Friday miscellany

I saw David Cromer's production of Our Town with Caroline last night. We sat on the stage since the tickets were $40 cheaper or so and--wow. I only have fuzzy memories from seeing this performed a couple times in my childhood (and from the episode of My So-Called Life where Rayanne tries out for Emily's part), so it was in many ways a mostly new play to me. The house really is set up for a kind of proximity--I was going to say intimacy, but I think that would be the wrong word--not only with the actors but with the rest of the audience, which I think is an incredibly interesting choice. And it did take me back a little bit to some theatre experiences I stumbled into when I was much younger, like the night I saw The Caretaker at the St Mark's Theatre--probably the first time I'd been even remotely close to the action of a play and all of the sudden it's taking place three feet away. Our Town really is an incredibly meditative play. The last twenty minutes seemed to accomplish everything that Synecdoche, New York was struggling with over two hours to achieve, and it did so much more elegantly, without the elaborate machinery that was Caden Cotard's self-centeredness--the point being here that even good people are blind. (And in this sense we care in a way that we don't in the film.) Had I not been right on stage, I probably would have started crying--the only other time this happens to me is at the end of the Axis Company's Hospital series.

The play was also quite a wonderful illustration of Coleridgean suspension of disbelief at its best--particularly the part about transferring from these shadows of the imagination a human interest and a semblance of truth--but in a way that, I think, complicates any sort of "live for today" message at the end. It's possible that the blindness isn't a tragedy after all.

Other things. It's my last weekday of spring break. I've accomplished very little and it's snowing. I need to go to the gym, sit zazen, put in several hours with Browning and get my life back in order. Was in Charlotte visiting family last week at this time; the weather was awful and my aunt got the stomach flu (which I am still worried about coming down with, since it seems to appear about a week after you think you should have gotten it) so there was a lot of sitting around, but in many ways this was perfectly fine. I didn't really have to think. Just thought that by the time I got back to New York I'd be ready to do that again. Not so much. Not sure where these days have gone...possibly too much fuzting and a bit too much drinking on Wednesday. By tomorrow I'm going to have to switch back into teacher mode and prep virtually the entire rest of the semester. Of course I am not looking forward to this.

On the other hand, I'm finally (mostly) over the cold I had for two weeks and I have my voice back. I'm also not as miserably run down as I was during the first two weeks of March. So this is good. The downside is that while I was sick and not going to the gym for 2 1/2 weeks, I ate a lot of takeout and then just ate a lot of food in general in North Carolina. So I'm feeling pudgy. Disappointing, too, because I lost like three pounds in February and have certainly gained that back. And I've certainly not been doing well with food this week. The whole thing is annoying, but I'll go to the gym after this and I should be able to get in at least four days next week. I need to keep up confidence here, just saying.

Saw The Poet on Tuesday for the first time in two months. Mixed feelings. Don't really want to be back with him, but very much want to be his friend. I'm not sure he has friends like me and it became clear over the course of our conversation that he is, in many ways, extremely isolated right now. And he would switch back and forth between these crazy future plans of how we're going to end up together in a couple of years living in some cute place in Hoboken or something and talking about our relationship in this weirdly extreme past tense. I have a feeling that there's a lot of this that's being displaced from other things going on in his life. I hope I can continue to be there for him in some way, though.

Saw D. the Tuesday before I left. He drove out to Brooklyn on one of those nights where I had more or less lost my voice. Did my best to function in the fog. We had a really great phone conversation on Wednesday, and I haven't heard from him since so now I'm all nervous again. It's the nervousness of a relationship (such as it is) that's pretty much non-fucked up and I do tend to worry that I'm nothing without the sense of the sordid. But I also worry about seeming to put demands and expectations on him--which I'm not, except that I really do like seeing people I'm sleeping with at least once a week. Which has been difficult for us lately for various reasons. Also, I ended up talking a lot with C. about her stuff last night which meant that I kind of unconsciously started obsessing over D., which is never good. But I do know that if I continue to not hear from him today, it's going to be distracting.

Had my recurring dream about K. earlier in the week. Still, everything's less wretched than last March. And with that, I should probably get ready for the gym so that eventually I can make spring break mean something productive. It's never too late to hit the ground running--right?

(By the way, I signed up for a Twitter account, for no apparent reason. It's my firstname/middle initial/lastname.