May 5, 2010

I AM SO HAPPY TO BE OUT HERE TODAY.

Or I was until I realized my mic isn’t really working. I got it to work with my little portable recorder. That thing is the greatest. But now I’m worried that I didn’t record Eddie at a high enough volume. What I’m recording now is just the sounds of labor. When I first got here, someone was sanding or something like that a few studios over – a regular rough analog sound, without a machine. At the same time, there were a few guys out the window shoveling sand into the fake beach. Great sounds, the sound of the shovel plunging in to the sand. I just wrote: the sound of the shovel plunging into the sound. Hmm.

Anyway, what I was going to tell was about how wonderful it is to be out here today. The air is perfect. It’s FINALLY not freezing anymore. I was grouchy and achey this morning, and I have been making myself very stressed out because it is the end of the semester and I’m preparing for a performance on Monday, and I have a kabillion applications and proposals due. And I’m all uneasy and frustrated about well, love, I guess. It’s really a pain in the ass sometimes. Love and work – too much work and not enough love.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I kept trying to write about how happy I am and it keeps turning into a complaint.

I guess there is some luxury in being able to complain, especially about heartache and noise. Anyway, I was so achey on the way down here, and felt barely awake. And then I got off the subway at south ferry and was hit with the smell of the salt water and BAM! Life is beautiful again. I know that’s very romantic, but it does it to me. There is something about the sea that is magnetic. I feel this urge and longing for it, especially when I am so overwhelmed with work and obligations. I think, wow, what would it be like to give it all up , to leave and go work somewhere on the ocean. I took a day-long vacation to the sea last summer and I really didn’t want to leave. I kept thinking: what if I just didn’t go back? I could get some job bartending and spend my days swimming and riding a bike and cooking good food, spend my nights serving drinks to some stupid sleazy guys with thick necks, and smile a lot. S was trying to tell me that he thought the poor people living in the villages he visited in Cambodia were happier than he was. I basically wanted to slap him, but I didn’t. And hey, it might be true in some cases. We do find ways to torture ourselves.

So I just videoed the shovelers for about an hour. My legs hurt from crouching down at the window. So I can’t imagine how they feel. Amazing, the amount of work that goes into making that ugly fake beach.

And now I’m feeling grouchy and stressed again. I guess time just goes too quickly for me. I feel like it’s moving out of control – everything and everyone is just slipping through my fingers. Opportunities passing, work hours passing, feelings changing too quickly to monitor them. I have to go make a list of everything I have to do. There is so much. And it’s all things that I make myself do, that’s the trick.

I was with this guy this weekend who is a public defender in Canada. He was telling me about his visits to maximum security prisons up there. He said that the inmates for whom there was hope were the ones who tried to carve out a little home, a personal space for themselves, within the jail cell. Eddie has done this with his space on Roosevelt Island. I have still to do it with my space here. It’s sort of just a dumping ground for gear and a too-small desk right now. In a way, the settling in marks a kind of hopefulness. It seems paradoxical, because what he wants most is to get off that island. It’s the ambition that kills you. But it’s the ambition that saves you. N and I talked last night about how to be more in the moment, how to accept working on and living in what is happening now. We both always have too much to do, too much that we make ourselves do. She was going home to her husband and I was going home to pay bills and fold laundry and set my alarm to get up and come out here. And she was saying how jealous she was that I could do whatever I wanted with my time. Somehow it doesn’t feel that way at all.

I was also telling her about this piece, how hard it has been to establish communications, especially as there is such bad cell service on the island. She was shocked, because she says there are so many radio waves in downtown Manhattan that she can’t stand the noise. I think: the water between here and there is another glass sea, but one of communication. It’s a sudden drop-off, a dead zone.