Month: October 2018

  • I Just Got Paid

    Today, I got paid for writing. It was only five dollars, but this is the first time that I received any money for something I wrote. I have no idea if the piece will ever see the light of day. Maybe, maybe not. This also was the first time that someone was like, “I will pay you at least something for your writing,” and not “the exposure will help your career.”

    Living and working in the arts is awful, but I can’t leave it, and I really don’t want to do anything else. So… I’m stuck.

    So much of my career in the arts, and I will group all of it together; theatre, writing, painting, arts management even, has been predicated by someone asking me to work for free. Until I moved to New York, most of the payment I received had come in the form of beer. It took me about two years in New York before I earned my first check from performing.

    I know that I am not the first person to write about this, but the arts and capitalism really don’t mix. Payment is slanted to the very few that are on the top, while the majority fight for… well… five dollars. I am also not going to claim that I know a solution to this problem, other than capitalism doesn’t solve all problems. People will continue to ask others to work for free in exchange for hope.

    The truly tragic thing about earning five dollars today is that I can’t find a beer in Manhattan for that price.

  • Thoughts All Over the Place

    There was a boy in my neighborhood that all the kids knew about because he played with dolls. We had to be about seven or eight years old at the time. It was seemed like such a sin, and such an egregious act for a boy to not want to play with boy things. I remember even being confused why someone would want to do that. Like, why would you choose to play with those things, when there are so many great boy toys out there. It never dawned on me that this is what he liked doing. That this boy had to be doing it as some sort of act. It couldn’t be who he really was. When that boy came around, no one said anything to him, or brought it up. It stayed a known secret. At least that’s what I remember.

    What I now find odd about this situation is that in kindergarten, I remember everyone wanted to play house and be near the kitchen play set. Well, just about everyone. There were some outlier boys and girls that wanted nothing to do with it. But the majority of us, we all wanted to play in that kitchen. I would have to say that in the early 80’s, boys playing at making dinner wasn’t the most masculine act, but somehow that was deemed acceptable. I am sure it has to do with both boys and girls playing together and acting out what it is like to be an adult.

    My daughter wanted a play kitchen very badly for Christmas. She was almost three when we go it for her, and she took to it immediately. There was some hesitation in me when it came to getting it for her, as I didn’t want to cast gender roles on her. Such as, girls don’t have to play in the kitchen. They can play with other things. Does she want a toy work bench? Not really. She wanted a kitchen.

    It was the same way with play costumes around the apartment. She wanted to have a Darth Vader costume, lightsaber included. (Nerd Dad Me was very excited by this development.) The next she asked for a Princess Leia costume, which I was also very cool with. Then she wanted a Cinderella dress so she could look pretty and dance with the Prince. So, from Darth Vader to Cinderella?

    These are the thoughts that go through my head, but I also know that as she is only three and a half, we are way too early to say that any of this play is determining anything about her personality or what direction she will go in life.

    But everything has to mean something, right?

    I think I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was 8, and then I think I wanted to be a writer. Then I wanted to be a performer, and then a musician, and then I think I just wanted to be left alone (That was high school), and then I think I still never really got it figured out that “THIS” is the thing that I want to do. I keep grasping at things, and trying things out. I hope my daughter doesn’t have this problem, but as she is my kid, she will go through the same thing. Just trying to put pieces together and see what is created.

  • Buying a House (A Bit of a Ramble)

    As I feel we all should do, but I have started in earnest, to question all of the assumptions that I was given growing up, and what I think I need to accomplish as an American adult. Full disclosure, I am a college educated white male who has unquestionably benefited from white privilege in America. For today’s episode, I would like to look into the idea that I need to buy a home in the suburbs.

    That to me seems to the highest expression of married white male success. I large house in the subdivision of the suburb of a major city where crime is low, schools are good, and everything seems scrubbed clean. We can talk about the banality of the suburbs, but I feel that John Cheever is the mast of it, and it is best left to him. What I see is the con game of the huge house.

    The larger the house, the more stuff you have to out in it. Which to keep the economy going, as the top 10% of earners are the only one’s benefiting from this economic growth, then they have to make up for the purchasing that the bottom 90% can’t afford. Bigger houses, more cars, more rooms, more entertainment.

    And isn’t this basic Adam Smith Economics 101; that you can either make an inexpensive product that you sell to the masses, or you make an expensive product and sell it to a few people. I feel like we are in the expensive few economies.

    Which gets me backs to the idea of buying a home. I feel like new homes are too big and take up too much space. There is nothing small with space. I have to buy big. Then the other side of it is why am I buying a house? It won’t get passed down to my kid. I have seen what my parents, and now some of my friends are doing with homes the inherit; they sell them. No one is passing homes down to their kids. It’s just an investment. Doesn’t it make more sense for me to $2500 a month into an index fund for the next 30 years? Isn’t that a bigger retune on that investment?

    But I have been told, and am still continued to be told that I have to get a house. Who does that benefit?

  • Walking New York

    I have been taking walks in the City again. I just seem to be finding myself doing it. Such as, I get done having a drink with a friend, and instead of heading to the subway and going home, I just decide to walk to the next stop. Or walk around the stop and see the neighborhood. Sunday I walked down Columbus Ave, down in the 80’s, just to look at the place.

    I have gotten into a rut in this City. I only exist in the neighborhood I live in, the one I work in, and that’s about it. With this large city around me, I only see Harlem and the Financial District. It’s a forty-minute subway ride between them in the morning, and it is like living in two different worlds.

    From the bottom of the island, I walked up Broadway, which at that point is heading up hill. I passed all the tourists at the Charging Bull, and made my way to City Hall. Technically, I think I entered into the boarder of Tribeca, and then, the boarder of Chinatown. SOHO popped up, and then I had to call it as I entered into the Village. I think I walked for little over an hour. I watched the people on the streets ebb and flow. I thought about how Broadway used to be a path the Lenape used. I tried not to think about all of the craziness that is going on in the world right now.

    I tried to clear my head, and look at the people who all live here. That we try to exist in the same place, to make it work here. Millions of people have walked the same route I did, in times that were way more dangerous than now. I want to believe that we are moving the ball forward, making things better. I wonder if there is a place for me, still. It is the question that seems to have been dogging me since I was eight years old. Do I belong? Am I supposed to be here?