Feeling Good Again

There's a Robert Earl Keen song I love where he comes home to his hometown bar and everyone's there, and everything feels so right. I think the song is actually about heaven. The B3 Organ line alone backs up my theory, but I won't get into that now. Tonight, I got a little bit of heaven with my acting class, of all the unlikely things.

I came to LA pretty burnt out on acting, which is pretty sad considering how little of it I participated in since college. There was just something about actors that made me tired and unhappy, because so many of them were tired and unhappy. It made me feel like that would be my destiny- to be sad and shriveled, mean and petty, and most of all, extremely needy. This is the nightmare scenario, and I don't mean to cast any kind of aspersions on the wonderful actors I've been lucky to meet and work with in my time. But we in the performing arts know the kind I'm talking about, and they just drained all the joy out of me for some time.

Tonight, and really every Monday for the past six weeks, I've been exposed to something different. For that span of time, I've had the sheer joy to watch actors of varying levels of skill and experience come together to learn and grow by attacking their work and tuning in to repressed feelings that brim beneath the surface waiting to burst out. There is not one person out of a maxed out class of 24 people that I don't want to work with or lose from this class, so much fun has it been watching their growth.

And the best of all was after class tonight, when all but just four or five of us went out for a drink and a burger afterwards. We sat and talked and complimented each other for our bravery and daring and really meant it. No one was BS-ing anybody. There was more love in the room than I could almost stand.

It really does feel so good, feeling good again.

Moving Day

Nothing in my life has made me feel like a bigger failure than getting up early on a Thursday to move apartments by myself. Not only was I leaving the place I called home for my first five months in LA because I could no longer afford it, I had no one I could call to help me move. There are only a handful of people I know well enough to call in such a favor, and they all either have day jobs or are on mission trips to Kenya or whatever good people do with their time while I'm moping over where to fit all my books in my tiny new room.

That feeling passed, thank God, when I made the decision to actually unpack everything at once upon arriving at my new digs and making it into my own space. I still need wall decorations, but it's my room now, and all is right with the world. I even got random phone calls from friends tonight who need me to do some on-camera work, and my boss called to see if I was available to go on a seven week tour all over the country catering a scotch tasting event. Also, I went to my make-up acting class and had a great time working on a scene. It was supposed to be a guy-girl scene, but through a comical mix-up I had to play an alcoholic doctor trying to convince my estranged husband not to leave me. Good times.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to do some writing for which I will actually be paid. Nothing succeeds like success, am I right? Suck it, failure!

LOST Thoughts

It's late and I've been working since six this morning, but if I don't blog about the LOST series finale, then I may as well hang up my keyboard and become, I don't know, an accountant or something.

I believe in no spoilers, so I'll wait a few days before going in depth into the episode and the series. I will say I saw the end from early on in the episode, but rather than being put off, I was so overjoyed that this was the route the creators decided to take, that I could barely sit still from the excitement and emotion.

It was nearly flawless. It was maybe the closest to truth that network television could ever hope to get. A little bit of heaven broke through, and millions of people got to share it.

There's a saying that my improv teacher drills into students: suggestion is opening, opening is form, the end is in the beginning. A fitting description of the series, for sure.

Hiding In Plain Sight

I fell in love with a girl the summer after my freshman year of college. It was six months after my dad decided to move the family back to Texas after nearly a decade of growing roots in Atlanta, GA, and even though I was at Baylor University I just wasn't ready to give up on the Jewel of the South quite yet.

Through the magic of AIM I kept in touch with my best friend Nick's older brother Michael who had worked at a day camp the summer before and knew they were hiring. Sensing an opportunity for one last goodbye to the city where I grew up, I asked him to recommend me for the job of day camp counselor- a position fraught with responsibility and even danger. More liability than danger, perhaps, considering there was a low ropes course and climbing wall involved, not to mention the zip line.

Since my family no longer lived in our beautiful green house with the white trim and front porch I imagined I would bring dates home to my senior year if I have been confident enough to ask girls to come over, I was fortunate enough to live rent free at the home of some family friends. The Schneiders went to our church and their kids went to the private school I graduated from in the class of '01.

Their older son was away for the summer doing an internship or some such thing that people do after their sophmore year at Harvard. He was the member of the family I was closest to, since he was just a year older than me and friends with my brother Ben. I also pretty much idolized him because he was everything I wasn't in high school. If Zach Morris was real and half Korean, then he would be Johann Schneider. Which I suppose made me Screech.

But as I said, Johann wasn't home this summer, which meant I spent the majority of my non-working hours playing video games with his little brother Justin who was still in junior high and already well on his way to being cooler than I could ever hope to be. He's at Notre Dame now on a track scholarship. I ran a half marathon this year and was beaten by my friend Bryan who was wearing nothing but longjohns.

The rest of my time was spent becoming acquainted with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I previously thought was lame and later discovered was one of the best written shows in history, and avoiding Shiloh, Justin's older sister who was killing time before going off to surf camp in California. Shiloh was like something out of a Beverly Cleary novel in terms of annoying bratty sister-ishness. She had a pet turtle and a pet bird and her favorite band was Blink-182, and she could have taught a clinic on classic middle child attention seeking behavior.

And of course I completely fell for her. I remember the exact moment it happened. My brother Ben proposed to his girlfriend that summer, and it was during this time period that the computer game The Sims was at the height of its popularity. This made for a perfect excuse for me to get hooked on Justin's copy of the game; here was an opportunity to simulate my brother's potential married life. It was during one of these sessions of turning my future sister-in-law into a professional cat-burglar that Shiloh bounded down the stairs and I realized deep down to my core that I would be married to her someday.

It would be a lie to say that the scene is perfectly clear in my mind. I can't say that she was wearing a t-shirt of a rock band I never heard of or that I said something witty and she laughed. All I can remember is that she came down the stairs and her dark hair whipped around because she turned the corner so quickly and she changed my life forever.

That was seven years ago. It took me three and a half of those years to get out of college, one year to save up to get to New York, two years to decide that I wasn't supposed to be there, and one year back in Texas to save up for LA. Shiloh went to USC, got a boyfriend who could've married her if he hadn't been too scared to ask, broke up with him before going on a yearlong worldwide mission trip, and picked up a new boyfriend along the way. He lives in San Diego and she is moving there to be closer to him.

I know all this because I've kept up with her, off and on, ever since that summer. We even met up a few times since then; once when I went to LA for work and another time when she lived in NYC for a summer. Every time we talk she makes jokes about how we will get married someday, never meaning it and never noticing that she is shooting flaming arrows at my heart.

She invited me to come visit her in Atlanta. She's been living with her parents in that same house ever since she got back from her trip three months ago, and I think she only invited me out of boredom. Still, I'm going. With no expectations save a grain of hope that she will see me taking a sharp turn on that basement landing and feel for just one second what I felt seven years ago when she stepped into the deepest part of my soul just by walking into the room, I'm jumping in my car and driving eight hundred miles to have my heart broken at Christmastime. I'm bringing her a present, too. A book by Donald Miller. It can keep her company on the long drive to San Diego.

Spinning Copper into Gold

I was thinking this morning about the story of Jesus in the Temple, watching the people put their offerings in the trumpet shaped receptacles, pointing out the rich showoffs and the poor widow who gave everything she had.

I used to imagine this story with Jesus camped out in the courtyard of the Temple, maybe hiding behind a palm frond, just waiting for a good object lesson to come along that he could spring on his disciples. Kind of like a show on the Discovery Channel. "Today," Jesus would say to the camera,"we're on the lookout for sincere generosity. Ooh, look at that one right there. Beautiful robes, quite the entourage, and ooh, see that big bag of coins! What a guy...oh, and he just tripped over a leper. Kept right on walking."

But that picture doesn't give Jesus enough credit for being supremely aware of his surroundings. In general, we who follow Jesus, and even those who are passably aware of his existence, tend to focus on his omniscience and ignore the fact that Jesus could be surprised just like any other human being. I'm not saying you could or could not walk up behind him and yell "Boo!" That kind of discussion is on par with the Major League argument on whether Jesus could or could not hit a curve ball, which he probably couldn't, considering how few Jewish ballplayers there are today.

My point is that Jesus was adept at incorporating the events going on around him to make a point about heaven, justice, or how life works best. As the widow is walking up to the offering place, Jesus is just wrapping up a tirade against the Pharisees and teachers of the law for being hypocrites and getting a kick out of burning down widow's houses. And right after that, clink-clink, the widow drops her last two pennies into the bucket.

We tend to think of Jesus as a cool customer, always in control, maybe even with an "I knew that was going to happen" smirk that a lifetime of being right would grow on a persons face. But what I love about the humanity of Jesus is the depth of his emotion.

I'm extrapolating big-time here, but I imagine if Jesus were living this story today, rather than leading with "I tell you the truth" he would use the speech of today's audience, with the proper emotional reaction: "SERIOUSLY! Are you kidding me? Did you just SEE that noise? OM Me, tell me that that did not just happen!"

And then he'd explain about giving out of our poverty and even if we aren't broke we should give in secret so that the focus isn't on how awesome we are and how we're wearing Tom's Shoes because we care about Africa. Because Jesus' next question would be to ask us to point Zimbabwe out on a map.

F to the Risco

I'm not looking at it like I'm trapped here anymore, which is good. Rather, it's like one of those riddles about being locked in a room with a dead man, a blog of ice, a squeegie, toxic gas and a copy of Good to Great. It's a problem to solve, and there is a way to do it, the realization is just lagging is all.

My friends and I went to Main Event Entertainment on Sunday, a combination bowling alley, pool hall, arcade, laser tag, ropes course and most importantly, bar, for the venue's soft opening. To get in, all I had to do was assume the identity of high school student Jesse Butera, and pretend I had been on a scavenger hunt with my senior class of '09. Thank God I shaved that day and they didn't ask for ID. I never thought to ask what became of the real Jesse Butera, or how my friend Andrew came into possession of his ticket.

I bowled two games with a fairy tail theme playing on the scoreboard, a spare conjured up a wizard who slashed his wand across the screen. Strikes were rare enough that I do not remember what came up in that instance. Maybe an ogre. Everything was free due to the soft open, so we ordered from the set menu of chicken tenders and sandwiches and tucked in to a meal reminiscent of my actual high school days, right down to the honey mustard dipping sauce, which is to say I'm glad it was free.

Cut-throat at the pool tables came next, where I excelled in mediocrity two games in a row. I took out my frustrations on electronic buffalo in the arcade before mistakenly attempting to shoot bears with a bow and arrow. Rambo the video game gave me insight into the lonely misunderstood veteran as I lived out scenes from Firts Blood. Neither of these games prepared me for laser tag, where I was shot from point blank range from by a fifteen year old girl.

I finished the evening with my first loss at air hockey in recent memory, followed by a short stint shooting terrorists in Time Crisis 4.

The whole four hours I was there, I'm pretty sure I had fun, but honestly, I can't say how.

I've got to get out of here.

Thank God for W!

Thank God for W!

Because how else is Obama possible? Eight years ago was when McCain should've been elected president; he wasn't, and GW Bush claimed it was God's will that he be President. I have to say I was skeptical at the time, but as a Christian independent who leans right, I was willing to let him have the benefit of the doubt. And boy, was I patient. I won't give you a history lesson, because odds are if you're reading this, you're well aware of how the country has been doing the past eight years. Even my conservative brethren would be hard pressed to give a passing grade the Republican White House.

But wouldn't you know, Bush was dead on, one hundred percent correct! God put him in office for a very specific purpose: to make Barack Obama a viable candidate for president. If McCain had won the nomination in 2000, and subsequently the presidency, I think we'd have done alright. We certainly wouldn't have gone into Iraq so cavalierly, the war in Afghanistan would be better run, and we wouldn't have increased spending by the trillions and leaving it to future generations to foot the bill. We'd be alright.

But that's all. A little growth, spending down, some safe picks for Supreme Court Justice, Roe v. Wade would still be around, because it isn't going anywhere, no matter who's in office no matter what you say, and we'd be just as disinterested and complacent and dead inside as any nation that does extremely well and then coasts on its past successes and gets fat and decadent until they are too weak to fight off the Vandals and Visigoths sweeping in from the east with torches and facepaint.

Instead, we were forced to examine our path with clear eyes. We re-elected Bush because there was really no other option. John Kerry was by no stretch of the imagination up to the task of cleaning up this mess. We still had illusions, brush to be burned so that a raging fire of devastation didn't get out of control and consume our country. Bush, whether by accident or design, was that fireman that clears the path to create the fire-break. Kerry would've just been a bucket of water.

Bush exposed us to ourselves, showed us the painting of America we'd been hiding in the attic that aged and decayed while we stayed bright and shiny Dorians. And we didn't like it one bit.
Would we have been ready for Barack Obama without that facade being ripped away? Would we have heard his call to hope above the dull hum of contentment brought on by a mildly successful decade of average prosperity? Would we muster up the energy to even care?
I don't think we would. I honestly don't. We'd be right back where we started. But now, by the grace of God, we have the chance to reverse history. The idealism of the Kennedy administration gave way to Johnson and Nixon and led to an unjust and unpopular war. Now our unjust war and unpopular president have given way to a new, robust idealism, kin to Camelot with an eye on the future.

I disagree with Obama on most of his platforms. But I voted for him because he is what a president should be- a leader. Disagree with him. Passionately. I predict just as many conservatives will be inspired to public service as liberals. I predict that more people than ever before will be inspired to take action needed to back up their ideals, whether it's volunteering for underpriviledged youths or counseling pregnant teenagers and compassionately sharing alternatives to abortion. These issues are non-partisan. The debate has to change now.

I believe with my whole heart that God takes what is broken and makes it new. And sometimes a sickness must be made worse before it can be treated. Our fever has broken, the healing can now begin.