By Scott Snyder
"Seagulls fly inland; why shouldn't they? Maybe the handouts are better. They're adapting -- examining the stay-at-the-seashore rule and finding it obsolete. Would that I had such fortitude." - Read Your Darwin...
I've been examining and winging some myself, this past year -- a process that has involved dropping and taking up threads with sometimes-uneasy alacrity. The tapestry is starting to look kind of funny, and it doesn't always stay together really well."What other ineptitudes have I yet to uncover? At any rate, I got fired from the two Big Dance Numbers, and now I'm just in the one Little Dance Number. The rest of the time, I walk around the stage serving drinks to other actors. Sometimes I sing." - Counting Left FeetAs it turns out, adapting can be exhausting. It involves drastic change, which is really only attractive when things are going unbearably. So, the trick is to make change without waiting for conditions to be unbearable -- and especially without making them unbearable on purpose...
Risks, and threats to my sense of competence -- these are the parts of adapting that I handle particularly badly. Sometimes I give up, of course, or try less hard. Fear of failure is strangely self-fulfilling, which isn't to say that it's especially fulfilling."Winter is a bad time for moving. Ideally, by winter you've lined the cave with insulation and laid in a few quarts of nuts and berries. All of that should be finished by December." - I'd Like a Cave for ChristmasI have a friend who has decided that he'd rather be a back-stager and in demand, than be an also-appeared on the stage. I can respect that, but there's something about the stage.... Sometimes I think that my friend knows that all too well.
I haven't moved yet; it'll be at least mid-January. January really isn't a very good time for moving, and I've been putting off the whole mess. I'm hoping that, for Christmas, someone gives me the keys to a really nice apartment somewhere, along with some berries."Donut guys come and they go -- you know. They merge with the ad campaigns; they fade like the chill of a May morning, with the music too loud and the sun at your back." - Cardboard for the Drive of a MorningI haven't decided yet whether or not to get cable TV in the new cave. I hardly watch it enough to make it worth the money. But when I've been without cable, I've felt profoundly disconnected -- which is difficult when you're in the midst of hibernation.
As it turns out, I'm not sure whether they do come and go, those donut guys -- metaphorical or otherwise. As I look back, I remember the trip to the airport; I remember the chill, and the cigarettes, the music."I owe a lot to cigarettes -- and I suspect they will eventually collect on the debt. But for now, at 25, I'm okay with that. " - Mea Minima CulpaThe chill is back, of course -- the other end of winter this time, with all the cold and more, but none of the anticipation of spring. I've quit smoking, or at least quit buying cigarettes. I still listen to the three or four CDs I had along on that trip. They make me think of leaden good-byes and (now) long-distance bills. I'm told the Long Island Expressway is still there. If you've seen it in person, I wouldn't mind receiving confirmation of this.
