Snapshot

Wherever I go, I want to blend in. There are lots of ways I've found to blend in here in DC: wear flip flops to work and carry my dress shoes in my purse (also: carry a large purse). Don't even glance at the monuments - way too busy for that! Jaywalk whenever possible.

One sure-fire way to out yourself as a tourist is to break the unspoken rules of the city: The City Etiquette. I've made it my mission to study DC's Etiquette. Here's what I've noticed:

1. If you're on an escalator and you need to stand, you stand on the right. Need to walk? The left is all yours. This is always the rule on the metro. Where it gets confusing? Escalators anywhere else. The mall? Movie theatre? Your guess is as good as mine. But for God's sake, don't give yourself away as a tourist by standing on the left in the metro.

2. Speaking of the metro, the train cars have two seats next to each other, an aisle, then another two seats. This means you sit next to a lot of strangers. Bad etiquette? Someone who sits in the aisle seat, leaving the window seat "open"...but socially inaccessible.

3. A busy sidewalk is a busy sidewalk is a busy sidewalk...but in DC, sidewalks get REALLY busy. So the best place to stop and pull out your map/cell phone/water bottle is generally not the middle of one.

4. On the west coast, acceptable stranger glancing distance is generally about 10 feet. Here? More like 20. Or not at all. Most of the time, you don't even acknowledge that there are other people around if possible.

Gotta go...back to blending in.

Creative Writing Assignment

Today's post is an assignment from a reader who has been living out of the country for some time. He wants to know, in 50 words or less: What is Going On in America?
_____________________________________

America’s Crush on Obama Fades.
Healthcare Reform – Where the f* is my stimulus money?? – Trade Sanctions Will Stop North Korea!
Politicians’ Affairs Uphold Sanctity of Marriage.
A New Report Shows Americans are Still Really Fat.
RIP: Farrah Fawcett/Michael Jackson/Ed McMahon/Billy Mays/Walter Cronkite/Taco Bell dog: yo quiero…I can’t, it’s too soon.

Creative Writing Assignment

She doesn’t like my songs anymore. I try singing them on our visit – in the canoe, in the car, but she just smiles absently and looks the other way.

After dinner we have drinks with Kelly. Kelly bought some Bailey’s special and I forget that I’m supposed to be drinking it slow until I catch her eye over the rim of my juice glass and realize I am really putting it away, drinking it like it’s water. It just tastes so good, like coffee and vanilla and cream! I forgot. I am embarrassed. And now it is too late because in the middle of telling my favorite joke I slur over the word ‘buffalo’. It comes out ‘bullfflo’ and I am so embarrassed I don’t even get to the punchline. There is silence for a minute and she asks if I’m alright and I nod my head, sharp—too sharp?—and she turns to Kelly and asks about her garden. I am grateful she can ask about things like Kelly’s garden because those are the normal questions and I can never think to ask them.

She’s at work and I’m out walking on my own. In the sunshine, and I am so happy to be visiting her in this place, this wonderful city. I am walking along the street and I smile at the people and I sing a song in my head. I look at my feet in their tennis shoes clopping along the sidewalk and I imagine I am a horse and this road isn’t paved yet. It reminds me of my sister and how she always wanted to play Stallions and it makes me laugh out loud which startles me and I clamp my hand over my mouth and look quickly around to see if anyone noticed.

At lunch she is wearing a low-cut top and I can’t stop staring at her cleavage. I can’t believe the fact of it. She’s tired and is looking at the people walking past on the street and I’m looking at her cleavage and the sugar packets in front of me and imagining how it would feel: the resistance of paper on paper as I pull a packet out of the middle of the tray; the easy heft as I underhand it right into the space between her breasts and the shirt. Then I imagine the way she’d look at me and I’m not sure anymore if it would make her laugh so I put my hands on the table instead, palms down, hard.
“Your fingers,” she says. I look down and they are twitching, like normal. Nervous fingers, is what I tell her. Truth is, they move all the time like that, thumping against tablecloths, thrumming on my steering wheel, tapping on my own lap—and I don’t know why. I sit on my hands.

At the airport she hugs me in the car. She wants to know if I have my ID, if I’m sure about what time my flight is. She already made me double-check before we got in the car so I tell her everything is alright. I thank her for the visit. Tell her I love her.
“Call me if you need anything,” she says as I heft my bag onto the sidewalk. I tell her I will. I am already thinking about the M&Ms I’m going to buy and hoping I don’t have to sit next to anyone who might want to talk.
“I love you, mom,” she says before I close the door. “I’m so glad you came out.”
“Me too,” I say, and stand and wave at her as she drives away.

Bad Poetry

Those three tanker ships
On Chesapeake Bay
Tug at my heart.
Gasoline, salt, metal and steam –
Great booming bellies –
Do they remind me of home?
Of pitchy logs on trucks
Of cheap portside beer
Of seeing that maybe I’m the driftwood –
not the water
as I had previously thought.

Snapshot

It's easy to forget, living in DC.

I was walking home from Union Station tonight, and I was stunned by the beauty of the columns of the Supreme Court. Staggered by the way the Capitol Dome was lit up. Knocked out by the panels of lighted windows in the Senate office building.

But then I heard water rushing. I looked down and saw a sewer grate.

And then I remembered again.

Creative Writing Assignment

My girlfriend is thinking about joining Match.com. She jokingly gave me her profile as my next assignment. I chose to ignore the joke. (Those of you who know my friends – any guesses?)
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[HEADLINE]
This Two-Person Kayak Is Getting Lonely

[ABOUT ME]
I play soccer when the fields aren’t too soggy and softball when the sun’s out. Being as I live in Bellingham, that means I don’t get to play either very much – so then I play the accordion. Or the piano. Or my stove. …okay, I know you can’t technically play a stove, but if you could see the sweet dishes I whip-up (seasoned with herbs from my garden) on any given weeknight you’d liken it to an awesome jam band in the middle of some serious jamming. Not annoying jam band music, though – think Widespread Panic.

I’m an environmentalist-urban-planner chick who shaves her pits. I work hard (and I love what I do) so I can play hard. I need someone who can keep up. Bonus points for speaking a foreign language and being able to pick up and go at the drop of a hat – or a cheap fare on Southwest – wherever we can get. I’ll pack my hiking boots, pocket phrasebook and bottle opener; you get the toothpaste and Mad Libs.

Let’s fill our Camelbacks with wine and bike along the Sound! I’ll be the one with red hair about 10 feet in front of you.

[INTERESTS]
Kayak camping. Live music. Working on my house. Happy hour. Yoga. Planning my next adventure.

Etc.

Wrote this a year ago while playing Beatrice in "Much Ado About Nothing". Still feels very true.
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Being in love in a play is very confusing.

I bring a bundle of nerves and experiences and associations with me onto that stage every night. I bring my beating heart and my skin and my voice. I bring the moment as it exists in me and I in it—I was very conscious of it tonight, poured into my tights and wrapped into my blue dress with the snaps (not zipper) at the back, my hair piled on top of my head and pearl earrings hanging from my ears—

And my costar does the same thing. And I know certain things about him. I know he is tired. I know he feels like his hair is too long. I know he spent the night on our friend’s couch because Lakewood is a lot closer than Seattle and you can really substitute any of these details for any of the men I’ve played opposite because none of them really matters. What matters is that when we get up there, in front of God and our cast and the interchangeable audiences, we are reaching for something—something from our guts, from the past, from our imaginations—something that will ultimately let us reach at each other and create that thing that our cast and the interchangeable audiences (and maybe God: I thought so at one point in my life, anyway) are there to see. It is like love and it is like drugs and it is a lot like lying but some of it is real.

And that’s where it gets confusing.

Every play I do: no matter if my costar has bad skin, or bad breath, or is a bad actor, or is gay, or is a woman—part of me always, always, falls desperately in love with them. And it is confusing because the THEM I fall in love with is always a mix of me and them and everything else that has nothing to do with me or them. In this show it was a mix of my ex boyfriend and my dog dying and my costar’s dead wife and the personal meaning of the production in my life and the smell of Tacoma and the seam in the stage that I ran my fingers against each time, that little ridge nudging against my fingertips.

And I wonder what it’s like for him. Is it the way our voices meet in space and mix their little vibrations of sound? Is it the bewitching smell of the Aqua Net in my hair as he leans over to whisper in my ear backstage? Is it the way I taste when he kisses me? Or is it none of those things—is it his dead wife? Is it his new girlfriend in the audience? Is it the fact that Lakewood is a lot closer than Seattle? Part of the way I feel about him in that moment will always be a mystery, because it is composed of the way he feels about me: and I will never know what that is. What parts of me and his life and the moment make it up. What it means to him.
But it doesn’t stop there.

My love is voracious. It is deep and it is wide and it has spread itself all over this show. It is in the way I know, with my body, that the audience is with me, and I can feel their energy as intimately as I can sometimes feel my own heartbeat.

That’s why it’s so hard to leave. It’s walking away from a world where my only job is to feel good. To love these people and to laugh with them and to draw on everything I’ve got and everything they’ve got and things we don’t even understand we have to make something together. It can be easy to get caught up in thinking that exercise means something. I guess what it comes down to is: it means something if you make it mean something. It is not inherently meaningful. And that idea breaks something in me. It liberates something in me too. Like a phoenix from the ashes of my dreamt-up future that I watched burn to the ground, I am resurrected with each second.