The Reluctant Receptionist

michael and his friends do something that they call the “finish game.” it’s where you make a piece of art—be it a song, a poem, a piece of writing—and the only rule is that you have to finish it that day. they critique each others’ work, and michael says that often the things that he thinks are weakest are what people actually really dig. i’m wondering if i shouldn’t do a personal “finish day” challenge with my blog. i feel like i’ve been updating it more often, only to see that it’s been a week since i’ve added anything to it. it’s not that i don’t have anything to say, it’s that i don’t have a lot that i’ve been feeling like sharing. i’ve been feeling very selfish with my feelings, trying to mull them over and digest them, learning how to once again be single in this bitch of a city. (but it’s a bitch that i can’t imagine myself leaving. when it hits me it feels like a kiss.)

i spent last weekend in DC with robin, for the first time since she started her new fancy lawyer job. it’s hard for me to imagine that my little sister is now a lawyer. it was one thing for her to be in law school—she was still in school, then, and i could imagine that she was still a baby. but now she’s taken the bar and she, as she told me last week, has “started her career.” what an odd feeling, i thought, knowing that a certain day is the start of your career. that you’ve been working toward this moment since you decided to go to law school, since you decided what kind of law you wanted to practice, and then there’s a day, august 30th or whatever, that you can point to and say, “this is the day i started professionally doing what i’m trained for.” maybe it seems so nebulous to me because i can’t point to a moment when i started singing, or because i don’t remember when i took my first “professional” audition, or because it seems, no matter how much singing i’m doing, that my “career” hasn’t started yet. what makes a singing career, really? is it getting paid to sing in church? filling your resume with roles done with friends’ companies? recitals? premieres? will i have started my career when i finally get reviewed by a big-time newspaper? or maybe this is it: maybe this is “my career” and the most it’s ever going to be.

in a way, that doesn’t seem so bad. getting to do all of these wonderful, creative things with people i like makes me luckier than most people out there, people stuck balancing books or stuffing oreo cookie boxes. it’s hard not to feel like something of a failure, though, with my sister “starting her career.” i’m nearing 30—don’t tell anyone, please—and it’s inevitable to reflect some. the time is nearing for me to tinkle or get off the pot when it comes to being a full-time professional singer, and i can see the train passing me by as i work and work a day job and a church job and fill every other moment with gigs or trying to get gigs. do i just keep doing what i’m doing, hoping that the right person will hear me? and if so, how long can i possibly keep up this pace?

robin and i had some pretty heavy talks this weekend, which is why all of this is on my mind. i’ve felt pretty loser-ish lately, because, as she put it, i “had a lot of life” happen this summer. fucking up my relationship, having my grandpa(s) die, being so so so broke all the time—this isn’t where i pictured myself at 29.4. yet, i’m not exactly sure where else to go: i can’t imagine not singing anymore, which means that going back to school for a complete field-change (if i could even decide what to go back to school for) isn’t really ideal. if i started a DMA now, i wouldn’t be done until i was 35 or 36, and even then there’s no guarantee i could land a teaching job—much less a teaching job anywhere i’d ever consider living.

and so i feel a little bit like i’m stuck in this holding pattern, waiting for the universe or for god or fate or friends or whatever to make it clear to me which way i should turn. i suppose that the best i can do in the meantime is to keep singing, keep auditioning, keep trying to be kinder, keep trying to be patient, keep trying to be good. it’s an uphill battle.

it’s inevitable that on the first day of fall-like weather i put sleater-kinney onto my ipod. (of course, it wasn’t always the ipod; i’ve been an s-k fan for so long that i’ve evolved with them from tape to cd to minidisc to mp3.) never mind that today’s weather is just a tease, that i’m sure the thermometer will spike at least one more time, there’s a crispness to the air that feels like fall on my face. and the clouds are skirting across the sky, dark against blue. this weather always reminds me of indiana, a fact that i discussed with amanda when we were in chicago last weekend. we were walking around downtown, somehow needing a sweater in the middle of august, and the air just smelled different: it smelled like the midwest. and as much as i love new york, as much as i appreciate everything that i have here that i could never have in the midwest, it made me miss it. it made me miss 2:00 a.m. breadsticks and coke in a box, eaten with amanda in the third floor of the SCARE house, and sneaking downstairs to have a cigarette on the back porch before i finally admitted that it was a stupid habit that would catch up with me in the end.

we wrapped up the rape of lucretia yesterday, a fact that i was thinking about while getting dressed this morning and i can’t quite believe. i know how cliche it sounds to say shit like, “it seems like just yesterday…” but seriously. it seems like just yesterday that i was saying things like, “well, i should really go buy that score since we start staging in three weeks!” i’m proud to report that i married myself to boosey and hawkes (it’s kind of a polyamory thing) for all of august and the performances thursday and sunday went really smoothly. i of course had a couple of wrong entrances between the performances, but it was nothing major and nothing anyone would notice unless they were following along with a score. it’s not often that i will say this, but doing this role was a bit of a personal triumph. it was a lot of range-y singing and difficult to pull off, but i don’t think that i personally could’ve done a lot better. could nathan gunn—or any of the legions of young baritones who are better than me? probably. but this game is increasingly more and more about challenging myself personally than competing with other people, and so it was a personal triumph. it also didn’t hurt that everyone in the cast was easy-going and fun to work with. it was seriously a win-win.

and so here i am, monday afternoon on the last day of august, with another role on my resume. back at work filing papers, running errands, wondering what my next gig will be. it’s rare that i don’t have something lined up when i finish one project, but i’ve got some callbacks and leads on gigs—and, of course, my wonderful ongoing work with rhymes with opera and at christ church. so i’ll walk to work and back, and then to the gym, looking up at the quick, dark clouds, listening to sleater-kinney, thinking of depauw.

let me make a suggestion: if you’re battling clinical depression (am i? probably not. this is probably just a long, protracted sadness. maybe the word for it is ennui. maybe i should look that word up before i try to use it in a piece of writing. maybe.) and are hung over and were at the beer garden seven hours ago and then talked to your ex-boyfriend and then laid awake thinking about the polite, content-less conversation you just had, don’t listen to aimee mann on the way to work. and, for god’s sake, whatever you do, if you have to listen to aimee mann don’t listen to “31 today” or “how am i different.” it’s not worth the risk.

i went to astoria last night to see cory, because i haven’t seen him since the three of us went to new jersey (not the new jersey you think of when you hear ‘new jersey,’ all strip malls and car dealerships, but the nice part, the northernmost part, which is full of ski resorts and organic farms). i was afraid that i’d be interrupting a visit with his friend mike, but when i got there i discovered that it would just be the two of us, so we had the chance to talk. all my friends—not just me, but most of us—seem to be going through something. i was telling cory yesterday that it isn’t just phong breaking up with me and having to find a new house. and it isn’t moving, and it isn’t my grandpa(s) dying, and it isn’t everyone getting married while i barrel, single, towards 30. it’s all of it, and it’s none of it.

i’m not a big no doubt fan (although i do like gwen stefani’s questionable but ballsy fashion choices) but i keep thinking about their second major-label album, the difficult, too-grown-up return of saturn. i never knew what a saturn return was until two weeks ago when i was talking to my friend michael (another ex. apparently my life is just populated with exes.) and he said something about it. if you don’t know what it is, then go here. you know that i don’t really do astrology or fate or crystals (except the ones whose last name are gale), but the concept of the saturn return has really been hitting me lately. we’re all in this incredible upheaval: everything seems to be flipping on its head, at least when it comes to my inner life. outwardly, everything is the same except that i’m not with phong anymore. inwardly, everything has changed.

you probably already know this, because i love this story and i tell almost everyone, but cory and i met when i was 17 years old at a summer camp for the arts in oklahoma. this place has been going on for years, and i think that it’s one of the best things about growing up queer in oklahoma, as long as you’re an artist or musician. you know, artsy. you audition for a panel of judges; the auditions are really stringent because if you get in you pay something absurd like 125 dollars. (i’m sure it’s more now since i was there eleven years ago.) anyway, if you get in you get to spend two weeks at summer camp spending all day working on your field of choice with really gifted teachers, then at night you visit the other disciplines. in between all of that, at least when i went eleven and twelve years ago, you get the freedom to hang out with other kids like you, which mean punk queer outcast queeny black latino white artisit musician actors. you (used to be able to) chain smoke cigarettes, you shit-talk, you fall in love. and for many people that go there, myself included, it’s the first time that you get to be around other people like you. it’s the first time that you see a world that’s bigger than where you came from, where you’re not weird because you’re skinny and jewish-looking and queer.

obviously, i look back at the two years i spent there with just a little bit of fondness. and it’s not nostalgia, because i’ve always felt like this. when i was 17, i couldn’t wait to go back. and when i aged out of the program at 18, i knew that i’d never again get to experience something like it. this isn’t to say that adult life doesn’t have its own treats, it’s to say that i look back on those summers (could they really have just been two weeks each?) as some of the most exciting, new, wonderful times of my life. and it was in that context that i met cory, who i had developed a crazy camp crush on and became what i like to call “my first camp boyfriend ever.” cory was everything i was missing in ponca city: he seemed terribly urbane, jaded, funny, dirty, irreverent. he smoked before i started smoking, and i thought it was very dangerous. in a sexy way. after camp, cory and i fell out of touch. i knew that he’d planned to move to nyc, but i never spoke to him again until i ran into him at a bar in norman in 2004, when i was living in baltimore. i gave him my email and never heard from him. (apparently, he was drunk and lost my email. and felt bad about it.)

when i moved to astoria in 2006, i ran into him, and learned that he was living down the street from me. i always say that cory and i were meant to be friends, but it just took us 10 years to make it happen. i said, “you might not remember me, but you were my first camp boyfriend ever.” he said, “robert. m. i am taking you out to dinner.” and i’ve seen him several times a week since then.

i bring all this up because cory just got word that he gets to go back to that camp this summer as a counselor. he gets to facilitate what will be for many teenagers the best two weeks of their young lives. and i am jealous of every bit of it. i’m jealous that he gets to go to oklahoma in the summer, jealous that he gets to guide these kids, jealous that he gets to spend two weeks with other grown-up oklahoma artists. we were supposed to go together, but i couldn’t take the time off work. maybe someday; for now, i hope he takes a lot of pictures.

i somehow got out of rehearsal for the next couple of nights (including last night), and i had forgotten how fun it can be to have a life. go out to dinner for crazy filipino food? sure, why not! go to a church choir rehearsal!? wait, i do that every wednesday. my point is, dear reader(s), that life is slowly but surely getting back to normal after the crazy whirlwind that was fledermaus/rhymes with opera tour.

part of that getting back to normal bit has me absolutely pining for summer. i think about getting my friends together to all go lay out at boypier, eating al fresco (a conversation the other night at dinner: “eating outside. is that really all that ‘al fresco’ means?” “yes.” “huh. i always wondered.” me using the term “al fresco” is kind of a joke, in the same vein as over-pronouncing BOEUF BOURGUIGNON, making myself sound like a smelly french chef. it’s entered my lexicon to the point that i don’t notice it anymore, and people who don’t know me may think that i’m either terribly pretentious or completely crazy. i am, in fact, completely crazy. so they’d be right on at least one count.), days in central park. of course, all of these things don’t really take into account the amount of time that i spend at a desk in an office, but honestly even though my job keeps me busy, i feel so much more like i have a life of my own. it’s probably because my commute is so easy (being nonexistent, i mean), but i feel more like i have more time to myself to do what i want to do than i have since grad school. the nights yawn and stretch (and try to come to life) in front of me, with plenty of time for the gym and dinner and television and video games.

have i just grown used to the grind? maybe. i think that for a while my aversion to the regimented schedule i often find myself in was a kind of bucking the system, trying to keep myself from joining the drones of office workers. after all, i was a musician, a difficult, moody artist who couldn’t be bothered to work a 9 to 5 job like every other person out there. i resented having to. maybe it’s getting older, seeing that every single person i know, even the uber-successful singers, have to make a living somehow. maybe it’s because this is such a cherry day job. who knows; i’m just going to go with it.

i didn’t expect to get caught up in logo’s “rupaul’s drag race” the way that i did. i’m not really one for reality television. sure, i’ve watched literally every episode of “project runway” and most episodes of “make me a supermodel” (sidenote: perry from season one has moved to our neighborhood, and i’ve now seen him three times outside my gym. i wish it was my true love from season one, ben the cop, but i’ll settle for perry. maybe he’ll start wearing tank tops when it gets warm.), but i’m generally suspect of reality shows, the way that producers and editors choose who wins and choose who you’ll hate. but there was just something about drag race that totally resonated with me.

for one, rupaul herself resonated. i’ve always loved rupaul, not least because she forced herself into the mainstream when the mainstream was anything but gay friendly. i mean, the queen had a music video that actually got airplay. and this was before ellen, will and grace, and the backlash to prop 8. before matthew shepherd. i mean, she was a trailblazer. i’d be remiss if i failed to mention that she’s also hysterical. i have now started hollering “CAMEROOOON!” for no reason whatsoever. i was falling off the couch last night when they replayed her telling one of the queens, “there are still too many snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane,” referring to her “tuck.” when the girls do their runway walks, she reads them all in the style of a caller of the old new yew york/harlem drag balls, and it’s easily my favorite part of the program.

so many people have never even heard of these balls, and it’s such an important part of queer history. rupaul will holler “house of labeija!” “extravaganza!” she’s referencing all of these old-school drag houses, some of which are defunct because all of their members died of aids (or were the victims of hate crimes) a decade ago. one of the challenges for the girls was to walk representing “executive realness,” which is one of the exact categories from the old balls in the 80s. and when they did, she read them from her seat up front, just like they would have been read 20 years ago.

so more than anything else, for me, rupaul’s drag race helped bring back to light something that we’d almost forgotten. cory has been researching these drag houses because he, like a lot of people watching the drag race, had never heard about them. cory’s drag house? the house of slots, because he, penny slots, is the mother. my drag name in the house of slots? what else: lucy slots.

CAMEROON!

i’ve been avoiding politics on television for over a month now, having reached my complete saturation level around that time. after a while, all of the politicking and chatter just started to seem so pointless: it’s just a bunch of talking points that both candidates are spouting to try to get elected. i can’t fault them for it; it’s their job. all of this talk will boil down to a worthless pile of syrupy nothing once one of them gets elected, anyway. both candidates have to pander to their base to a certain extent. but that doesn’t mean i have to fill my head with it.

beyond that, it just makes me worry. i know who i’m voting for (ron paul 2008!) and i have since before he got the official nod from his party. as i’ve always said, i goddamned had to vote for john kerry in 2004, so whether i was voting for Hillary (my primary choice) or Barack (no schlep of a second choice) was irrelevant. at least i had a good candidate to choose this time. but since my mind has been made up for so long, i don’t need to hear all of the idiosyncrasies of the road to the white house, all of the he-said/he-said’s and 10-second CNN soundbites. i don’t follow the polls day to day. i just hope beyond hope that america doesn’t vote a rich, old, racist homophobe puppet and his vapid, pandering choice of a running mate into office. if he does, all my friends joke that we’ll all have to expatriate. but, as i’ve said on this blog before, i refuse to leave my country just so that i can have the same rights as everyone else. plus, as i told elspeth yesterday, i can’t afford to live in the united states, much less canada. and it’s so damned cold.

when i got home last night, though, phong was watching the VP debate and i didn’t want to make him change the channel so i sat there watching it with him. we were all hoping that palin would fall on her ass, that america would see what a blundering fool she really is. what actually happened, though, is that she did an incredible impression of fucking george w. bush, her aw-shucks demeanor and rapid-fire tongue wagging (completely content-free as it may have been) mesmerizing the legions of midwesterners and southerners and white people afraid of a black person and fat housewives who have never registered to vote before they had the chance to vote “one of themselves” into office.

george w. bush pulled the wool over all of these fools’ eyes in 2000 and 2004, somehow convincing them that he was just like them, dumbing down his speech, assuring them all that he was a good ol’ boy. my greatest fear is that people who don’t pay attention, people who are so easily bought, will vote for mccain because they want to see a twit like palin in office. because she is “one of them.”

you know what? i don’t want somebody like me in office. i want somebody smarter than me in office. i want someone to lead this country who actually has experience and a clear idea of what their policy will be. if i led the country, god only knows what would happen. but, as usual, i’m preaching to the choir here. i just don’t know what else to do.

i made the mistake this morning of reading my friend ellen’s blog. i say that it was a mistake not because it’s a bad read—absolutely the opposite, in fact, because reading her blog is like siting down and talking to her: it’s self-aware and self-deprecating and funny—but because it made me miss her and my summer friends just terribly. i’ve said many times that there were a few people i met this summer that i wish i could’ve just brought back to new york with me, plopped them right down amongst the group of friends i have here because i knew they’d get along, and watch what happened.

reading back through the posts she wrote this summer (i’d never read her blog before because, as i said when i first came back, i totally couldn’t be bothered with blogs of any sort while i was away) was like reliving all of the ridiculous things that we all went through, the trial-by-fire that was spending seven weeks singing a billion shows and living and eating with the same group of singers. most of all, i keep thinking about what it felt like to not have to have a day job, how freeing it was to be doing what i wanted to be doing. i keep thinking about how this summer, even when we were working our hardest, felt like playing for seven weeks. it’s not that i wanted to go on to another young artist program when onj wrapped—i was dying to come home, and another week spent away from phong might have meant an amityville horror-style mass murder (after which i would, obviously, drive to brooklyn, change my clothes, shoot up some heroin, and pretend like i hadn’t done anything).

i just wish that there was a way to make a living doing what i want to be doing (you know, um, singing or something like it). because when that’s all i’m doing, no matter how hard i’m working or how exhausted i am, i’ve accomplished exactly what i set out to. it’s so strange the way that days drag when you’re in an office (specifically someone else’s office, at someone else’s computer), and i just find myself wondering how so many people spend a lifetime doing what i’m doing now. maybe if they’re not just doing this job to make a living they’re more invested, which makes the time fly by. i don’t know, though, because, try as i might, i can’t think of another career i could ever be happy doing. and i’ve thought about it, believe me.

i know what you’ll say. that there are ways to make it without temping; that i should be teaching or coaching or…i don’t know what else is out there. and i don’t have a good reason for why i’m not. so thanks for listening to me bitch a little bit.

the food situation around the office i work in is dismal. thousands and thousands of people work in the few blocks that i’m working, yet there isn’t a single affordable, edible thing to purchase. sure, i’ve seen people walking around with bags of chipotle (pronounced chih-poe-tul by my mother, who got extremely defensive when i corrected her and demanded that i tell her how i knew that my pronunciation was correct. i couldn’t tell her why i knew—i just knew—and so, like most arguments with my mother, she won) and as much as i love it, it’s expensive. and i’m already spending 8 hours a day sitting on my ass in this cubicle (pronounced cue-bye-klee) so the last thing i need is a 1500 calorie burrito, even if it’s filled with delicious homemade guacamole and greasy, wonderful beef and beans and cheese and spicy salsa i’ll be right back.

anyway, since the food situation around here is bleak, i bring my own lunch. that’s made just a little bleaker by the fact that there’s no microwave that i can find in this office. i assumed there’d be one in the “kitchen” my first day here, so i brought leftover pesto that phong had made, only to find that my option was to pretend that it was some kind of pasta salad. i have to play tricks on my mind like that. so i’ve taken to bringing the same lunch every day, a lunch that is shelf-stable, cheap as dirt (because, as much as i learned this summer and as wonderful as it was, i am now nearly broke. and the paychecks i’ve gotten, hereafter to be referred to as “paychecks,” weren’t even enough to cover my storage space rental, much less actual bills or rent or insurance.), and doesn’t have to be microwaved. i bring a ham sandwich with dijon mustard, a plastic baggie of chips (or, today, cheetos), and a quaker chewy granola bar.

as i was eating my lunch at my desk today, so that i can use my lunch hour to go to the gym, i realized something (specifically, while i was stuffing my face full of cheetos): the meal that i’d brought myself was the exact same meal that my mother packed me when i was in pre-school. i don’t mean, like, sort of the same. i mean,

ham sandwich
cheetos
quaker chewy granola bar.

the exact same. she’d pack it in a metal disney world themed lunchbox, which started to take on the smell of its contents after a while. i have a very vivid memory (tied to the memory of making art by blowing paint around a piece of paper and nearly passing out from blowing so much) of eating this exact lunch, but in preschool. if you switch wonder bread out for the whole wheat i brought today, it’d have been identical except for its packaging.

the more things change, the more they stay the same.

last night’s audition went fine. musician friends, you’ll know what i mean when i say this: i sang well, but i didn’t nail it. you know the times when you walk out and you’re just like, “yeah. i was in the moment, my voice was there, my acting was there, i was all over that.” and then there are times like last night when, for some reason, you can’t get out of your head and you’re just kind of phoning it in. it sounds perfectly nice, but is it going to land you a role in a 20th century opera? probably not. i’m not being down on myself, i’m being realistic with myself as an auditioner. maybe, though, i’ll be surprised. they could also offer me a cover, or something, which would also be greatly appreciated.

it’s kind of strange to me how much my mood seems to be directly related to the weather these days. i never used to be like this, or at least i didn’t notice if i was. i’d spend entire winters in indiana frozen to the bone, only 8 hours of dreary daylight a day. then again, i was playing around and it was college and i was going to study sessions with amanda where we’d all lay around on the floor of the queer center and eat breadsticks and coke-in-a-box (these incredible, huge to-go fountain containers that stapled at the top) from marvin’s, our just-off-campus greasy food place. all college towns have them, don’t they? these places that people hold fond memories of because it’s where they’d order food in at 2 o’clock in the morning, or drunkenly stumble to, or subject their parents to when they visited. i don’t think that my parents ever went, come to think of it. i know for a fact, though, that i dragged them to la charreada, a place whose mexican food wasn’t anything compared to that in ponca, but is stellar compared to what we get in the city. but enough dragging you down food-college memory lane.

i can’t tell if my elevated mood is hangover from my vacation or just because it’s a little warmer/more bearable outside. or maybe it’s because i’m leaving for adult opera camp in six weeks and i can see a light at the end of the tunnel (although, obviously, that light includes being away from phong for 7 weeks and not having a paycheck, which means that the light of the end of the tunnel sometimes looks more like a train’s headlights). whatever the reason, i have spring fever. i can’t wait to get out into the sunshine, feel the air on my bare ass arms. it makes me want to actually go out and do things, to enjoy this city we live in. like, um, go to choir rehearsal.