Wednesday, April 27, 2011

I'm an optimist, but I'm an optimist who takes her raincoat.

For most of high school, I was little miss sunny outlook and positivity. Problem? Bring it to Siobhan. Besides the listening and the sympathy, she would generally be able to provide you with the way to rationalize, come down from the ledge, and find you the light at the end of the tunnel. Even when bogged down in my own shit, I was generally pretty good at doing my best to provide this service for others - and more often than not, doing it for myself.

As you might have garnered from this anecdote/the title of this blog entry, I am less than stellar at doing that these days. When I have a problem I latch onto it and fixate. I don't wallow - it's not really my style - but a problem sits with me until I am good and ready to let it go. Generally this requires blowing it out of proportion, getting spectacularly mad, and then coming down from the ledge a step at a time.

This process takes a lot of time and emotional energy, and annoys both me and most everyone who has to deal with me while this is happening. And while I've protested on frequent occasions that current me would not be friends with high school me (owing to the aforementioned sunny disposition and relentless positivity), high school me was probably onto something. And okay, yes, the "stay positive at all costs" mentality was generally her way of just pretending everything was fine rather than ACTUALLY coping with anything that went wrong. But about half the time she was pretty good at pinpointing when something was actually not a big deal and subsequently taking immediate action towards fixing it.

So okay, high school me. You're in there somewhere. Let's do this.

Step one: identify the problem. Today, I am pissed off because I overslept, meaning I missed auditions. Additionally, woke up having overslept from dream about both roommates talking to me about their successes, whereas I still moooostly feel like a failure.

Step two: analyze why problem is bothersome: I feel guilty about skipping auditions. I feel lazy because I only have 1 audition lined up this week. I feel pathetic/jealous because my roommate has 4. I feel doubly pathetic/jealous because my roommate has a callback tonight.

Step three: perspective: Ugh this one is the hard part. Okay so the dream means I'm actually NOT confronting the problem all the way - I'm still scared and I still feel like I'm not working hard enough and I'm jealous that the work I AM doing is still going unnoticed while I feel that's not happening for my peers. But I've had some really positive responses to auditions lately. I got called in for a pre-Broadway show, even though I'm non-union. I've been getting callbacks. And I'm IN a show, for Christ's sake, with a good part, going to Europe in three weeks. All this is good. I'll get back on track with six auditions next week, and it's only Wednesday so more things could easily turn up for this week. And I shouldn't feel jealous of my roommate's callback for something I didn't even audition for.

Step four: other good things happening in my life: Well... see, this is where I always fail in this part of the exercise these days. Perspective trips me up and then I get here and I'm like WELL SHIT. But. 1) It's ACTUALLY SPRING. 2) I have time this morning now for grocery shopping/laundry. 3) I've lost 7 pounds (hey, gotta throw it in somewhere). 4) Did I mention it's spring? 5) My throat hurts like a mofo, which means my singing would have been less than stellar today anyway. 6) Again. Spring. (See my last post about LA or this post about winter for reasons that's so prominent).

Okay okay I know how obnoxious that was, but all of I think 5 people read this blog so I don't really feel THAT badly about that.

...The thing about this method - which no, I don't itemize in steps in my head but do run through all of that when I'm actually trying (tune in next week for the litany of reasons Siobhan is CRAZY) - is that it doesn't always work. In spite of myself the big problems are still there. But I have, as it happens, talked myself all the way off the ledge.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

we've been on the run driving in the sun looking out for number one

I have an extremely difficult confession to make: I really liked LA. “Well, sure, Siobhan, what’s not to like? The palm trees? The sun? The beaches? The general aura of relaxed fabulousness? Or if none of those work, how about the fact that you were on vacation? OBVIOUSLY you liked LA.”

The thing is, the experience was wholly unexpected. I grew up (to simplify… see previous discussions on my lack of hometown) in Northern California, and promptly moved to New York City where Los Angeles is viewed as maybe the most evil place in the country except perhaps Texas. Therefore in spite of any hard evidence, I knew in the emotional/spiritual way that I didn’t like LA.

Sure, in the back of my mind I remembered enjoying multiple trips to Disneyland, a couple of middle school and high school state championship FPS trips (that’s Future Problem Solving, for those not in the know, which is a super cool academic competition thing that I was very involved with for 4-5 years maybe?), and a thoroughly enjoyable college visit expedition in the eleventh grade. But really, when it came down to it, I live in New York which is (arguably) the center of the universe, and had spent many an evening sophomore year getting into less than sober lighthearted but nonetheless intensive quarrels with my LA native roommate and her friends about whether the Bay or LA was better. Psh, like that’s a real question.

So well known was my “hatred” of LA that when I told friends I was going, their response – besides those who dwell in LA, who were very graciously excited or at least pretended to be – was “really? Why?” Actor friends asked if I was going to figure out if I liked it enough to move there, to which I promptly responded that I already knew the answer to that one and it was no. The simple explanation of “to go on vacation?” sufficed to shockingly few. Surely there must have been an ulterior motive for such a trip.

You can imagine my surprise then that everything that probably should have triggered my instant and instinctive hatred did no such thing. Rather I curiously liked Los Angeles pretty much from the moment I touched down at LAX. [I will pause here to comment that I’m mostly joking – clearly if I really expected to hate LA I obviously wouldn’t’ve spent money going on vacation there, but for the purposes of my story we’ll keep pretending.]

I spent five days in the company of dear friends both old and new, on beaches, outdoors, in numerous bars and more numerous restaurants, generally eating drinking and being merry on vacation. One easily understands how these things engendered a generally positive feeling about the city I was in pretty damn quickly.

This is the thing though. I have visited other friends at their colleges, and though it’s always fun and interesting, I hadn’t yet visited friends at any school I’d actually even considered, let alone applied to, let alone been accepted to in the case of USC (oops). Driving around one day, it occurred to me that it was sort of a phantom version of what my life might have looked like, minus of course the attendant responsibilities – but then I never considered those in early trips to New York either. And I found myself quickly coming to the conclusion that I could easily have been happy out here. Would I have been crushed at first that I wasn’t going to New York? Of course. But I could have made a life out here and enjoyed it and been happy and maybe not have ended up moving to New York until my middle twenties, if at all.

But – and here’s the part that if you are my parents I would like very much for you to stop reading, and/or please read without jumping to the immediate conclusion that I am giving up and moving back out here/there (I’m currently writing this somewhere over Kansas, so either pronoun is actually incorrect) – something else occurred to me. I could easily be, present tense, happy in LA. I can absolutely see what my life would look like. And some really, really appealing things about how my life would be easier – lower cost of living, slightly less competitive theatre scene, idyllic weather, and most importantly proximity to such a high number of friends and family – jump out almost immediately. I have a hard time shaking those. I know it has something to do with the idea of leaving 1) warm weather and 2) the end of my effectively two week vacation (including Memphis), but I found myself distinctly not excited to go back today.

Also, there were, as it happens, ulterior motives to booking this trip so many months ago. New York is an astonishingly easy place to feel lost and alone, and in January when I planned the trip and February when I booked it, I was feeling this in a biiiiiig way. I wanted to be somewhere that felt like home, somewhere where it felt like people still loved me and I was still important to them. Somewhere I could feel a little more like me, aka not so stressed and angry and unhappy.

Obviously all of these problems are things that were to do with me, and not New York. Also they definitely owe in part to the fact that as it turns out, I hate winter. That having been said, they don’t call NYC the concrete jungle for no reason. So the idea of getting out for a while, particularly to a place with warm weather and palm trees, seemed incredibly appealing

I have said on a variety of occasions, when asked, that I’m not opposed to moving back to California, I would just have to already have a job to do it. I still feel this way, and in some way this was good to prove that I could do it easily and not unhappily. I was, though, taken aback with how quickly I came to that conclusion. It threw me, I think, to realize that I had no real desire to get back yet – I can’t think of a time I’ve ever been on vacation that by the end of it I wasn’t at least a little ready to go back to my real life.

I’m going to chalk it up to duration, I think. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but I believe it’s possible brevity is also the soul of overly fond generalizations. I’m pretty sure that eventually, the lack of public transit and cabs and things open 24 hours and walking and tall business and urbanity would eat away at my sanity. But sometimes I feel the same way about the days at a time without sunshine and the lack of palm trees and (dare I even say it) nature.

It’s funny, too, because as I’ve also touched upon before I never considered myself a Californian until moving to New York. And I still feel a kind of spiritual homelessness, which I honestly mean in the most un-self-pitying way you can think of; I am one who is at heart always defined by being from somewhere else. I have been for my entire life. But I joked routinely throughout the week about being from New York – and though to others it’s just semantics, it’s an important distinction to me that I say from New York rather than live in New York. Which feels true in many ways at this point; New York is no longer where I live because I go to college there, it’s just where I’m making my life. It is where I am becoming from.

[Second disclaimer: I started this blog by wallowing and listening to songs about/that remind me of California and at some point decided it was wise to switch to songs about New York… apparently I’m very suggestable.]

Obviously, the solution is easy – become wildly wealthy and successful beyond all imagination, and go bi-coastal. That shouldn’t be too difficult, right?