That’s the way I like it. Other than an hour at my friend Will Maier’s Friend’s House (for two board games, and a few rounds of everyone calling me by all three of my names preceded with “the”), I was silent for the entire day. Went to Fred 62 for a two-egg lunch, read Tim Rogers‘ The Most Gorgeous Situation In Korea, drove to the Arclight and pondered the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There.
I had a coffee that tasted like milk. I had a shot of vodka poured over ice. I prepared a lot of free time, and used some of it to collect fifteen more stars in Super Mario Galaxy. I made too much free time, actually. Tomorrow, when everyone else is eating Turkey Sandwiches, I’ll be lunching on leftover free time.
Holidays bunch me up inside. They make me tense, fidgety, and distracted. I don’t like feeling trapped. See, I may not go anywhere on any given day, but the knowledge that I CAN’T GO ANYWHERE makes my apartment feel smaller. And as we all know, everything is closed on Thanksgiving. I don’t need to shop, I don’t need to get a coffee … but the freedom to satisfy sudden whims is soothing. Take it away, and you suddenly realize it was there.
But it’s not just that freedom. I have a lot of pent-up holiday misery. Thankfully, there’s a large Freudian block that keeps me functional on the third Thursday of every November, and the miserable Christmas that comes a few weeks after that. If I had total access to all of my memories, I’d be a whimpering mess on the floor, with skin the color of ice.
Man, the holidays were joyless for me when I was a child. I was older than my cousins, and disproportionately smarter than them as well. I was no longer a child by the time the rest of them were born. Sitting at the Kid’s Table when you aren’t a Kid is not only demeaning, it’s the damned foundation of a young identity crisis.
Now, I didn’t have one of those families that yells about politics over the dinner table when everyone gets together. They didn’t even discuss the pleasantries of evening television, or the look of the new 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee. No, I had a family that relentlessly screamed at each other. Everyone got in on it, except me. Grandma and Dad raised their voices about choices in the house. My uncle called his little girl a cunt; his sons were shit heads and fucking idiots. The language was sponged up by the kids and squeezed out over their ma and pa during my last Thanksgiving with the family. Oh, and there was the dog — this bitch of a boxer, bred to demonstrate affection by drooling — she sought me out relentlessly, dipped her head into my dinner, pushed my food onto the floor. The family took a break from screaming at each other to laugh at me. I turned away, read a book, and pleaded with my parents to deliver me back to my room, my video games, my solitude in Chicago.
This is no exaggeration, by the way. I’ve brought a friend, once, to Thanksgiving with my family. After, he turned to me with hollow eyes and said, “I think I understand you a lot better now.”
Growing up didn’t make it any easier. When everyone else was bringing their boyfriends/girlfriends around, I was arriving at the dawn of a decade of lesbianism. My scruffy-faced pseudo siblings shouted, “HEY ARE YOU GAY?” over and over again until I simply stopped coming around. I haven’t been to a family Thanksgiving now for eight years. I plan to keep up my truancy until everyone is dead. I’ll catch my parents in the summers, thank-you-very-much.
So this Thanksgiving, I woke up and watched the voice-actress anime REC. I played some video games. I went to the roof and lay down to watch the sun set over my western forehead. And then I drove around the empty streets of Los Angeles, because I could. These streets are pretty great when you can actually ride around on them! I wish I could take the Red Car. Or a subway. A tram. I wish there were less people in this city, or that you could only get in your car if two other people were going with you.
I’ve had a lot of time alone lately. Or maybe I feel more alone because I had a house guest for two weeks. Press on your arm for an hour and then let go; your arm FEELS in the place where your finger had been. Your finger isn’t just gone — there’s a new place on your arm in your brain.
Kissing works the same way, I think. For every place you get kissed, you develop new feelings.
I’ve received a bunch of emails (and a few comments on my last entry) begging that I WRITE NOW AND THEN POST NOW NOW about what is going on. Well, let’s see. I was kicked out of The Groundlings (a decision that I’m not really surprised about nor hurt over) after working there for about 9 months. I booked a pilot for MTV, wherein I host a Live Improv Show. I was cast in a MADtv sketch, featured in a unfortunate special about Mass Effect on Sci-Fi, and a photo of mine has been chosen for an Amsterdam guide book. I’ve been promoted at Play Magazine (effective January 2008), and I’m almost positive I’m going to Japan again in December. My shows with Tim Meadows and Miles Stroth continue on Friday nights at 10pm, Last Day of School chugs along Fridays at 11:30, and Roberto Alomar will keep on doing the cage match for as long as audiences will let us. And I’ve got a bass guitar that I’ve been plucking on for my upcoming stint in a band. That’s a lot of Things Happening.
And then there’s that wonderful house guest.
The more I think about it, though, the less I want to write about him. It’s not that I don’t have a lot to say. My mind is all cluttered up with pieces of days. They rattle around in there so loudly that when I shake my head it sounds like something expensive is shattering.
But he and I move in a lot of the same circles, and journaling about all of it here seems a little juvenile. I’m happy to include everyone by saying this: I hung out with a guy in Tokyo. We were friendly to each other, and then he visited Los Angeles. The least I can say is that I like him a bunch.
Man, why am I so nervous to post this one?