Don't Fuck With Muffins

I really hate how muffins have become the new cupcake. I like muffins. Scratch that, I LOVE muffins. But a muffin is no cupcake. Not a cupcake, I say! A muffin should be a delightful bread substitute, often with a delicious swirl of carrots or zucchini, perhaps banana. None of this chocolate chip, frosted fudge whirl. That's dessert shit!

I hate other things. I hate waiting for my free online episodes of Mad Men to buffer. I hate buffering! I hate hangovers. I hate fake girls. I hate salmon. I hate how bad Heroes has gotten.

But I really, really hate the muffin thing! When did this happen? Have they always been a sugary, cuppy cake? At Thanksgiving, I wanted to make carroty wonderful muffins, and my friend said, surprised at my choice for her dinner table, "Muffins? Really?" Yes. Really! REALLY!

You may think I'm ridiculous, but I'm sad at the state this world is in. Muffins are small, muffins are tasty, muffins are without a liner, and muffins are nutritious, depending what you put in them. MUFFINS!

On Coming Home for Christmas

I lapse into old habits.

I eat frozen cookies out of the basement freezer while watching old movies late at night. I snap at my mother. I often leave the discussion at the dining room table to sit alone in my room, silent.

My mother hugs me too much, and tells me adamantly she won't share me with anyone. She doesn't want me to go to New York. She wants to snuggle me until I fuse to her breastplate.

My grandfather laughs at my bad jokes about Franz Ferdinand, and then shakes his head when I talk about books he doesn't like or movies he didn't understand.

The rain sleets across the green lawns like hissing spit. It's almost frozen, but not quite. Once, when I was seven, I sat in front of the tv on a Sunday night, and asked my father what it took for snow to fall. He told me that it had to be 32 degrees, and the clouds must be full of precipitation. I was disappointed. I had wanted him to tell me that he could make the snow fall, if I wanted. I did.

Another time the sky was purple, it was nighttime, and we went outside and made mazes in the frosty street without speaking, and my sister wore her boyfriend's oversized green coat, and my brother was quiet, and I was utterly fulfilled with my life.

The house is warm, because there's a new heater. And a new tv. And a new boat is coming too. Santa is no longer a person, he's actually the internet.

We eat too much, and drink wine at every meal. My grandfather drinks margaritas afterwards, and it knocks him out until 2 am, when I hear him sighing in his sleep, and waking up to pace his room.

Christmas is about these five people. But I'm strung between worlds. I have Pennsylvania health insurance and Pennsylvania plates, but I live far away now. I ran away from them, I think. I didn't mean to. They picked the wrong place to live, twenty-one years ago. It's not my fault.

My brother-in-law hugs me and says, "You really haven't been away that long, you know." So why does it seem like years? I've changed. Can't you see it? No one comments. Maybe I haven't changed that much, or not at all.

It's Christmas, and every year since I was twelve I lit one particular candle on Christmas Eve so I could talk to God on the holiest of holy days: the Present Day. (I didn't mean it that way.) I wanted to believe in Jesus Christ, and one time I even wrote him a note on the computer so Santa could give it to him, and my parents wrote me a note back. My parents the Agnostics played Jesus for me. If that's not the spirit of Christmas, I don't know what is.

This year, I don't have much to give. Sure, it's because I'm poor, but also because I feel empty. I feel like I gave so much away this year, I tried to give myself away too, but I stuck.

Once, my brother and sister and I walked to the church down the street because it was snowing, and we threw some snowballs, and then we lay down in the road, and listened to the snow falling on our faces. It sounded like sugar sifting, or hair freshly cut sweeping past your ears. My sister whispered, "Listen. Isn't that beautiful?"

I must have changed. I think I did.

Persimmon

When I first moved to New York, I trained with a girl from Manhattan Beach, California. Like the island itself, and like the girl who came from there, Manhattan Beach seemed highly exotic to me. I knew, from what she had told me, it was near Los Angeles (Land of Beautiful People) and that is was, indeed, a beach. I daydreamed of white sands and houses filled with overflowing ferns and sundresses year round. I liked the idea of being this girl. She was someone I knew, but not well, and so, of course, it seemed like her life could only ever have been perfect. She was kind, and beautiful. She had long, golden-brown hair, and she wore white boots with mint green tights and a matching coat. She laughed, and men turned. And she ate persimmons.

I'd never seen a persimmon before I watched her eat one. Was it a tomato? Was it a sort of apple? Where do they come from?

I asked her what it tasted like. "Brown sugar," she said.

Years have turned since then. I've moved away from Manhattan, to Los Angeles, closer to the beach, though not into a house right up on the waves. I do wear sundresses year round, even though it is December. I talk to my friend once in a long while. And, today, I bought a persimmon. I think it must be fitting. I want my life to be brown sugar, packed, dense, sweet on my tongue.

I put the persimmon in the refrigerator. It seems very cold. It's a perfect orange-red, with four flat leaves greening its peak. Its the color of tomato soup, when you mix it with cheese, or creme.

Wow. The first bite tastes like nothing. What a letdown.

I won't be stopped. I close my eyes. Still, the second bite tastes like nothing. It's a very mushy fruit inside.

The third bite. Ah, there's a little sweetness. Not much. I am biting more quickly now. Maybe it's a quantity thing? There's a little gravel taste, mixed in with the softness. The stiff leaves are thick, and they're getting in the way. How do you eat this thing?

It's almost gelatinous on the inside. I can taste more of the sweetness, but its not much. This is no peach, no plum at all. This persimmon is an odd duck indeed, not entirely tasteless, but not flaunting itself either. This persimmon holds secrets.

The inside is not one solid color, its a portrait of flushing reds. There are caverns of deep juiciness, and smooth strings of vertical orange. Still, it's no mango. The juice spreads across my mouth. This is no pear, either. No, this is a persimmon, and I couldn't cut it into slices if I wanted to, I couldn't divide it like a clementine easily parts with its sections, I couldn't do anything with this persimmon it didn't want to do.

Hm. I guess that's the end. A little bit of a disappointment. But. I don't feel hungry. I can taste the heavy creme of sweet in my mouth. The leaved core sits a little slumped, used.

I am a Manhattan Beach girl now, I guess. I live in sunshine, I wear dresses that swing, and I eat persimmons. I don't do anything I don't want to do. I laugh, and I don't care who turns. I am exotic.

A Little Homesick, A Little Regular Sick

My cold is still hanging on like a persistant itchy booger, and it's making me even less of a productive unemployed actor than ever before. Not that I'm not being productive, because I actually am, but...I just wish I was getting paid for my productivity.

One of the weirdest things about LA is, of course, the weather. It's beautiful. All the time. The reason it's so weird is that because every day is sort of the same, and it hasn't really gotten that much colder since I've gotten here, there is a strange sort of time lapse. What month is it? What day is it? Who am I? It's the WALL-E effect: if every day is the same, you are apt to lapse into a sort of coma in paradise. You eat, you doze, you can't quite look at yourself objectively. You watch a lot of tv. (Although, to be fair, ALL of my tv watching is done on Hulu, so at least I've gotten myself hooked on internet rather than cable.)

I'm trying to find more blogging jobs, because it makes me royally happy. Could you imagine that? A job that pays you AND you love it? I can't do what I've done, and wake up every day to spend 9 hours in Hell, blackmail my soul for a paycheck. I have a varied skill set, but it can be a curse: sure, you want me to what? Okaaaay. Fuck that shit! I don't want to be unhappy anymore. I want to look for joy in everything I can, and I need a job, and I need a job that makes me happy. It's out there somewhere...

The only problem with blogging is that you can't be completely open. What you write will love on in cyberspace, festering in 1's and 0's, and do you really want everything you think to be open for all the world to read forever and ever? Which is why I need the acting. It can be terrifying to do, but sometimes, you get to play a character where you can open up all your dirty little sweaty pores to the world and unleash yourself. I need so much.

I went to this networking event at AFTRA last night with an actor/coach named Scott Mosenson, and he quoted "Franny and Zooey." Franny's boyfriend says, after she says maybe she'll be an actress, "Acting is the business of wanting." It is. I think about that a lot. Sure, it's wanting, wanting, wanting parts, money, agents, casting directors, but it's also about characters' wants and objectives, stories full of wanting passions and hidden needs. It's all a want. How can I turn that into a positive thing? How can I, as Scott says, reframe for the positive?

I miss you guys. I know that there are probably only three people reading this, and it might not be til January til you do, but I miss you. (Brian also might be reading this. What up, Bri.) I wish my heart wasn't always so torn up across wide spaces, but it is, and probably will be for the rest of my life. Reframe: I love you. How lucky to be me.

ROAD TRIP 08: WEDNESDAY

The final day of our cross-country journey. Josh and I will finally pull over at my bff Beth’s apartment in Irvine around dinner, and I can’t wait to see her new home in her new town. The last time we saw each other was Labor Day, right before Beth moved to grad school. It seems like no time at all since I last hugged her and said, “See you on the west coast! See you when our lives are completely different!” And now…they are.

We spent the last two days at the Grand Canyon, an odd mix of natural grandeur, old white Americans, foreign tourists with large cameras and many children, bitter and bored exchange students working the cashiers, and a Disneyified version of camping in the wilderness. Bees swarmed around our car, and the squirrels scurried up to our toes hoping for junk trail mix handouts.

We spent yesterday hiking halfway down the canyon on a red dust trail. We made friends along the way from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and spent the return trip heaving and pulling ourselves up like a couple of old smokers. After dinner at the canteen, we crowded onto the lowest observation spot at Mather Point to listen to a Star Talk. You know you can see the Milky Way from the Grand Canyon? They have laws about the light and sound emittance from the park, so even their emergency helicopters are virtually silent. It was an incredible way to end our stay, craning our necks up above, thinking about how little our lives our, and short. Josh questioned the futility of our existence, while I couldn’t stop thinking about how I must remind myself, whether I can see the night sky or not, it is no way worth it to spend my life afraid and worrying. Par example, I spent the first hour of the day worrying about dying on the hike yesterday morning. (Josh is part of the most dangerous demographic who visit the park: 18-30 year old males.) Lo and behold, we survived.

We crossed the Colorado River into California a few hours ago, and shrieked with glee when we saw the “Welcome to California!” sign. I was driving, and Josh put on the ipod Gene Kelly singing, “Singing in the Rain.” That’s when I started crying. I never thought I’d move to the west coast. I never thought I’d want to live near palm trees and Baywatch and the desert. But I watched Gene Kelly, literally, thousands of times. He made me want to be an actor, in the cheesiest of ways. And now, here I am, in my car, with my love, in California. Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at apartments.

I have to remember the Milky Way.

ROAD TRIP 08: MONDAY

Day Four and we’re driving through New Mexico on our way to the Grand Canyon. At this point, I think we both loathe the car a little bit. My sweet little Toyota Matrix is a champ, even though I’m paranoid her tires are going flat, or her engine is making mouse-squeaks, or her alignment is fucked. She’s fine, despite a constant smattering of bug guts on her white exterior. We, however, are starting to go crazy.

I think it really took hold in Texas. Ugh, Texas. The panhandle, at least, sucks. It was both Josh and my first time there, and it was just flat, flat, and more flat. The only good things about Texas: the Free 72 oz. Steak repeatedly and boldly advertised (but only if you eat it in a hour) and the tall, alien windmills spread pell-mell across the horizon. They tried really hard to redeem the landscape.

And then we entered New Mexico, and almost immediately, I felt better. Broad mountains dotted with low-lying trees swept across the sky. Hills dipped the road. Bushes speckled the dusty fields that stretched forever out of sight. We stopped at a gas station in a three building town called Newkirk, where the pumps seem to have been installed in the early 60’s, and a train sped past us for several minutes. An abandoned church, forgotten by everyone (God too?), stood awkwardly beside the road, its front door boarded up and a foot-wide crack bisecting the adobe walls. I was utterly sold on the state when we got to Santa Fe. All the houses are adobe, and there are lush gardens of bright, reaching flowers everywhere. At the first sign of a dreadlocked hippie artist, I felt at home. It’s a liberal, apparently well-moneyed town, and everyone was very polite and welcoming.

And now we’re off again, through these rolling swathes of land, empty and totally silent. A man came up to our window with his small girl and told a long story about his family going through Sky City, and how he lost his wallet. Poor people are everywhere in this world, not all of them homeless, but looking around my car with two ipods, a garmin nuvi, two laptops, cell phones and Bluetooth devices in our pockets, I felt a tiny bit embarrassed. I can’t tell if I’m greedy or normal, but I have an inkling I might still be that desperate kid in elementary school, pleading my mom to take me shopping, to be like the other kids and buy new things, new, newer. I want and I want, and I ask for so much, when all I really need is food, a safe place to live, water, sunshine. That’s one thing I really despise about my career: it encourages you to want and want, and never be satisfied. Good for the ambition, detrimental to the soul.

So, Josh gave this man $5 to feed his daughter, or whatever. Maybe he’s like the New Yorkers, and he just needs to drink, or maybe to gamble, or maybe he does need something to feed his little children. It almost doesn’t matter. He’s doing what all Americans do: we beg for more. For something. We prostrate ourselves at the feet of our government, do this for me, give me my fix of more and more.

We’re crossing Arizona now, and just passed Flagstaff. It’s funny to me, knowing nothing about Flagstaff, I always imagined it as a singularly unattractive town, tan and dusty and treeless, nothing but an oversized American flag in the middle of an unhappy village of very tan old people. Lo and behold, Flagstaff in reality is forested and beautiful, and my imagined counterpart is instead more of an accurate description of Albuquerque. Yuck. A low point in NM’s map.

Arizona’s flag, interestingly, looks like an 80’s t-shirt now being resold for $40 at Urban Outfitters: bright blues, reds, and oranges, exploding out of a center star. Everyone who pastes it onto their car windows are automatically cool.

I heard an NPR interview once with an American Flag representative, who said that the rules for handling flags so specifically were instated because of the worry the flag would be overused, overdisplayed. That seems to have been lost somewhere. We’ve driven through 480 miles today of empty lots of land, sometimes with nothing but a shanty and a flag in the middle of a sea of lonely shrubbery. Signs for “America’s Restaurant,” or “Patriot’s Place” dot the billboards. When there’s nothing else around you, just sky and sagebrush, maybe patriotism for your country and fervent belief in God are the only things to keep you sane, or to keep you from wallowing in an intense and justified loneliness.

Ninety percent of the other billboards today have been for Indian wares: Indian blankets, Indian pottery, Indian polished petrified wood, Indian smokes, Indian food, Indian maps, Indian merchandise of all kinds. When we pulled off at a “Scenic Spot,” which consisted of six plywood shacks, half of which were empty, the other half selling Indian merchandise, I told Josh it reminded me of Jamaica. Jamaica is a frightening place full of restless bodies, a whole country full of displaced people who didn’t ask to be where they are, the ancestors of enslaved workers from another world. The Native Americans, even more recently displaced, have turned their misplacement into the most American activity possible: capitalism. They do what actors do. They are so desperate to survive, they sell the most precious thing they have left: themselves. Their identity is for sale on wide, chipping billboards: REAL INDIANS. Some day long ago, somebody mistook them for someone else, but after persecution and all but annihilation, they turned in their identities. They market the mistake.

It’s hard to believe with all this space, it’s still not enough. Wanting, wanting.

On the Road: Saturday in Missouri!

Second day of the Road Trip! Yesterday, we spent 13 1/2 hours driving, which wouldn’t be so bad if we were driving through fun America, but we weren’t, we were driving thorugh boring, flat, fielded, America. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri. Today will be just as bad. No hilariiouis signs, like there were in South Dakota, lots of trucks. I’ve seen no Obama bumper stickers, and only two McCain. That doesn't mean anything. Josh said driving through the midwest makes him understand better why Obama won't win. I could see that too.

We just passed a billboard of a small girl playing, with the italicized command: “Pornography Destroys.” Maybe we’re transitioning into fun sign land. Oh there’s another one, it says simply, “JESUS.” Well, when you say it like that...

This trip is, clearly, special to me, because, duh, I’m moving across the country for the first time. Beyond that, we are driving across America in the final month of a cutthroat presidential election during an economic crisis.

(New sign: “Jesse James Wax Museum: LIVE video of Jesse James!” Now we’re getting somewhere!)

We listened to the presidential debate last night on the radio as we sped through black fields in the last two hours of our first day of traveling. Ignorant of what most people saw last night, we could only hear their tones, their frustrated sighs, how they carefully worded their comebacks and defenses. Here are two intelligent men, wildly ambitious and hopeful, and they resort to exploiting dead soldiers’ bracelets. It reminds me of that acting exercise where each actor has to enter the picture and physically change the stage picture in order to upstage the other person. Look at me! Look at ME! LOOK AT ME!

(“Missouri Hick B-B-Q Next Exit.”)

I think that might be half of a generalized American personality: immediate attention satisfaction. We are stereotypically loud, demanding, selfish, and persistent. The other half, which is in essence the soul of our government in 2008, is about money. This election is about money. The failure of our government is about money. Their arguments are about money. The legacy of the Bush government, if not pathetic before, will be about a loss of money, a destruction of our financial supplies. Our government, whatever size, boils down to a collection of accountants, stewards of our cash. The final and only way to grab the attention of the non-voting, uninterested American population is to collapse their economy and shut down their savings.

(“JESUS.” Is this like a Mad Libs thing? “JESUS poops!” “JESUS in bed!” “JESUS in bed with your mom!”)

This is a trip about me, but this is also a trip about America. I’ve never felt so involved with my own citizenship as I do now. We have driven across five states in one day, safely, and efficiently, and we are listening to a radio station that is playing a song called “Blood of My Freedom” whose lyrics go, “Thank God for the Red, White & Blue/Someone Died that we might be Free.” We value our independence, our freedom to buy, sell, and live how we want, but to do that we find it necessary to damn everyone else. At times, our only similarity between states is roughly the same language and the constant presence of McDonalds.

This is a trip about me, and this is a trip about America. There are local politicians’ signs hammered into the heathery fields next to I-44 W, reminding me it’s almost time to vote.

Ooooh! “Pleasure Zone.” This is getting good…