Lolla 2008

The season at Ravinia is drawing to a close, and I am glad because I am tired.
The Backstreet Boys were here last night. I will not miss them.

With any kind of luck, I won't have to see them again, but judging by the turnout,
they'll probably become a staple.

Tired. Tired. Tired.

I'm fighting off some strange infection that I got from who knows where, probably work.
The lymph nodes on my neck are swollen slightly, as they have been for a few weeks now.

After the first week, I was convinced it was cancer. No joke. I figured, shit. I'm going to
be one of those kids we learned about in health class; the baseball kid who chewed tobacco for a year and got
cancer of the tongue, a statistical freak. And the pictures of his hairy tongue. Jesus.
Not that I chew, mind you.

But I did quit. Smoking.

Like I should have after that first infection at the beginning of the season.

I got a small cut on my hand while cleaning birds nests out of the ceiling.
I woke up the next day with a fever and an angry red streak following a vein
from hand to shoulder. The doctor told me that if that streak had reached my heart, I might have died.
He also said that I should quit and then maybe my body would
be more able to cope with opportunistic infections such as these.

I lit up as soon as I left the doctors office, but not in defiance or anything like that. Stupidity, perhaps.

I suppose I shouldn't call myself a quitter, though. I'm just not currently smoking. Nor was I yesterday. Or the day before. The day before that, I smoked a pack, but that was because I left without a patch that morning.
I never thought it would work, the patch, but it does a good job of killing my physical cravings. It doesn't, however, kill the craving for a smoke after a beer, for example. Or after a meal. Or after sex. These cravings are the result of habit, and they are very difficult to ignore, but so far I've had success with substituting cherry licorice. I've gone through a large bag already.

In a month, I'll be living elsewhere;
Paying less on an investment
instead of more to a landlady.

I look back on the past twelve months and ask
myself if anything has really changed.
Perhaps my surroundings, but as for myself,
not nearly as much as I would have hoped
twelve months ago.

I own more camera equipment.
I own another guitar.
I own more kitchen miscellany than I know how to cook with
(though I am getting better).

Maybe that should be enough for me.
I learned that I can stay on top of bills,
go thirty-six hours without sleep
(more than once in a week),
and travel when I would like based on my work.

But I still feel like I haven't grown up,
And I still feel like I'm not doing what I am supposed to.

All around me, people are getting married,
finishing school, moving to New York
and Los Angeles to pursue careers in writing, filmmaking, photography...

I am still here. And because I love someone, I won't leave.

And neither will she, but she has done all of those things already.
I would like to. At least, I think I would like to.

It's hard to take even a small step away from a good thing, fought so fiercely for.

Maybe I'll finish this later.

Today I find myself in week two at the Oakwood Apartments, halfway house for aspiring actors, writers, directors, slackers, and any other person looking to live in Hollywood on the cheap. The room is small, but the bed is a Murphy (the underside of which is a giant mirror) so some illusion of space is maintained.

More importantly, I'll be leaving on Sunday, departing LAX on a redeye, getting into Chicago at 5 AM. I wish you could still smoke on planes.

My time here hasn't been bad. One of the roadies on High School Musical needed time off, so she called me in to replace her for her stay in Hawaii. She had already trained me to call the show, and it didn't take long to get back into the swing of things. The first show was almost a disaster. After that, the jitters wore off and I was back to where I was when the show left Chicago. My two spot ops are a mixed bag of neuroses, but nice enough. And they do what they're told, so I really can't complain.

Through it all, I only occasionally ask myself, "Is this what I left school for?"

I try not to think about it too hard. Dropping out is certainly not the traditional way to enter into the next stage of one's life, especially when one was as close to graduation as I, but it felt like the right thing to do, as stupid as that might sound. And now I'm thinking about it. Too hard.

While I was doing laundry the other day, I got to talking with the lady using the machine next to mine. She had moved to the Oakwood six months previously to give her thirteen year old son a better shot at getting into acting. He's currently enrolled at the acting school which is a part of the mall where I currently work (The Kodak is the only theatre I've ever worked that was part of a mall. Only in LA). When she asked me why I was there, I told her, and the ubiquitous questions followed. But she seemed nice enough, and didn't have that creepy air about her that I've seen in so many other stage moms. Yes. I think it was because she actually wanted her young son to succeed on the grounds that he loves theatre. How rare is that?

No matter how plastic you might think this place is (and it is, incredibly so), it's nice to know that there are good people here, too.

Things are better now.

Living on one's own gives much needed perspective
and new freedom (and of course, responsibility).

With freedom, of course, comes additional free time.
For me, this means tinkering.