news flash

There is movement outside my window. A couple of days ago, a teal Pontiac pulled up the driveway. The driver was H, a Mexican guy who's been working at the bar that J built. He cleans the entire bar every morning, and used to be the barback, but the bartender/manager said he really needs somebody who speaks English, so they found somebody and J put H to work on the container house - our house! Yay. He met with J that first day, and then yesterday he was back, trimming trees and moving a beam from near the current house (M&J's house where S and I currently reside) to the top of the two containers - essentially S's room and mine - that have been sitting over there since early this year, when the work was halted shortly after beginning because of a drying up of resources. S and I weren't too upset about it because we've had some financial woes of our own of late and aren't paying rent as long as we're in the house.

That's the big thing. After a while of waiting, and being able to see that nothing was happening outside my window on that side of the yard, I wasn't sure it was ever gonna happen. Well, that's not true, I knew it would happen eventually, but I didn't know when "eventually" would be, months or years...

Another thing is that I've been really doing a lot of writing on august chagrin. I feel really focused, and haven't been socializing much at all (which has its disadvantages and disappointments), but the more I spend focused time on the book, the more it comes, and that seems like the right thing to be doing. I've got a lot more chapters completed than are on the august chagrin blog, but I'm trying to put up a chapter a week at least.

But that's been a little more difficult lately because work has been picking up. Because of the financial crisis on Wall Street, I'm not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week (used to be we could work as much as we could), but there hadn't been enough work to do 40 hours until a couple of months ago, and now it's pretty steadily coming. I also got an email from the boss yesterday telling me where the company stands financially and that he can't give us back the 25% cut we got when the crisis hit hard, but I feel confident that he will do it as soon as possible - it's pretty impressive to me that he has become so open about the finances of the company; that feels honest. I figured out early on that I would have to work 40 hours to make the same amount of money as I was making in 30 hours a week - which had become my comfort zone. I'm hoping now that I've figured out a way to get to 40 on a regular basis, I'll be able to continue it after our 25% is reinstated, and therefore get out of debt sooner than later.

That's going well, the debt thing. It has a lot to do with having no social life, just spending my time working and writing. I've let down a couple of friends, but after what happened while I was Paris long distance with C here in Austin - the friendship that crumbled - I took stock of my friendships and of Friendship in general, and there just isn't enough of me to go around right now. That sounds harsh, but I feel like my primary friendships have to offer me something, not just take from me. And not to say that the friends who've recently gone by the wayside were taking from me physically - a little bit but not so much the actual physical time required to maintain the relationship - but I mean more on the emotional plane.

Besides work and writing, there is improv. Which is more like therapy than a social life. And it's been difficult of late. Last Friday night, I was in my first group show, but was on a strange stage with quite a number of people I had never met, we hadn't had one rehearsal as a group, there wasn't a strong leader in our group, and the performance was at TWO A.M.!!! I freaked out. It was something like stage fright, I guess. I spent the hour onstage standing and sitting on the sidelines hoping nobody would call me out onstage with them, and when they did (they did!) I felt like I had nothing to offer. It was awful. I felt like shit on my way home (at 3:15 a.m.); I didn't say anything to anybody, just left. The next day I cried a little. I think my biggest fear is that I'll have to come to terms with the fact that I'm not able to be onstage in front of people again, and since I really want that, it would be something I would have to let go of.

It's like aging.

But there were so many problem factors in that show so I'm cutting myself a lot of slack and gearing up for the next group show, which will be this coming Tuesday. We have one, maybe two rehearsals planned, T&C will be part of the show, and all the other people will be folks I've been taking classes with for quite a while.