Well, I am, officially, already behind schedule for my 2019 reading challenges. You may recall that the goal for my main challenge was to check off one category each week. You may also be advanced enough in your math skills to understand that if my overall goal is to read 75 books in the year (applying 67 of them to different challenge categories), then I need to be reading at a pace that is more than one book per week.
And yet here I am continuing my long march through book #1.
Last night, after what has been a draining week both on the national and personal fronts, I received the same “chain letter” from a few different theater friends on Facebook messenger. The message encouraged women to enact a “female blackout” on social media today: to change their profile picture to a solid square of black, as a way of showing solidarity with survivors of domestic abuse and demonstrating the value of women’s contributions by taking them away for a day and making “men wonder where the women are.”
I’m guessing this chain got going coming out of the general sense of exhaustion, despair, and rage so many of us are feeling after the shitshow that was the Brett Kavanaugh hearing this past Thursday. In all honesty, until I went back to re-read things before writing this post,* I was misremembering the stated solidarity message to be more expansive, and to include survivors of sexual violence as well as of domestic violence. The fact that the focus was narrower suggests to me that this chain letter was started/written some time ago, but I can understand why this past week’s events might inspire it to be distributed again.
One of the main living-my-life endeavors that has occupied my time and energy during my “forgetting how to write” patch was doing a show. Yes, after all was said and done, I got a part in that Sondheim show I blogged about back in May, when I was convinced I hadn’t passed muster. Go figure.
The show was Sondheim’s Company, which, for the uninitiated, circles on a group of friends in 1970 NYC: one single guy/womanizer (Bobby), 3 of his girlfriends, and 5 married couples who use their get-togethers with Bobby as a way to ease/escape whatever tensions are going on within the marital bond.
Well, the decluttering death march continues at its snail’s pace.
Yeah, that’s hyperbole. Not so much about the “snail’s pace” bit, but more the self-indulgent and ham-handed analogy. After all, struggling with the quote-unquote burden of too much abundance in my life and home is the Firstiest of First World Problems, wouldn’t you say?
So I’ve been trying to figure out what I might end up doing as my next show, now that I’ve decided to prioritize hobbies theatrical over hobbies choral in my life. Reading audition notices, calculating estimate commuting times from home and work to rehearsal/performance sites, and so on.
I also did one audition last weekend.
So one of the things I’ve been working through during the last couple days is trying to define and clarify the boundaries around when to speak up and when to be silent. Because, however-much I admire the determined stance voiced in Calderon’s and Wise’s “Code of Ethics for Antiracist White Allies“:
[W]e are committed to challenging the individual injustices and institutional inequities that exist as a result of racism, and to speaking out whenever and wherever it exists.
And however seriously I take the responsibility I articulated a couple days ago about speaking up again and again, I still can’t quite see myself as a wherever, whenever kind of testimony giver.
Of course, in addition to the rediscovered joy of plugging myself back into musical theater, these past few months have also provided a forum to examine some things in need of release.
So tonight, I finally, fully, and formally resigned from the choir.
I know that the Blogging 101 assignments/prompts are piling up unattended, but it’s been another late night, so I am just going to have to write quickly about the topic that is most front of mind for me — and I’ll catch up on Blogging 101 tomorrow and over the weekend.
And why was it another late night for me?
As it turns out, that’s exactly the topic I want to be writing about tonight.
I was out late because I was auditioning for a show.
Okay, I hadn’t quite expected to roll up the sidewalks here for an entire month while doing my Shakespearian NaBloPoMo experiment.*
In retrospect, perhaps I should have seen that coming. After all, my November schedule–full-time job, 2 “college courses”** (one of which is still ongoing), choir, regular Shakespeare blogging, and all the ephemera of embodied life (cooking, laundry, sleep, etc.)–was pretty rich.
With 20/20 hindsight, it’s not terrifically surprising I didn’t have a lot of extra time to keep the momentum going here at JALC.
But here’s the dirty little confession about it all: I didn’t exactly try that hard to keep the wheels turning here. And when I say “I didn’t try that hard,” what I really mean is I didn’t try at all.
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Self-Love: It's Just Another Lifestyle Change 