Life’s Work | interstalking

I was supposed to be a way bigger deal than I am and I am starting to be seriously stressed out about this for one reason: I’m thirty six years old.

It’s easy to forget when you don’t say it (though I begin a lot of sentences spoken to my Mom that way), but sometimes in the very end of the day when my eyelids are just beginning to stay closed, it hits me like this.

Oh my God. I’m thirty six.

And I gasp and open my eyes, of course.

It’s usually in a moment where I sleepily think about being thirty five because that was at least a less old age to get stuck on, and then I remember that very uneventful birthday I had in December (Sagittarius).

Holy shit, I’m thirty six! How the FUCK did that happen?

I’m aware of how relatively young thirty six is, except when you look at things like this:

“Girls”. I pretty much could have created that show, because I’ve been writing essays or short fiction based on my own life very similar to “Girls” since I was about twenty three, but, um, I didn’t have rich parents that financed a movie for me after college and then starred in it and let me film it in their Tribeca home, so, that kind of made “Girls” not happen for me. There was that. I mean, not that I asked. (Yup, I’m a “Marnie” according to a Buzzfeed quiz.)

GIF from http://www.nsmbl.com/the-best-quotes-from-hbos-girls-in-gifs/.

Lena Dunham is twenty seven, that magical age (at least until May 13, 2014). Not when a lot of famous people died, but the age when Keith and Mick were writing “Exile on Main Street”. Liz Phair released her supposed answer to the Stones, “Exile in Guyville”, around the same age in 1993. I then listened to this album every night while falling asleep from 1994 to 2004.

How was an album like “Exile on Main Street” even possible at age twenty seven? How can one have lived that much? Is it because things were different then and you weren’t necessarily required to go to college like all the privileged famous people in this country now? Were the Stones just more adult at twenty seven than I could ever be at thirty six? You have to admit, things were never the same after “Exile on Main Street”. It was, I daresay, the peak.

1971 Photo by Dominique Tarlé.

I am older than the characters on “Sex and the City” for almost every season (not Samantha, who was always the oldest but you never knew how old, but Carrie turned 35 in season 4!). I know, it’s a “Sex and the City” reference, but you can’t deny the influence of that program on women like me. I idolized those TV characters (well, not Miranda), and now, truly, I’ve become them, with a lot less money. I didn’t realize how real that show was.

Carrie alone at dinner on her 35th birthday, “Sex and the City”.

It was fucking real.

I’m also way older than most of or all of the cast of “Saturday Night Live”. I’ve used Wikipedia and I have proof:

Kate McKinnon – DOB 1/6/84

This is particularly meaningful for me because Kate MacKinnon was always the stage name I wanted to use if I became an actress; MacKinnon was my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. She happened to be singer in the big band era before she left it all behind to marry Grandpa Al.

Cecily Strong – 2/8/84

Vanessa Bayer – 11/14/82

Aidy Bryant – 5/7/87

Taran Killam – 4/1/82

Bobby Moynihan – 1/31/77 (Behold, the one cast member older than me! By a whopping 10 months!)

Nasim Pedrad – 11/18/81

Jay Pharaoh – 10/14/87

Keenan Thompson – 5/10/78 (Close… but I’m older.)

Brooks Wheelan – 8/2/86 Brooks is a featured player, but um, he’s my favorite. More on him later.

Please note the millennial nature of the names above. I’m more from the era of Tina and Kristen and Jimmy than Cecily and Brooks and Taran (Though I do have a cousin named Brooks, I’m pretty sure he’s a Millennial too). I’ve been obsessed with “Saturday Night Live” since I watched reruns of the original cast on local TV in suburban Boston. It’s just my thing, and now, I’m basically too old to ever dream of somehow ending up on that show because I’m that funny.

More things you can’t do anymore at my age:

– Be cast on “The Real World”. We all felt a pang when that ship sailed on our twenty fifth birthday (thanks to my friend Deb for reminding me).

“The Real World San Francisco” Original Cast from 1994.

– Donate your eggs. I’m not saying I would do this, but maybe I would have done this. 2008 was a tough year.

My feeling of missing my window corresponds to the nagging belief that I’m not living up to my full potential… and of course that I may have missed the ideal moment for achieving that potential. I’m not sure if being as much of a dilettante as I am is an achievement or a disadvantageous addiction to distraction. I’m not sure if my problem is not being good at so many things or being good at everything.

The trouble started in college. That was when I started to believe that I was special and was validated by my film school star’s status. It wasn’t like high school when I coasted relatively easily through all my classes (except for AP Calculus where I just slept and charmed the liberal teacher). I had some really hard classes in college, like Biopsychology and Astronomy and Statistics (okay I just slept in two of those, hence my grades). But then there were my production classes in which I was visibly better at making films than most of the other students. I mean, it just seemed like things could only go up from there.

So, I did, of course, what was always supposed to be my destiny and moved to New York where I could become one of those super cool people like the stars of “Girls” and “Sex and the City”, but when I got there that didn’t happen instantly. I didn’t really understand working for things then despite not being bankrolled by my parents. For example, I worked at a video store on Bleecker Street for three weeks. A documentary filmmaker who came in took a shine to me, set me up with an informational interview at Independent Pictures I absolutely bombed in (like, accidentally slagging off someone on a film they were financing bombed), and offered to pay me a hundred bucks to help paint his studio. “I like to have my weekends to myself,” I told him. I barely knew anyone so what I did on the weekends was ride the subway to all the places I wanted to spend my meager funds and try to buy cooler looking clothes. Then, on Sundays, I got drunk and fell asleep on the same subway, missing my stop on the way home at 4am. My NYC trajectory begs the question, do the really cool famous people even have experiences like that, or are they too busy working to fall asleep on the L train?

Prior to my L Train naps I was drinking at Manitoba’s, a bar in the East Village owned by Handsome Dick Manitoba himself (of the Dictators), where I befriended aging punks who’d reference Bad Brains shows they were all at in the 80s. I started listening to Cheap Trick, read “Please Kill Me”, and, weirdly, moved to L.A.

So you’re thinking, due to the SNL and “Girls” references, I moved to LA to be a comedian or like, create my own TV show and that’s what I wanted to do, right? Um… yeah, I mean, yes, definitely, now I think that. But I never did comedy or acting at all, I always thought I wasn’t pretty enough to be on TV. I didn’t have cable then so HBO was just something I saw on posters in the subway. And I was way more interested in directing movies, which I figured I’d achieve by age twenty seven (magic age) or go to grad school. My first goal in L.A .was to get a job in development (difficult), and later was to meet/date Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet (I actually came extremely close to that one… I mean to meeting him.).

Worthy pursuit circa 2000.

I worked in the business in L.A. and at one point had a script optioned, but it was a handshake deal with an older gentleman I knew who had an agent. When I had a foothold working in production I realized it wasn’t the life I wanted and that it wasn’t anything like the feeling I had when my parents paid for me to be creative all day long in college. On the weekends I was competing with a woman who claimed four washing machines as her own at the laundramat even when she only had clothing in one. Essentially, I’d started my life as a day job person, and I continued that life in Detroit when I moved there almost exactly two years after I’d arrived in L.A.

So you’re thinking, okay… she must have really just wanted to play music because of that “Exile on Main Street” reference and the Handsome Dick Manitoba thing. I mean, yeah, but as a young person I lacked the confidence to sing and play music in front of anyone, and I set my sights more on being a groupie, which I didn’t even come close to achieving as an awkward teenager with acne. Music was a draw to Detroit, and I thought I’d finally get a job writing. I thought writing might be what I was good at, but I didn’t know if I wrote anything people would want to read. Music writing seemed like a journalistic compromise that provided a paycheck. “Please Kill Me” was the first in a string of influential rock bios/journalism. I also recommend “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung”, the collection of Lester Bangs’ work, if only for his super long narrative fictionalization of “Maggie May”.

I didn’t get that music writing job (turns out it’s extremely difficult to write well about music you don’t know or like), and other than trying to date musicians (again, bad at that), I took photos of them as another potential calling. I realized quickly how I’d never make money doing this, and eventually got back into my chosen field of production in Detroit, this time focused in advertising. My one attempt at starting a band with a friend didn’t work as I was annoyingly late to our two person practices due to my unpredictable day job hours, the same hours that made it hard to date the most enticing musicians.

Making money was consistently too important for me to be completely dedicated to an art form or an artist.

Here’s where it gets back to Brooks Wheelan. I googled him, and he actually went to engineering school, and worked as engineer, doing standup comedy all along in his spare time while he worked at his day job, that was not even a day job like most of mine have been, but specifically a not industry-related day job that he could make good money at and was less of a struggle to get into. Then, at twenty seven, he was cast on Saturday Night Live. Like, this guy made the ultimate sacrifice and had the ultimate backup plan and was dedicated to making it work – to have two plans going at once and the awesome one worked! I could cry with admiration.

Way cooler than he looks in this publicity photo, I’m praying this guy makes it to season 40.

In the process of being a day job person, I developed a feeling of being a failure as a famous person/artist that leaked into my non-famous life. I meet people ten years younger than me with so much esteem in their skills and it makes me depressed. They’re a bit like I was when I offended the head of production at Independent Pictures as a twenty two year old, I guess, except some of these people actually try a lot harder than I did. Some of those people start their own companies. With or without parental funding.

As I assume is true for most, I have way more confidence now than I did ten years ago, when I should have tried harder to do something major as failure became commonplace to me then and I was already poor. Unfortunately I cared way too much what people thought despite my moxie and I jumped jobs and states and boyfriends instead of settling into myself. Oh, the curse of the twenties. My biggest fear is that the older I get, the less people care to listen to me, the more I seem like a joke who didn’t succeed when she was supposed to.

As much as I envy the Rolling Stones and comedians of the world, I’m just not sure I could do one thing all the time. As much as I wonder “am I even good at this” about what I’m best at, I feel “don’t fence me in” about my entire life. I’ve never been able to be too focused on one thing for too long. I think that is why I love writing. I don’t have to pick one thing to write.

I get bored so easily. I don’t think I can ever stop being a dilettante.

I don’t want to be that person in her thirties and forties (and fifties?) trying to reinvent herself… hoping to start a band with her other forty five year old divorced girlfriends. When I date men who make six figures and secretly want to be video producers (ahem… what I do), I always groan inside. It’s so embarrassing when old people who aren’t good at art want to be artists.

But look at me: I’m the narcissistic cliché of a professionally employed thirtysomething blogger. Is it so wrong? I could always start a band ten years from now, right? Maybe it’s not that bad. Maya Rudolph started a Prince cover band. I mean, she’s famous, so she can kind of do whatever she wants, but I can sing too.

There’s no time like the present, of course, and I should hurry up and achieve my idea of fame… my ever-changing idea. I am plagued with self doubt like anyone with passion. Experience notwithstanding and priorities changing, I’m as hungry as I was at twenty two. I want to be this way when I’m eighty. I want to be one of those cool old people like Joan Rivers and Betty White. Whatever I’m doing, I just want to keep doing it until I’m really too old to do it. Like, really, really old.

If I look at it that way, I have plenty of time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about resolutions and I finally made progress this year to not make the same resolutions I make every year like:

1) Pay off credit cards.

2) Travel overseas.

3) Be thinner and work out more. (What a stupid resolution, but I’m sure I made this one in my twenties. A better resolution would be to get laid as much as possible while still young and healthy (only by extremely cool people, obviously). I doubt the guys will notice that four pounds I always want to lose.)

4) Don’t make out with upperclassmen at parties when you are drunk (I’m pretty sure I made this one in 1992).

It’s so easy to tell yourself you are going to do big things, you are going to live life to the limit, you are going to love boundlessly, you are going to stop acting “out of fear”, you’re going to stop being a bitch to your Mom. Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram have been full of such proclamations recently. A lot of people are telling me to get outside, usually whilst I’m checking Facebook on a run with my dog (lame). I think of these posts as “boast-posts” disguised as gratitude. I hate being told what to do, including by my friends, and social media seems like such a cheap place to try and inspire people – so action-less.

(New Resolution: Stop thinking bitchy thoughts about your friends and family on social media!)

I search for enlightenment and I try to quiet down enough, sometimes, to listen to the universe, I just don’t usually choose to find it and listen to it on social media or online dating profiles. A lot of people use that tiny space on Tinder to write something like “Live your life, don’t let it live you”… you know, some stupid crap like that. But I’m not on Tinder, of course. (See “Tinder’d” Parts I and II.)

It’s so great to think those positive things, and really try to live your life that way, and “be present” though. I remind myself to “be present” often in my head, and not just when I’m eating fries. I have to remind myself because I forget that shit regularly. I always thought I was practicing the spiritual exercises of being present and acceptance and not assuming. Or maybe I really wasn’t trying at all, which is more likely; I think I was actually judging the crap out of people and scaring them away in bars – that was, when I wasn’t hating myself and trying to control my life and future without actually doing anything about what I wanted.

I have cried in the temple ceremony at the yoga retreat and thought about becoming who I really am, and then my life forced me to actually do it, and forget about resolutions that involved being financially responsible, not slutty, and not a bitch. So what was my enlightening experience? Did I go to South America and hike or become a yoga instructor or climb mountains or sky dive?

No. My Dad died.

2013 started for me with my Dad dying (January 3, 2013, the day after his 67^th birthday). My distant, deadbeat, lovely, weird, handsome, handy, and utterly cool, fucking difficult Dad was the hardest gift of my life to receive, because everything and everyone around me told me he wasn’t right, but there were things about him that were so perfect that I missed for so long. I didn’t even realize I had his nose until he died because my sister inherited his beautiful eyes and perfect teeth. I got the anti-establishment belief system and the funny nose.

My Dad once told me that his first rule of relationships was “I get to be me, and you get to be you.” He was not perfect, and he failed as a father. But I wish I had allowed him to be him enough for him to tell me more stuff like that.

I had 6 weeks and a lifetime to prepare for him leaving me in ultimate because of Marlboro Reds and stage 4 lung cancer. Years of ignoring my feelings and issues came rushing up in my throat and forced me to deal with them as I vomited it all uncontrollably for months.

I am very aware that I sound like one of those annoying Facebook posts right now. But this is a blog; it’s different.

The post my Dad dying me is so much cooler, so much happier, and capable of making resolutions like this:

1) Open all mail at least twice a week. (Facing avoidance issues.)

2) Start a savings plan for trip to Sweden. (Actually long term planning instead of wishing and blaming circumstances for things not happening.)

3) Start using Hoot Suite. (Actual practical method of operations for someone with a blog.)

4) Create an actual bill pay off plan that will actually pay off my credit cards – like a realistic, long term one, not an unrealistic one that will be derailed by new boots, that turns into a bunch of new stuff and expenditures because, well, I bought the boots, so…

This is what I’ve got now in 2014, – a logically thinking brain that can make small and thought out goals because it isn’t distracted by the garbage of a troubled soul. Because 2013 was all about my willful, childish self, I can do this now. Being forced to be more of an adult than I’d ever been brought out the insolent teenager in me, the high school makeout queen on several Natty Lights. And, I got her out of my system for the foreseeable future.

2013 was about emptying the apartment of my dead father mere weeks after I was cringing at the sight of him dying in it, inheriting several mason jars of weed, “The Joy of Sex Part II”, and an apartment full of furniture. It was about closing his bank account and liquidating his retirement account and adapting a “fuck it” attitude about the pot I was smoking and the too young guys I was dating and actually letting one of them wreck my emotions (the guy, not the pot – the pot was actually a good friend in this time period). It was about telling my sister I would call the Sioux Falls library system and personally tell them to fuck off for trying to get back “The Hunger Games” trilogy from my dead father if she didn’t want to do it herself (she got all the forwarded mail). It was about not giving a shit about what I’d thought I was supposed to be doing since turning 30 because we all die anyway and not being yourself is a colossal waste of time. Especially if you aren’t getting paid for it.

Not surprisingly, 2013 was also about having a therapist. I might be a head of the class therapy all-star, because I only went for six months. Eventually, I stopped crying all the time. I learned to communicate with my friends, making my friendships so much more valuable and beautiful to me. I learned to communicate with my family. I learned to accept them all, including myself. Forgiveness was something I’d always known, mostly. Acceptance is much harder work, and makes your life so much easier.

2013 was about weekends spent crying in my apartment, listening to my Dad’s records and clutching the box with his ashes to me when I felt especially awful (I am aware that this is creepy). It was about eventually finding a special place for some of those ashes in my home, and letting the rest of them float gracefully downward into the Mississippi River from a bridge just blocks from where they were born, with my only blood sister and best friend next to me. We watched them arc through the air and draw a line in the water to where they were headed with the current. 2013 was about eventually thinking about getting rid of some of my Dad’s stuff like I let go of the ashes. But keeping some too. Including the weed, on both counts. And really, I haven’t been able to let go of much yet. But I will.

I may need to go back to therapy eventually to deal with my intense commitment issues (see lack of long term planning skills noted above), but I think just opening the mail and sitting down to create an actual budget – like, a realistic one I can totally stick to, are small steps toward not being as scared of obligations and long term logistics… and the people that you feel obligated to.

I think I’ve finally learned how to let life happen to me (instead of telling myself all the wrong things were happening to me because I thought I wasn’t the person I should be), and happiness happen to me (you create it, of course, but you have to make room for it by being yourself). And I think it’s making space for me being an adult where it counts. My fucking checkbook people, and my passport. I mean, where it counts for reaching goals I’ve had for a long time with no idea how to achieve.

Death is an extremely commonplace and inexpensive way to be enlightened, but it works. It teaches the damned lesson, that’s for sure. ”Death is for the living” was always in my mind, because the brief time I had with my Dad in his illness, the painful few moments, the day of calling him because he could no longer speak but he could hear me, and I was a ten hour drive away and didn’t know if I wanted to go be with him or if this would go on for days, or if he wanted me there… those are the things I don’t think about as much later on. I can’t change them. It’s what started happening to me once he was gone that was the authentic experience of his exit. If I had a day to be with my Dad without thinking about what a crappy Dad he’d been… oh, if I had that day. He died with regret, and I don’t want to. If I make it to the mountain tops and the other continents, my Facebook posts should be more grateful and braggy than anyone else’s now. But I want to write them on my own heart and those of the people I love. I’ve finally started to understand.

And I really do think I’ll start paying off my credit cards this year. I’ve heard that money can’t buy love.