I attempted to move New York because living in the big city with endless possibilities is what I wanted.
Moving to New York failed, and I moved back to my hometown in Upstate New York, Rochester. At that time, I always thought Rochester was a mini-New York, only to figure out in the end before I actually moved to New York, that it barely was. During my young adult life in Rochester, I carved out a routine for myself, unintentionally, around the Eastman School of Music, the school that I once dreamed as a child that I would attend. I would hang out at the coffeeshop by campus, drink espresso drinks, write and enculturate myself into the student body which provided a me with a group of people who weren’t the plastic faces of Arizona, when I wasn’t working at the Food Co-op down the street. Without a tv, I lived with a radio to guide me. It was only a year ago, when creating pieces from old photographs I took during that period, did I realize my life is pretty similar to that except I smoke different clove cigarettes now.
I guess if I was writing my own story, it wouldn’t look like Amelie but one inspired by that story. Much like all stories throughout time, nothing is really all that original. My world was carved out by the need to have freedom and discover the world around me, and somehow, without realizing it, I actualized my dreams. But for some reason, I’m still pretty impatient with getting what I want, even after the past ten years of full circledom happening. Believe it or not, even to this day, it’s still happening. JTT, the one who I originally was writing stories about, goes to school nearby where I work. Odd.