Gene Kelly was Right All Along

Every once in a while in an actor's life, (say, every 6 months or so) you develop a weird stuffed-up feeling. It's uncomfortable. It sneaks up on you. It makes you want to use a blow-up butt pillow. The problem, my friends, is creative constipation.

Creative Constipation occurs in the animal world because actors are artists, and to be actors we have to do all kinds of crap just to attempt to get work, things that have nothing at all to do with the actual physical experience of acting. Just like the old pros predicted, once you get out of school...you actually don't get to act THAT much. Now, because actors are artists, there rises a level of non-acting bile in the body, creeping up over time as you go through days and weeks and months of juggling rent jobs and paperwork and everyday crap without the balancing effect of a creative outlet. Oh sure, you can exercise all day long, and go see movies, and watch great tv shows on HBO, and say things like, "I just LOVE Dostoeyevsky," but there's nothing quite like that release of built-up real world sludge, like the expenditure of that glorious creative soup welling up behind your eyeballs.

In the winter of 2008, I found myself writhing with creative blockage, so I started blogging. Lo and behold, I was released, more joyful, eager to awake and write in the mornings. Then, I began to blog more. People were reading it! Soon, I began to get actual jobs blogging, ("People want to pay ME to WRITE?! My life is gloooorious!") and then more jobs, and then bad jobs, and then non-paying awful jobs, and then I became bitter and jealous as I started to receive rejections, and then I stopped. I stopped because the writing had become like the acting: bad work to find good work. Unjoyful. Bad. I found myself getting pissed off that everybody had a blog, and they were so prolific, and funny, and orginal, their writing was just as good, if not much, much better than my own. ("Does that mean I'm not...*sniff*...special?") The appropriate response seemed to be: STOP WRITING.

That's never the answer, by the way. Just stopping. It's never right. Unless we're talking about meth, and, after watching an episode of Law & Order: SVU last night, I have to say...you should really stop taking meth if you're on it. That shit is crazy.

But here I am, again, feeling my creative juices have solidified into that nasty form hot fat takes when it cools into jello-lard. I wrote because it made me happy, and I wrote a lot because it worked the same muscles I used on-camera, or onstage. (It's all tied to the same organs, you see?) And I never did it for anyone but me until I started thinking, as I do all day every day, "Maybe I can make money off this skill!"

I'm still not sure what this blog is about. My career? My goals? My wholly original and ceaselessly interesting thoughts on everything me-related in this world? Yeesh. I sort of want to scrap the whole darn thing and start over...but then, it would only be the same as before, and it would only be paving a giant exit-less rotary for myself. And what this little chickie needs more than anything is a release, and not a loop.

In any case, I'll be back tomorrow...

This is Not a Real Place (Yet)

So, boys and girls. Welcome to Calabasas.

I'm house and dogsitting here in North LA (is it north? Is it even technically LA?) for my boyfriend's cousins while they vacation in Hawaii, but this is no ordinary house. No, no, people, this house, and its neighboring mansions are not houses at all, but temples of pleasure.

This house is downright palatial. Britney Spears is moving in across the street. I can see in the windows of her South Wing. (Again, guessing with the directions.) I take my mornings bathing beneath waterfalls and slipping down the waterslide into the tiled blue pool. I retreat to alcoves of pillows to relax in sweet air-conditioned bliss. My shower has a glass wall, and a stone bench, in case I tire of standing. If, heaven be shamed, I get bored...I just stop wherever I am, pick up the nearest remote and watch one of the many flat-screen televisions featuring hundreds of channels.

This is not my life.

The house I grew up in had four bedrooms, a kitchen, and a 1/2 acre of dirt to play in. We had one refrigerator, and until I was old enough to date, you had to get up to change the channel. You took your hand and had to twist a knob on the TV. The effort. We didn't even have stairs. None. We lived in a "ranch house." Made for easy escape if your domicile burns to the ground. This Calabasas house is unusual in the neighborhood because it doesn't have an elevator.

Again, not my life.

Not to say this can't be my life, or that I cannot aspire to owning enough money to warrant desiring and actually affording a home like this one. But being in this line of work, being an actor, really forces me to humble myself to accept I probably will never actually live in this house. I probably will be able to afford cheap rents in skeezy-ish neighborhoods before they're artsy cool, and I'll probably prey on innocent renters on Craigslist for an apartment here in LA when I move in October. I look forward to years more of sharing not just common rooms, but bedrooms with other starvin' artists, sharing not only Netflix rentals, but Ramen noodle bowls as well, highlighting in the newspaper not only job opportunities but obituaries too, to remind myself to check out their sidewalks later to score some dead people's free furniture.

Sigh. The life of an actor. My life.

It's okay though. I don't need to live here. I need to work hard. I want to work hard. I want to move across this honking big country because I want to work. If I could figure out something else to do that would allow me to buy a house at all, I would do that! But I can't. In my lowest times, I've sobbed into my checkbook, "Why can't I just be happy as a bank teller?!" Plenty of banks, plenty of jobs. I look great in blue and red. (Those are the colors of my bank, Commerce. They always seem so happy.) Alas, I'm no teller. Unless you count being a storyteller, haha! Oh God, the smell of maid-cleaned appliances is getting to me. I'm serious. There's a maid lurking behind me right now, 409 in hand.

So, Los Angeles. I don't know what I'm doing yet. I'm enjoying the sunshine today, and hoping in October, when I'm here for reals, acting jobs will abound and money will flow, Commerce Bank will love me, and I'll get the work I want to give me the money I deserve so I can live in a palace like this. With an elevator.