Month: November 2018

  • Adjusting

    Today was my first day of a little depression. With the huge Camp Fire burning to the north of us, we have been covered in smoke, so we can’t go outside as the air is unbreathable. The wife goes to work, the kid goes to school, and I am at home looking for a job, and trying to write.

    It was fun for the first few days.

    Today, clearly, I hit a wall.

    I felt unmotivated, and couldn’t get going on anything. I mean, I got groceries for the family, but then I couldn’t do anything else.

    I watched the news, and just spent the day thinking about everything that could be happening to me in New York. Social media doesn’t help, because I can see what all of my friends are doing in NYC. And that kicks in the “fear of missing out.”

    But they are in there, and I am here, and 3,000 miles separates us.

    Another part of this is that I was talking to an old college friend last night, and he was asking me about how I was doing, and why I moved to California. It wasn’t in an accusatory way, more along the lines of “help me understand your decision so I can support you.”

    Why did I move?

    Well… I wanted a better life for my kid. I wanted to go on an adventure and try something new. I wanted to focus on writing. But as I was talking to my friend, I found myself saying something that I hadn’t expressed before, which was I was becoming the type of person who couldn’t celebrate other’s successes without trying to pull them down. The theatre world isn’t very nice, and I was beginning to take part in the bitter middle-aged actor stereotype. And to be that person made me a crappy father and a shitty husband. Maybe that was New York’s fault, but it was really my fault.

    I needed to change things.

    I needed to reinvent myself.

    Today was a day that I started to doubt that decision.

    Not that I am changing my mind.

  • Traveling Observations

    It took us seven days to drive from New York to California. We pretty much stayed on the interstates, except for a pace in Texas and Arizona. Most of the travel writing I have read has always attested to the glory of seeing America on the two-lane highways.

    I guess that could be true.

    I did spend a time in my early twenties travelling the back roads of East Texas, to visit friends at the small universities they were attending. I would call that quaint travelling, and small towns are nice, but some of them were happy to see you leave.

    Being on the big interstates of the country, you do get to see how these highways were cut into the land. In a few cases, mountains that were cut in two, and valleys that were filled in. It was like looking at the result that civil engineering can have on the land.

    The other observation that I made was the number of abandoned barns there are in the country. From western New Jersey to the Big Valley in California; there was always a rain and sun grayed wooden barn that wasn’t too far from the side of the highway that had its roof coming in, or barn doors off. I guess these barns were the last monument of the family farm, or that’s what I liked to tell myself.

  • Parenting Challenges

    Today, with the observance of Veteran’s Day, the kid’s school is closed. The wife, on the other hand, had to go to work. That leaves me with the kid.

    Back in New York, those were good days to spend together. Since it would be a “treat” that Dad would be home during the week, we’d watch a little extra TV, but then get ready and walk three blocks over to the park. We’d be there for an hour or more, and then head back for lunch. After eating, it would be nap time, and sometimes I would also take a nap on the couch watching Sports Center. When we got up, story and drawing time. Maybe one more TV show, and then news and getting ready for Mom to come home and dinner.

    Ah… but we are in California now. We need a car to go to the nearest park, but the wife has it today to go to work. There are wild fires that are blowing smoke in our direction, and the air quality is so bad that we can’t go outside to play. This past weekend, the last of our things arrived, so there are boxes all over the apartment. We will be making a game of putting things away and arranging the furniture. I set the kid’s easel up in the living room so we can all draw together.

    We are in transition, and this is a big change for all of us, sometimes to does feel overwhelming.  I had a colleague at the last job I had who shared an article with me when we were in the processes of moving offices. The article was about how people hate change/transition and will react negatively to things they normally would agree with. I lost the article, but I have thought about it often over this past month with everything that has happened to us. It might be awhile before we begin to feel normal again.

  • Where Did the Day Go

    I do get distracted a little too easily. I have been working on writing today, I think out of six hours, I have only written for about one of those.

    One hour was for lunch.

    I did read a review on a book of Sylvia Plath’s letters, that took an hour.

    So… I can account for three hours.

    That would mean I have procrastinated for three hours.

    I can admit that I got sucked down a rabbit hole of looking up stuff on the Dragonlance and D&D stuff earlier. But in my defense, I hadn’t thought about all of that for a very longtime. In junior high and early high school, I read all of those novels and was really into all of it.

    I have been reading the news all day about awful stuff that I know everyone is aware of.

    Since moving to California, I have been looking for a job, and it hasn’t gone the way I thought it would, as I still don’t have one. My thought was that I would be splitting my days job hunting and writing. The writing past hasn’t taken off as fast as I thought it would.

    What I want to believe is that I need time to relax after the month I have had, but that makes me feel guilty. Two people are depending on me to find a job, and that is what has taken over my thinking. “MUST FIND A JOB!”

  • Morning in America

    Woke up this morning to the news that there was another mass shooting.

    Remember when the big news was the firing of Jeff Sessions?

    And remember when the big news before that was Trump’s weird confrontational press conference?

    And Remember when before that the big news was the mid-term elections?

    I find living in this country now is like having the attention span of a dog looking for a squirrel while being bi polar at the same time.

    I am starting to give up on the idea that we can return to a time when things were “normal.” I think it is past and this is the new normal that we live in.

    I always wanted to be the person that looked to the future, as that will be the better place to work for. Now, I am very nervous about what the future will hold. I keep thinking that we will reach a breaking point, when people will have enough of mass shootings, and a president who flouts the rule of law, or a political party that is becoming openly racist.

    But… no…

    I still can’t get over people who would vote for Ted Cruz. I mean, no one likes Ted Cruz, but he got re-elected… And no one likes him.

    I keep reading and watching the news, reading up on my history and political philosophy, thinking that there will be some new insight that will come to me, but I keep feeling despair. And the House flipped, bringing at least some over sight, but that hasn’t made me feel any better.

    It’s the gun violence. It’s like it just will not subside in this country, and after each shooting, the feeling grows that it is a ticking time bomb that will one day explode on each of us. And we will wonder how it got this bad, and didn’t we do anything before.